Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff's dwelling, “Wuthering” being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there, at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind, blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few, stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs, one way, as if craving alms of the sun.Far north, in the back end of Nowhere, England, stands the medieval manor house known as Wuthering Heights – we are constantly reminded of the rains and winds and swampy, deadly moors – and the people here are insular and fractious; aware of and bound by the rules of their class, but wild in private and downright rude to strangers: the kind of place, one imagines, where ghosts might walk. Down the hill lies Thrushcross Grange – another manor, known for slightly better manners – and as though they house the only two families in the world, Wuthering Heights recounts the interminglings and intermarriages between these two estates around the turn of the nineteenth century...and the tragedies which ensued. Naturally, I had heard over the years that the love story between Heathcliff and Catherine might be the greatest of all time, but this is really more of a hate story – one of cruelty and abandonment and revenge – and I probably liked it better for that. I'm going to proceed as though there's no such thing as a spoiler for a 150+ year old tale.
He shall never know I love him: and that, not because he's handsome, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same.In brief: Mr. Earnshaw – master of Wuthering Heights – while on a trip to Liverpool, found a dark, abandoned child (naming him Heathcliff) and decided to bring him home to raise along with his own son, Hindley, and daughter, Catherine (there is scholarly speculation that Heathcliff was either the child of immigrants, gypsies, or was Earnshaw's own bastard; in any case, a cuckoo in the nest). Hindley bitterly resents the intruder, but Catherine and Heathcliff are hell-raising soulmates from the start. When Catherine suffers a dog bite and must recuperate for some weeks at Thrushcross Grange as a teenager, she is exposed to the fine comportment of the family there – which includes the fair and delicate siblings, Edgar and Isabella Linton – and there seems an inevitability to Catherine and Edgar eventually marrying; Catherine might be in love with her step-(or is that half-)brother, but custom, class, and inheritance laws make the preferred union impossible; even so far from civilisation. After the old Mr. Earnshaw eventually dies and Hindley returns from university with a wife to accept his role as the new master of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff leaves for some years and then returns a wealthy gentleman: bent on destroying both families and acquiring both homes. It is soon after Heathcliff has accomplished all of this that the story is actually set.
It is the framing device that I actually liked the best: As Wuthering Heights begins, a dandy from London – a man who has played loose with the affections of young ladies and must now lay low in the back end of Nowhere, England – named Lockwood arrives at Wuthering Heights in order to rent out Thrushcross Grange. The people he finds at the grand manor – the snarling master, the inhospitable housekeeper and incomprehensible groundskeeper (Joseph's dialogue is a nearly unreadable brogue), the ill-mannered young lady, a brutish young man, even the vicious dogs – are unlike any Lockwood have encountered before. After spending the night as Heathcliff's unwanted guest – during which his nightmares of a ghostly presence trying to enter his bedroom kept him awake all night – Lockwood returns to the Grange, hoping to persuade his own housekeeper to gossip a bit about the weird characters up the hill. And Ellen “Nelly” Dean is happy to comply: The rest of the book is either Nelly going into intimate details about the lives of her employers (she had been the housekeeper at Wuthering Heights when Heathcliff was first brought home; in many situations, she was his only friend), or Lockwood recording his own impressions about Heathcliff and his entourage in the present. And I loved Nelly's tone – she is self-important and sly, aware of giving a rare performance as she shares every private thing that one could fear a housekeeper might share. And why shouldn't she? Not only has Nelly spent her entire life in the boonies, sent here and there at the whim of this master and that, but as she reveals, it was she who often directed the action of this tale – breaking confidences that she had sworn to keep, deciding not to pass on a message that might have averted this tragedy or that.
As to the love story, it's pure Gothic romance that both Catherine and Heathcliff decide that if they can't be together in this world, they will meet in the next. Catherine explains their supernatural link:
I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees – my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath – a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff – he's always, always in my mind – not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself – but as my own being.And after Catherine dies in childbirth, Heathcliff raves:
I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you – haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe – I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!Now, because Catherine and Heathcliff never married, I had assumed that theirs was a chaste love (I'm so naive), but scholarly opinion tells me that every time they “met”, I can infer that they “coupled”, and opinion apparently has it that after Catherine died and Heathcliff dug up her grave to be with her one more time, the reader should infer that they coupled once more. Ew; that's your greatest love story of all time. And it must be noted: Heathcliff is a brute and a bully, beating this person, kidnapping that; he's cruel to children and animals; he has no concern outside of his own desires and revenge fantasies, and he would never be my pick for the greatest leading man of all time.
And so how does it end? Lockwood returns to the Grange once more and asks Nelly this very question; which she is avid to answer. After Lockwood had shared his fearful vision from his night at Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff started roaming the moors in search of Catherine's spirit; eventually starving himself and then dying in her childhood bed; the window open and his corpse covered in icy rain; a glint in his eye and a smile frozen onto his dead face. And as it turns out, the two young people that Lockwood had met at Wuthering Heights were Cathy (daughter of Catherine and Edgar) and Hareton (son of the late Hindley and his wife from away), and although they had been enemies at first (due to Heathcliff's machinations), Cathy had managed to gentle the brute and their union sees a type of cosmic justice: the two family homes to which they would have been heirs if Heathcliff hadn't wrangled them from their parents were restored to them upon Heathcliff's death; united upon their marriage. Even the site of the graveyard – where Edgar, Catherine, and Heathcliff were all buried alongside each other – prompts Lockwood's final peaceful passage:
I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath, and hare-bells; listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers, for the sleepers in that quiet earth.Ultimately, while the plot is a little soap operaish (without going full out schadenfreude-inducing revenge romp like The Count of Monte Cristo; one of my very favourite books), the language and the framing device (and especially Nelly Dean herself) thoroughly delighted me. I did get a little tired of characters constantly needing months of bedrest and porridge after getting caught in the rain, but as Brontë herself died at thirty (out of the six Brontë siblings, none saw forty), maybe that's just the way things were back then – and it's important to remember that Wuthering Heights is from “back then”: Brontë captured her own time brilliantly, but with enough modernity to make the whole thoroughly readable. I'm happy to have finally read this and know what the fuss is all about; it merits fuss.
