® 2016
Bustle
8 Things You Didn't Notice
About 'Wuthering Heights' The First Time You Read It
SIX REACTIONS
The first
time I read Wuthering Heights, I hated it. Hated it. I was in
high school, and I was just beginning what would be a life-long love affair
with 19th-century literature. I had barreled through all of Austen’s novels and
Jane Eyre, and I sat down with Wuthering Heights, expecting to be
amazed, and instead, found myself feeling a weird combination of boredom and
fury. It wasn’t until I got to graduate school that the novel “clicked” for
me—I started reading it for a class, thinking, “Ugh, not this again,”
and then somewhere around page 100 found myself engrossed and wondering where
the hell this amazing, bizarre book had been all my life. My love has only
grown upon subsequent re-readings: Wuthering Heights is one of the
strangest, most beautiful, most ludicrous, and most narratively complex novels
I’ve ever read, and I can’t get enough of it. Who are these insane characters
and why do they feel the need to say every thought they have the second they
have it? Why do they all insist on marrying each other? Why does Mr. Lockwood
keep nosing about their lives? Why don’t they ever go anywhere?? 1
If you’re
a fan of Wuthering Heights—or, like me, you hated it at first and are
now wondering whether you should try again—read on for some things you might
not have known or noticed the first time through:
1. It is NOT a romance novel
I think
one reason I hated Wuthering Heights the first time I read it was that I
was expecting it to be a great love story. And then I got into the book and
realized that it is, in fact, a story of terrible people doing terrible things
to each other. I was outraged: Where was the love? Where was the romance?? I
understood later that my expectations had been set by people who knew the story
from the film adaptations of the novel, rather than the novel itself.
The film
versions of Brontë’s novel usually go to great lengths to cast the
Catherine/Heathcliff relationship as a passionate romance, I think because it’s
much easier to film yet-another-doomed-love story than it is to capture what
the novel is really about: a destructive relationship between two people who
are obsessed with each other. Cathy’s famous line—“I am Heathcliff!”—is
often touted as uber-romantic, but it expresses something that isn’t really
about love: Cathy wants to be Heathcliff, to merge with him. After she
dies, Heathcliff breaks down the side of her coffin so that, upon his own
death, they can be buried next to each other and literally decompose into a
single, shared body. They strive to transcend the boundaries of human
subjectivity and physicality—to become something that is other and only them.
Their relationship in the novel is strange and fascinating, but it’s not love.
1
it’s for
these reasons that I found the whole Twilight thing hilarious. In Eclipse,
Bella and Mr. Sparkly Von Vampire mention Wuthering Heights again and
again as a corollary to their relationship. You want to model your relationship
on an angry, controlling asshole and a cruel, spoiled brat? Er, have fun with
that, kids. Harper Collins went so far as to release a “Twilight
edition” of Brontë’s novel, bearing the slogan “Bella& Edward’s Favorite
Book.” I’m sure Emily Brontë is THRILLED.)
2. It was first published under the name “Ellis
Bell”
ll three
of the Brontë sisters initially published their works with masculine
pseudonyms: Charlotte was “Currer Bell,” Emily was “Ellis Bell,” and Anne was
“Acton Bell.” Charlotte Brontë wrote later that they did so because “we had a
vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice.”
The pseudonyms caused confusion later, when some readers assumed that Ellis and
Currer Bell were the same person, and attributed Wuthering Heights to
the author of the very popular Jane Eyre.
3. It’s a claustrophobic, surreal dreamscape
the
Victorian novel is famous for realism—a literary movement that sought to
portray life as it really is, even in its most everyday occurrences. But in Wuthering
Heights, Brontë goes out of her way to make the reader feel dislocated and
unsteady, to make the narrative seem like it exists in a world entirely
separate from our own. From the start of the novel, the geographic isolation of
the novel’s setting—the fact that we, as readers, never move beyond the
boundaries of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange—has us wondering where
the hell we are. Add to that the novel’s multiple frame narratives (at one
point, we are reading Lockwood’s account of Nelly’s account of Isabella’s
account of what happened, and it's... bewildering), and the reader is left
spinning, looking for something solid to hold onto, at once trapped within the
novel’s complicated narrative framework and locked outside any true, direct
understanding of what’s going on. 3
4. There are approximately three names in the whole
book
Seriously,
the names are insane: There’s Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Linton, Edgar and
Isabella Linton, Hindley Earnshaw, Hareton Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and—most
ridiculous—Linton Heathcliff. The names get extremely confusing, but I think
that’s the point: They contribute to the claustrophobic quality of the novel as
a whole. As we watch these people grapple with each other, all bearing similar
names and all related in one way or another, we get the feeling that there’s no
escape from it—as in the Hotel California, “You can check-out any time you
like, But you can never leave [Wuthering Heights].”
