On Wuthering Heights

My thoughts on Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte…

Wuthering Heights seems to be very much a part of our culture and has generally been accept as part of the literary canon for quite some time now. Not only that, but it’s become a standard of romantic literature. Notice the lowercase "r." By that I mean to say that people consider it romantic in the modern sense of the word. In other words, a love story.

But why?

The only reason I can even begin to imagine is that someone somewhere along the line misinterpreted "Romantic" with a capital "R." In that sense, it is very much a Romantic novel, in that it is characterized by strong emotion, reverence for wild and untamed nature, rejection of rationality, and the use of the supernatural to further the plot.

It is Romantic, but not romance.

To consider what Catherine and Heathcliff do to one another romantic is to have only the most adolescent ideas of romance. Passion and obsession have their place in life, but they must be outgrown. For love to never deepen beyond passion and obsession is never to be a whole person. I think that Catherine, in choosing Edgar over Heathcliff, at least experiences some measure of real love. Heathcliff never does. All he knows his obsession and hatred and as such he lives his life no better than a child. He prefers to destroy anything that he can’t have for himself and in the end is destroyed because he can never have a real emotional life, despite the fact that it is really the only thing he craves. It is Cathy and Hareton that we should learn to emulate. While the beginning of their relationship is marked by aversion, in the end, it is their growing interest in one another that teaches them to improve themselves. Cathy learns humility in the face of her cousin’s desire to improve himself and Hareton is softened by Cathy’s gentling influence. That is love and the reader knows that they will be happy together. Catherine and Heathcliff could never have found any happiness in marriage. They would only have made one another even more miserable. How is that romantic?

Don’t get me wrong. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. It was well-written and must have been revolutionary for its time. It is dark and raw and shows the cruelest side of passion and the madness it can engender. What I don’t like is that anyone can hold up this twisted tale as a beacon of romantic love. It clearly isn’t and I can’t see that it was ever intended to be. I think that it was meant to show that romantic love isn’t always everything it’s cracked up to be; that one’s personal psychology and character has a great deal to do with how one approaches life and "love." I think it serves as a good illustration of the idea that passion is not a good basis for marriage, since we see that passion destroys every relationship in the book. It is the gentler, more temperate love that succeeds. The love of adults instead of adolescents.

What Bronte does is provide an object lesson of what happens when a love match is approached by those with less settled tempers than what we see in Austen’s works. While Austen’s characters make mistakes, they come in time to recognize those mistake and to correct them. If compared to Radcliffe, Austen’s heroines were more realistic and flawed, Bronte’s are almost nothing but flaws. And sad to say, I think Bronte represents the largest proportion of the population sometimes. But there’s no telling people that. People must learn from their own mistakes.

~Liz