You Tube is agog with every content creator jumping on the Wuthering Heights bandwagon, from movie goers/critics to literary scholars and nerds.
There is a new film adaptation of this classic tale by Emily Bronte where the title is in quotes, akin to porn or something, as referenced by the theatrical trailer. Every movie version of this story focuses on what people see as a passionate love story between two people in a forbidden love who are forced into limerence by no fault of their own.
None of that makes sense to me after having completed my read through.
The literarians like to focus on the author’s backstory to find clues as to why she wrote this novel/where she got the idea, etc. Emily Bronte and her sisters were spinsters in the 1800s. All three of them wrote novels. Their brother was a failed artist who lusted after a married woman then died of a broken heart; they also had two additional siblings who died in childhood along with their mother (and later they buried their father). And Emily herself died of tuberculosis just three years after publishing her novel, which she wrote as a twenty-seven-year-old with no experience in the love department.
With that noted, there must have been contempt inside of her. I have a friend who likes to watch those Real Housewives TV shows. She enjoys the mayhem because she is not exposed to drama in her real loving family life and she finds those people hilarious. I’m guessing that before the discovery of antibiotics, there were a lot of people in the Bronte era dying young from colds and such, which made for the real life mantra life sucks then you die. Here, I’m assuming that their household was not as wonderful as my friend’s is, and so they didn’t find the humor in it
It took me a week to get through Wuthering Heights because I kept needing to get some distance away from these miserable characters. I felt miserable too – it was so weird. I was feeling bothered by the littlest things in my own life that normally don’t get to me and I kept wondering why I was feeling this dark cloud over my head thing. And then I was like – oh, yeah – it’s the book. It’s a giant negative energy, but only in the way that pseudo-friend you have is, the one who talks badly/gossips about people and basically gives you their backstory from their own opinion of the truth. And then it takes you days to clear your head of that shit.
So why did I stick with it? Emily Bronte’s structure fascinates me. A man rents a house in the moors, ingratiates himself with the owners and then, after snooping around on a bookshelf and finding a diary, he invades its privacy and secretly reads the words of a young Catherine Earnshaw. He then mentions her name to Heathcliff, the landowner, and is intrigued by the man’s reaction.
Because this man, Lockwood, is obviously a busy-body with nothing better to do. Apparently, he is on some sort of vacation from his life. He decides to engage the housekeeper in exchanging gossip about these people.
Thus begins this information dump complete with the woman’s recollections of dialogue, as well as her opinions about the characters inserted throughout. Clearly, when someone is talking about other people, they see themselves as the hero/heroine, as Ellen/Nelly Dean tends to do here, so you don’t get the “truth” just her version of it.
Catherine and her brother grow up alongside their adopted brother Heathcliff. Catherine and Heathcliff are equally naughty children. The brothers don’t get along. Their mother dies, followed by their father. Catherine meets the neighbors, father, mother and a brother and sister. The neighbors are wealthy. They are blondes. Catherine and her brother have brown hair, Heathcliff is described as of Indian or a Chinese-mix ethnicity with black hair and eyes. The neighbors don’t like Heathcliff either.
So, his only friend is Catherine, and she’s actually a bitch. She does tell Nelly that she feels like she and Heathcliff are the same person, meaning the same personality, which appears accurate, although Heathcliff, while eavesdropping, hears all the negative things she says and decides to leave. They are both about fifteen years old at this time. Apparently, in his absence, he gets educated and gets money somehow (undisclosed) and upon his return three years later, Catherine is married to the neighbor and is also pregnant. Heathcliff – is he in love with her or does he just want to spend time with his sister? You know? It’s kind of weird.
Upon his return, she pendulum swings, saying mean things about both men, then nice things. She doesn’t know what she wants, she has everything and yet is unhappy – Catherine obviously has a case of Borderline Personality Disorder. She starves herself, gives birth and promptly dies. Heathcliff goes into a deep mourning and is angry at the world and everyone in his vicinity.
He marries Catherine’s sister-in-law, they have a kid, he is mean to them. Cut to the children growing up – Catherine’s daughter, her brother’s son and Heathcliff’s son.
At the end of the novel, only two are still alive, lol. It’s a drop dead fest. No real hero’s journey, except we get this dialogue from Heathcliff towards the end that gives you a sense that his contempt was all retaliation, and it is sad. I actually cried.
In life, it is really important to not react to provocation. That happiness is an inside job. Unfortunately for the characters and for the author, I’m speculating, they did not get that memo.
If you still want to read this book after this report, know that the structure of this story is so original, that your interpretation will be different from mine because it is set up to include you as the voyeur to the proceedings, since it is coming from the POV of a spectator with her own opinions of her employers. And this is what makes Wuthering Heights a classic.
Some people get a spiritual/ghostly thing-a-ma-bob here – it’s that Victorian Gothic mood they enjoyed to infuse, but I didn’t bite on that. And, as many of you may have seen the Margot Robbie movie recently, you might read it searching for the romance and you might find it, the way the woman who wrote Fifty Shades of Grey turned Twilight into a BDSM fantasy.
I’m waiting for a reinterpretation a la the people who wrote the Brooklyn 99 TV series, where the characters say the exact same dialogue that is in the book but it is in the tone of comedy zingers. Now that would be a movie worth watching – maybe even a mini-series. Can I manifest that?
P.S. – I borrowed my book from the public library. It was the large print version. You can buy one here.
