That ‘dude watching with the Brontë sisters’ comic has a lot to answer for tbh. This one makes up for it though, drawn when Kate Beaton had, you know, actually read Wuthering Heights.
As is, I believe, traditional, allow me to pitch several completely different female authors against one another: why yes, I do prefer the works of the Brontë sisters to Austen. And of the three I will likely always choose Emily. I assure you that this is purely my subjective, literary preference, and makes me neither less of a feminist nor someone who romanticises ‘alcoholic dickbags’, to borrow the phrase. I don’t intend to apologise for my tastes here. I do intend to read some Anne Brontë soon, to whom I mean no disrespect or criticism, but if you think that preferring Tenant of Wildfell Hall to Wuthering Heights automatically makes you a better person then you probably won’t get much out of this review anyway.
This is my favourite novel. It has been since I first read it half a lifetime ago, and I’ve been nervous about returning to it in case I found that I had, in fact, been romanticising something that was not as nuanced as I remembered. Stevie Davies‘ take on Emily gave me the confidence to return to it though, and I’m so glad I did. On the re-read, I found that Emily is a far more fascinating judge of human character than I had realised before, I accepted that I am now old enough to sympathise properly with Nelly, who is absolutely key to the story, and I had much more patience for Volume II than I did as a younger woman.
Wuthering Heights is a story about how children internalise prejudices and repeat them. It’s about the selfishness of love and its short-sightedness. It’s a story in which revenge proves unsatisfying, class hierarchy disempowers even the best of intentions and what endures through it all is the cycle of seasons and the landscape. Alcoholism is not romanticised, nor is domestic violence. One woman makes the mistake of romanticising Heathcliff, and Isabella soon comes to regret her decision to elope with him. Even the vapid Mr Lockwood has to change his opinion of Heathcliff within a page of his positive opening assessment. But Heathcliff himself is a victim before he is a monster: a child offered a precarious place in society, only to have it snatched from him, to spend his youth oppressed by violence and hard labour. It’s not used as an excuse for his actions as an adult though — Emily is interested in the reasons we are who we are, not in excusing bad behaviour.
This time I did not read Charlotte’s introduction, which is an apology of sorts for her sister’s imagination. I do think that Emily’s achievement in writing such a novel is extraordinary, but I think that because of the ambitious attempt to unravel human nature it displays, not because, as Charlotte implied, she was some sort of naïf who created something primal and uncultivated. To be truthful, it does not always achieve its ambitions, but that is only because they are set so high.
Here and there the book shows a limitation of scope, plus the narrative voice contains an unbelievable level of detail: exact conversations and recounted to one person who recounts them again years later, word for word, so that, taken literally, we should imagine Nelly Dean putting on voices and acting scenes out for Mr Lockwood. Nothing beyond the moors between the Grange and the Heights has any substance, and Nelly is a ‘Mrs’ Dean who spends her time trying to see the best in her self-absorbed employers, while we learn nothing at all of her life beyond her service. Yet this is maybe accounted for by Lockwood’s overarching narrative: such a man would not concern himself with the details of a servant’s life, and the servant herself is hardly likely to have anything to say about Liverpool or Heathcliff’s fortune-making travels or the southern parts Isabella disappears to. I can forgive the lack of distinction between each narrator’s voice when the envelope structure is such a clever way of telescoping the detail in a direction that allows Emily to write about what suits her best.
On this reading I did feel more that Nelly was quite a clear authorial voice: a woman, like Emily, who is used to observing, to spending time at household chores and hard work, who harbours a general hope that the people around her will act for the best, and a tender reverence for the sick and dying. But as a younger reader I recall wishing Nelly would behave like the grown-up in the room more often. I wanted her to be more sympathetic sometimes and less sympathetic at others. I thought she made too many mistakes, and I almost certainly took Catherine Earnshaw’s side too often. Nelly, of course, is constrained by her position: she is an employee, even if she also has maternal feelings for the children she has cared for, and once her charges are old enough to understand that they have power over her, none is reluctant to exert their will. From her childhood, raised at the Heights alongside Hindley, to the role of nursemaid to successive generations, she seems a part of the family, and has a closer relationship to them than other servants do. But she still cannot control or dictate their actions, and she remains an observer throughout, able to do little more than report or withhold what she supposes is right. She’s not infallible in this, but nor is anyone else in the novel. Nelly still retains her compassion for the others though she receives little more than scorn and trickery in return.
