Wuthering Heights

My first introduction to Wuthering Heights was through master songstress Kate Bush:

“Oh, it gets dark, it gets lonely
On the other side from you
I pine a lot, I find the lot
Falls through without you
I’m coming back love, cruel Heathcliff
My one dream, my only master

Too long I roam in the night
I’m coming back to his side to put it right
I’m coming home to wuthering, wuthering,
Wuthering Heights.”

Naturally, I was intrigued; the song was clearly quite passionate and yet I had no real idea as to what it was referencing. So, of course, I bought the book, to pass the time on a series of train rides.

Wuthering Heights is the story of an orphan, Heathcliff, who is found by a travelling businessman and taken to live with his family in Northern England. He is disliked by the man’s son and servants, yet eventually falls in love with his daughter, Cathy. When she marries another man he sets out to destroy the family one by one, including any members who were born following his tortured childhood.

That is basically all that you need to know. Cathy dies fairly early in the story, and he spends the rest of the book making the lives of others miserable. It has been described as one of the greatest love stories of all time, yet is unusual in that the two ‘lovers’ in the story are both inherently unlikeable. Cathy is whiny and spoiled; when she falls sick it is assumed that she is faking illness for sympathy. This speaks volumes about the type of character that she is, once described by a teacher on Dawson’s Creek as “a whimpering, mentally unstable wet rag”. Heathcliff is maniacal, his anger at his ill-treatment raging for many years past what would be seen to be reasonable today – not that we don’t hold grudges, but they would hardly ever extend to the torture of our nemesis’ (and own) children.

Perhaps this is how people acted back then (the story is set in the early 1800s), or perhaps these extreme emotions are what made the book so famous in its day, written in 1847. Either way, it all seems a little unrealistic in today’s society.

For actual enjoyment of reading, Wuthering Heights is sufficient. There are no twists, and anything that may have been meant to be unexpected is almost blindingly obvious – the book starts near the end of the storyline, and then works its way forward to show you how the characters’ lives reached this point. This unconventional method of story-telling actually makes the story more interesting, despite seeming like it might be rather bland. The reader is forced to use their imagination to fill in the parts that have not been read yet. I spent many an hour awake in bed deciding how the story would progress and when certain characters would enter – this does, however, make the actual plot seem marginally blander, as some of my own ideas would have been more interesting to read had they been included.

The book is worth reading, even if only for the novelty factor of being able to discuss its contents at pseudo-intellectual events. Kate Bush evidently loved it enough to sing an ode to (I think I prefer the song); Blair from Gossip Girl claims to read it every Christmas.
Maybe I’m missing something.

Anthony Walton