Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights

by Emily Bronte

Link: https://librivox.org/wuthering-heights-dramatic-reading-by-emily-bronte/

Listening Time:  11 hours 54 minutes

Quote:  "You said I killed you--haunt me then!"

Theme: Soul mates

My first reading of this story was this year (2015), but I read it as a romance...not as part of my gothic reading challenge. It was only after I'd listened to an essay by Mr Lovecraft (Supernatural Horror in Literature) that I even recognized the gothic and paranormal elements in this story. 

Mr Lovecraft cites this book as an example of how the gothic genre evolved into contemporary weird lit. I'm going to go over some of the points he brings up that convinced me that this is indeed a work of gothic fiction.

Eerie Setting:

The narrator of the story is a guy who moves to the English Countryside. This isn't the kind of country with manicured hedgerows and acres and acres of developed farmland. This is a moor: an isolated, under developed area where nothing grows really well, except peat and heather.

It's cold, and windy and the narrator seeks refuge in the manor house of a guy named Heathcliff. He's surprised to find that his future neighbors are not very pleasant or hospitable. They take him in and he shares dinner with them, but while he is all proper and polite, they behave with contempt and disdain (towards him, and towards each other).

Apparitions/Supernatural Phenomena:

At some point, the narrator finds himself in the attic of the manor (The Manor is called Wuthering Heights). He's going through old papers, including the diary of a young girl named Catherine Earnshaw, then he sees an apparition of a young girl like the one that he was just reading about. When he describes what he saw to the master of the house, Heathcliff is shocked. We're lead to assume he (Heathcliff) hasn't seen any apparition; but he'd really, really like to.

At this point in reading, I didn't take the whole ghost sighting seriously. The narrator had been going through very personal papers of this girl: a girl named Cathy (just like the living girl in the house). And in this really creepy atmosphere...he probably imagined the girl he'd been reading about.

And when Heathcliff hears about the apparition, I kind of just assumed he kind of went crazy. Because it turns out that he and the girl who wrote in that diary were very very close. Losing her has taken a terrible emotional toll on him and he wants her back, even if it's just her ghost.

"Be with me always. Take any form, drive me mad...only do not leave me in this abyss!"

[O.O]

When I first read it, I was just like: "OOOOh-Kay this guy's bonkers..."

 Mr Lovecraft has a different idea; the apparition is real. It's the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw  (Cathy Jr's mother), and she's haunting the house at Wuthering Heights because her soul mate (Heathcliff) is still alive and living there.

Looking back, it doesn't seem like too much of a stretch, it kind of makes sense actually, with the whole emphasis on how deep and abiding Heathcliff and Catherine's connection is.

Referring to their relationship as a transcendent supernatural bond, and not merely a metaphorical one, makes the message of the story a lot more powerful. Catherine and Heathcliff aren't just two people who have common life experiences and similar temperaments (although they do have that as well...); they're linked on a primordial or spiritual level as well.


Love as a spiritual connection:

As the narrator (and we) learn more and more about the lives of Catherine and Heathcliff, one thing that sticks out is that even though they have this connection they didn't always treasure each other the way they should have. 

At one point, Catherine talks to her friend and servant about how she doesn't understand romantic love. She likes her boyfriend (The Not-Heathcliff) because treats her nice and buys her things. Outside of what he can do for her, she doesn't care about him.

Her feelings on Heathcliff are a completely different matter: 

"He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same [...] If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it [...] Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always on my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being."


(^^Dang! Those are some really intense #feelings you've got there!)

And those feelings remain consistent throughout her whole life, even after she figures out that it's not going to work out with Heathcliff for various social and economic reasons. I think it's interesting that despite her strong feelings, she's OK with the two of them staying 'just friends'.

You get the feeling that even if they had gotten married, they would have probably still had problems. They have a really hard time connecting with their other family members (this particularly problematic when they each have children of their own). If they actually got married, they'd probably be the type of couple who's fighting and arguing all of the time. Because it's not just a reflection of how they feel about each other, but how they feel about their own person (whether that person exists as a single or a dual entity).

The message I got from this part of story is that having a soulmate is a powerful thing, but it doesn't necessarily have a lot to do with your personal happiness, especially if you don't have a great relationship with yourself in the first place!

"Sinners would be miserable [even] in heaven."

Heathcliff's Identity:

As a literary figure, Heathcliff is kind of like Othello in Shakespeare. As questionable a moral figure as he is, he's really important because he's one of the few notable, romantic figures in Victorian/Romantic literature who is not white. 

Also, a lot of the difficulties he faces in life (feeling like an outsider, suffering abuse, facing discrimination and overcoming it) are all consistent with the struggles a person would face as an ethnic minority during that time.

However, Mr Lovecraft takes it a step further and conceptualizes Heathcliff as a changeling. Maybe not a literal changeling, but as a symbolic one in the story. (Apparently there's a part in the book that refers to him that way, but I don't remember it.) 

(Note: If you're not aware, a changeling is a baby fae or demon who's been switched with a baby human. That's why Heathcliff was supposedly abandoned as a young child: His parents discovered he wasn't the child they wanted...so they left him out to die.)

I think that's kind of dumb. If Heathcliff is basically a baby Satan, than the only reason he's causing havoc in everyone's lives is because it's what he was born to do. It diminishes the struggles he's had to go through.

The idea of Heathcliff as a paranormal entity does communicate one point that I like: that Heathcliff is not a victim in his own life...Kind of a Don't underestimate him. He's a force to be reckoned with. type of thing. 

And I think Heathcliff would like to see himself in that way, too. He certainly showed all those punks back home, he ain't worthless!

Adaptions: 

I'm currently looking for one to watch. I really don't like that most of the time they cast a white actor as Heathcliff. 

There is one version (2011) that uses a mixed race actor: 

It looks promising! Sure hope it's good!