I was weeping as much for him as for her: we do sometimes pity creatures that have none of the feeling either for themselves or others.
I also realised that my love of Icelandic sagas must at least originate in part here. I don’t know that Emily would have had access to any translations, and it seems unlikely, but the concerns and the flavour of the tragedy are very similar to the family sagas (possibly to many kinds of tragedy, but the sagas are my biggest reference point). Property and wealth are set against human relationships; those who are ‘in’ can never be ‘out’ of polite society, and those who are ‘out’ cannot ever truly be ‘in’; vengeance is a matter of a lifetime, an all-consuming drive to show oneself worthy; and the knowledge that this is a self-destructive way to go on never stops anyone. Heathcliff could fit in very well with the ambitious heroes of Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða or the poets’ sagas: unlikeable men who calculate the best way to get back at the world for a slight against them, people with a long and very personal view of revenge that aims to strike right at the heart of the concern to be remembered. But like many such ambiguous saga characters — particularly the poet-outlaws — Heathcliff’s aim to put an end to his rivals’ lines is thwarted and it is he who is left childless, as without connection in the moors as he was when he arrived.
That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time, only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case — I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.
It’s worth noting that, ‘canonically’, Heathcliff is described as ‘Spanish’, ‘gypsy’, ‘swarthy’ and ‘black’. No doubt arguments continue to rage as to whether Emily intended him to be descended from Afro-Caribbean slaves, Spanish sailors, North African pirates, Romani travellers or sun-tanned labourers. The thing is, she does not specify, and the openness means that Heathcliff can be represented as any of these, and I’d love to see more adaptations take a more imaginative route rather than the default ‘pretty white boy with flowing locks who’s always up for a tumble in the heather’. It is there in Heathcliff’s own words at the close of the novel that, though Cathy haunts him, it is not her eyes in Hareton’s face that give him pause for thought, so much as the recollection of his own wretched childhood. His relationship with Cathy is not where the interest lies in the story — it remains as unchanged and unchanging as the rock, after all — but his developing, contrary attitude to Harton in particular gives the plot its most satisfying arc.
Heathcliff is a boy who suffers from complacent allies and the aggressive jealousy of the privileged; his closest friend is not brave enough to sacrifice her position in society for him. Cathy is, however, selfish enough to think she can hold Edgar’s affection simultaneous to her uncompromising bond with Heathcliff. For his own part, Edgar arrogantly believes he will win Cathy round to him and him alone. Isabella thinks she can fix Heathcliff; Cathy Linton thinks in a similar way about Linton Heathcliff. When a relationship finally works in the novel, it seems to be because both parties desire to change themselves as much as each other, while not forgetting that they remain separate people, with different experiences.
If Heathcliff himself and Cathy Earnshaw appear to have a less self-centred attachment than other couples in the story, it is only because of the illusion created by their closeness — “I am Heathcliff”. This is the bewildered cry of a child trying to figure out why she feels guilty for her motives in flirting with Edgar, it doesn’t strike me as romantic so much as terrifying and terrified. Cathy is too scared to choose the unfamiliar, uncomfortable life, but her choice is understandable in the context of her society; whatever Heathcliff’s background, his one privilege lies in his gender, and the fact that, as a man, he can leave the moors and make his fortune elsewhere. And let’s please not pretend any longer that only Anne Brontë understood the destructive nature of alcoholism when Emily created the picture of unstable addiction that is Hindley Earnshaw.
I know that in many ways Wuthering Heights is a ‘gurt bellaring bull‘ of a tale. It throws tantrums on the kitchen floor, it slaps and pinches and keeps some things from us while being too free with other details. But it’s a breathtakingly confident survey of human failings, peppered with observations on everyday things of joy and beauty, and with landscapes so lovingly captured you could almoat look up from the book and swear you saw the Penistone Crags right there ahead. I can’t wait until the next time I wander up past the stone marker and the ruined kirk to the gate, open or closed, and the tangled lives beyond it. After all, like any good tragedy, I always harbour the hope that things might go a little better for everyone, surely this time…
I enthuse 
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