Discussing Wuthering Heights

The Bronte Sisters. The three Victorian women writers who I have been slowly reading my way through for the past three years. This past month I tackled Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte and thought I would share my thoughts on the novel.

Wuthering Heights is described as one of the most toxic books in the English language, it’s a book that confuses, disgusts, and challenges readers. And I was very excited (and nervous) to give it a go. To fully illustrate how polarizing this book is (and to make us laugh), here are some reviews of the book from modern and historical audiences.

One reviewer on Google Books said  - “The poisonous passion this book contains is just extraordinary. A very strange book indeed!” 

I honestly can’t tell if this is a positive or a negative review.
    
A Goodreads reviewer dramatized his reading experience - “What follows is a retelling of the exact moment I gave up on reading Wuthering Heights. 

"I CAN'T DO IT ANYMORE!" Screamed the weary reader.”

Another Goodreads Review - my favorite part was when heathcliff banged his head against a tree out of despair because that’s how i felt reading this.

In 1847, James Lorimer wrote that  - “Here all the faults of Jane Eyre are magnified a thousand fold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.”
How wrong he was on that final point.

An Anonymous 1848 reviewer said - “The volumes are powerfully written records of wickedness and they have a moral – they show what Satan could do with the law of Entail.”

An Anoymous reviewer in Grahams Lady’s Magazine said  - “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. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors….”

So now, let’s get to my thoughts. Wuthering Heights is the epitome of a gothic novel. Dramatic and windswept moors, a moody, mysterious, and angry male protagonist. Potential hauntings and generational horrors.
    
The first thing you really need to know when going into Wuthering Heights is that it is not a romance. Yes, it is based on love (albeit starcrossed and deranged love) between several characters, but the point of the story isn’t that two people fall in love and live happily ever after. It is quite the opposite. In Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte tries to answer the question “what if you don’t end up with the person you love.” This is exactly the issue Heathcliffe wrestles with throughout the course of the novel.
  
 Something I find very interesting about the works of the Bronte sisters that I have read so far, is how each book seems to echo a similar theme from each other. It makes me think that perhaps Charlotte, Emily, and Anne were discussing deep topics together and each had a different solution to moral problems. Their books immortalize this.
    
But before we get into the more literary analysis section of this review, let’s get a little backstory on Emily Bronte and the plot of the novel itself.

Emily was the daughter of Curate (a term that is equivalent in many ways to pastor or reverend) Patrick Bronte. She was the second youngest of six children including of course Charlotte and Anne. Her childhood was slightly troubled with her mother dying when she was quite young, being sent to a boarding school where she and her three older sisters were often mistreated, and experiencing the death of her older sisters Maria and Elizabeth.

Despite these trials the sisters were well educated and specifically loved the romantic poets (think Lord Byron and Percy Shelley). Echos of the romantics can be seen in all of the Bronte sisters' work, but I think it appears especially in Emily’s. Emily along with her sisters were teachers by occupation, but Emily was noted to not like children very much. Her first work was published alongside that of her sisters under their male pseudonyms. It was a book of poetry entitled “Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell” at the time of it’s publication it only sold two copies (a thing I like to remind myself of when I feel like my writing is worthless.”

This brings us to Wuthering Heights.  
  
The novel was published in late 1847 in a three volume set alongside Anne’s Agnes Grey.​​ The publisher published the books in the wake of the success of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre. 
    
I think the pairing of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey is very interesting, as the two works are in many ways polar opposites. Wuthering Heights emphasises the rugged, desperate, and dirty sides of human nature, while Agnes Grey puts emphasis on purity, resilience, and greater good.

The plot of Wuthering Heights is in many ways a record of an isolated family living in Yorkshire.
    
We follow a servant named Nelly Dean as she tells a tenant on the family property (Mr. Lockwood) about his landlord Mr. Heathcliffe. 
    
I’ll keep most of the details a secret so that you can enjoy the novel yourself, but it’s primarily about Heathcliffe’s vengeful actions after being essentially rejected by his childhood love. He is fueled by passion and unhealed grief and will do anything at anyone's expense to get back at the man who he believes has wronged him.
    
Wuthering Heights isn’t very realistic I don’t think, but it shows what perhaps might happen if human passions and desires were left untamed. 
    
There are no “good” characters in the novel (unlike Anne’s Agnes Grey where the two man characters are perfect paragons of good behavior), in fact all of the characters are highly flawed and sinful human beings, but Emily does a masterful job of making the reader care about the characters, at least, enough for them to sit on the edge of their seats as they flip the pages of the novel.
    
One thing that must have annoyed Victorian readers was the fact that there is no real reform for any of the characters in the book and there is no moral presented by the author. The book is rife with people doing horrible things and never repenting from it. In it’s very
essence Wuthering Heights is a chronicle of passion untamed, and this is where my Bronte sisters literary analysis comes in.
    
After reading the first three Bronte novels, I have traced a theme through all three, passion. Jane Eyre and Agnes Grey both have other themes, the most significant to me being the way Charlotte analyzes temptation in Jane Eyre. 
    
But this theme of passion is the invisible string between these three seemingly unalike novels. 
    
Wuthering Heights is passion untamed.
    
Jane Eyre is passion tamed.
    
Agnes Grey is passion diluted.
    
Let me explain. In Wuthering Heights each character is driven by their own desires for love, admiration, money, and pride. Each of them sees the world through the lens of their all consuming passion and everything they do flows out of that worldview. Cathy marries Edgar because of his worship of her, Heathcliffe makes life miserable for his wife and son because of love for a woman he can’t have. Edgar Linton withholds his daughter from the world because of his fear of her falling away from him like her mother did. Linton is driven by a desire to please his unpleasable father, Cathy the second is driven by her desire for love. The cycle continues again and again throughout the book and is something we also can observe in many of the side characters as well.
  
 In Jane Eyre we have Mr. Rochester, a man full of fiery and overwhelming passion. Passion that he learns to set aside in the search of becoming a better man. And we also see Jane, a woman who will not let herself give in to the passion and desires that she has. She instead gives her cares to God and removes herself from situations that may cause her to sin.
  
Their passions are tamed in the search of self betterment and their tempers are softened by love and affection.
    
In Agnes Grey we see a woman who stands firm no matter what is going on around her. She is mistreated and looked down on, but she doesn't let anger or passion take over. She is steadfast and true. And the man she ends up marrying also reflects this. (I have to say that because of this Agnes Grey is quite a boring book).
    
There is no question in my mind that the sisters talked about these things, each choosing to sketch out a different human reaction to similar feelings.

Now back to Wuthering Heights. It’s not just a dramatic, passionate, windswept gothic novel. It is also clever and witty, deep and haunting. It is a piece of literature that should not be looked over, but instead questioned and explored and understood. Unfortunately this is all the world ever received from Emily Bronte, she left us very young and with so many questions.  But I would encourage you to read the book for yourself, dig deep and explore the rugged moors of Yorkshire.

Belle Thomas

Belle is the writer and dreamer behind An Old Fashioned Girl. She is passionate about reminding girls of their identity in Christ, classic books, history, Louisa May Alcott, and earl grey tea. ​​ ​