5. It was not an instant bestseller
Wuthering
Heights received
mixed reviews from critics when it came out in 1847. Even those who liked it
seemed puzzled by it more than anything—what were critics supposed to do with
this weird, but compelling book? One reviewer expressed the general sense of confusion:
Wuthering
Heights is a
strange sort of book,—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to
begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and
say nothing about it.
Others
hated it full-out, and were not shy about expressing their dislike of a novel
populated by “savages” and lacking a moral lesson. These are just a couple of
my favorites, from two American magazines:
We rise
from the perusal of Wuthering Heights as if we had come fresh from a
pest-house. Read Jane Eyre is our advice, but burn Wuthering Heights….
How a
human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing
suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery.
6. Even Charlotte Brontë felt the need to distance
herself from it
After
Emily and Anne Brontë died in 1848 and 49, Charlotte Brontë continued to
promote the works of her sisters. In the preface to the 1850 edition of
Wuthering Heights, Charlotte writes of the novel’s power and her
sister’s talent, but she also seems to feel the need to respond to the critics
by making excuses for the novel’s “faults.” She blames the novel’s “rusticity”
on Emily’s upbringing in Yorkshire, admitting that for those not raised in the
North, “Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production.”
She also suggests that Emily was seized by inspiration and compelled to write
what she did, as if she had no control over her writing; Charlotte writes that
when Emily created her passionate, angsty characters, “Having formed these
beings, she did not know what she had done.” We can see Charlotte here as a
grieving sister trying to protect her loved one’s memory—but in the process,
she strips Emily of her creative agency, recasting Wuthering Heights as
the product of an almost supernatural vision, rather than artistic genius.
7. We don’t know where Heathcliff comes from
Heathcliff
is one of the great mysteries of the novel. Why is he such an angry jerk? We
know very little about his origins: All we’re told is that Mr. Earnshaw picked
him up in Liverpool, he has dark hair and eyes, and, when he first arrives, he
speaks “some gibberish that no one could understand.” Critics and readers have debated
Heathcliff’s origins for more than a hundred and fifty years,
without getting any closer to finding the answer. Because Liverpool was a major
port for both Ireland and the slave trade, some scholars have proposed that
Heathcliff may have been of Irish or African descent. The most recent film
adaptation of Wuthering Heights (dir. Andrea Arnold), released in 2011,
was the first to cast a black actor in the role.
8. This song
OK, so
this song really has nothing to do with the book’s writing—it was released by
British singer-songwriter Kate Bush in 1978—but I love it. Written when
Bush was only 18, “Wuthering Heights,” like most of Bush’s music, is beautiful,
haunting, and really, really weird. In a high soprano, Bush takes on the role
of Catherine’s ghost, beating on Heathcliff’s windows, wailing, “Heathcliff,
it’s me, I’m Cathy, I’ve come home, I’m so cold….” The video is wonderfully
bizarre, with Bush dancing and cartwheeling across the screen. And if you can’t
resist performing this very special dance when you’re alone in your apartment,
well, that’s completely normal, right? (That’s what I tell myself, at least.)
Bonus Fact: There’s an MTV version
MTV made
an adaptation of Wuthering Heights in 2003, and it’s precisely as
terrible as you would imagine. Seriously, it is full-on, grade-A awful, and I
watched the whole thing because I love Wuthering Heights that much. I
think all I need to say about it is that Heathcliff gets his revenge by
becoming a Rock Star! Just as god and the Brontë sisters intended.
