Wuthering Heights: An Appreciation

[selenak]

I had the great luck of reading Wuthering Heights without any expectations whatsoever. What I mean by that is: being German, it wasn't a part of our literary canon we had to read, so I didn't encounter it in school (though I was still a teenager when reading it - I simply came across it in the library, started and couldn't put it down), I had

Comments

[likeadeuce]

You know I also love Wuthering Heights, so I appreciate this writeup, and particularly the first chapter, which is not only funny but does a wonderful job of setting up the 'mystery' of the novel that follows. I read this book for the first time when I was 13 or 14, and I realize now that the reason I remember the first chapter so well is that I had no idea what the plot of the book was going to be, so as I went along, I periodically re-read the first chapter to see how it fit into my revised understanding of the characters' relationships. Certainly the novel has an artificial structure -- perhaps unnecessarily so -- but it's hard to think of an author who does a better job of unfolding that structure. In, I think, Emily's only published novel, which makes the achievement all the more remarkable.

[selenak]

the first chapter, which is not only funny but does a wonderful job of setting up the 'mystery' of the novel that follows.

Yes, this, as the kids say today. It made me wildly curious to find out what was going on, really lured me in, and as for the funny dimension, this is why I'm so baffled every time I come across someone declaring the Brontes display no sense of humour. In their defense to that particular charge, I would add to the opening chapter of Wuthering Heights that part in "Shirley" where Charlotte has a go at the three Curates (supposedly reducing her father, who had his chare of Curates, to tears of laughter when he read it), and her Jane Austen issues reaching a climax in this snark by letter: I have likewise read one of Miss Austen's works, Emma -- read it with interest and with just the degree of admiration which Miss Austen herself would have thought sensible and suitable(...) (Actually I think if they had ever met Charlotte B. and Jane A. would have gotten along famously, but Charlotte had the bad luck of being a

[rose_griffes]

I was enjoying reading all of this and then came to this line:
There are no characters to identify with, for starters.

At which point I felt like shrieking, "Eureka!" Because that's why I'll never love Wuthering Heights, even while I find the language beautiful and the characters interesting.

Good thing Cathy is Heathcliff, because I'll never feel like either of them.

Heathcliff and Cathy for me are among those characters I wouldn't want anywhere near me in real life but do find captivating to read about precisely because they don't behave according to the sympathetic romantic character rules.I once jokingly described the book as "Young sociopaths in love". It doesn't quite fit, really, but it's the best description I could think of for the trainwreck they are together

[zahrawithaz]

What a great write-up. It puts me in mind of Virginia Woolf's famous praise of WH over Jane Eyre and makes me want to reread the former. (Great point about the Buffy line, and the general understated humor.)

I appreciate it the more having had a difficult relationship with the book. Alas, coming to the book with loaded expectations (as in, "this is where your grandparents are from"--they were working-class people very close by) I remember not getting it as a teenager, and then rereading as an adult and despite appreciating the artistry, being very disturbed by the classism toward Joseph, especially as linked to his dialect, which is what my relatives spoke. That revelation overshadowed others, I think. But now it's well worth giving it another try.

Also I think it's easier to appreciate the importance of authors who have no sympathetic characters as I get older and see the overabuse of sympathetic narratives!

[selenak]

re: dialect, I read the book in German first, where there is none. Later when I started to read the 19th century novels in English, I noticed that Dickens as well as the Brontes and Wilkie Collins all did that. Oddly enough, while I saw it as classicism in Dickens and not always logical (for example, in Great Expectations Pip as a child ought to speak the same dialect/accent which his sister and Joe Gargary talk in, since they raised him, but he never does, even before going to school), I didn't in Wuthering Heights, probably because Joseph having the strongest Yorkshire accent didn't imprint on me nearly as much as Joseph as the embodiment of cranky Wesleyanism

[zahrawithaz]

Ah, the differences made by translations! I'm used to the whole dialect convention in Victorian novels, and frankly as a USian I think I miss some of the social meanings in a way I wouldn't in a novel using that convention with, say, African American vernacular. But that's the one and only time it's hit so hard for me, because it was eerily like how my family (who left in 1906 & therefore crystallized their dialect) spoke

[selenak]

Detour about Dickens: this passage in George Orwell's Dickens essay comes to mind:

One crying evil of his time that Dickens says very little about is child

[selenak]

I'll argh with you. Edward Rochester deserves to be sent to a desert island with Maxim de Winter and no one else. The perfect fate for both of them.

[selenak]

Yes, I've heard that about Daphne du Maurier as well, but it doesn't make me sympathize with Maxim any more. :)

Re: Rochester, the self pity, exactly. And the complaints of how he was TRICKED into marrying Bertha Mason (and taking her money), and how disgusting she is, but of course if Jane were to go mad, he'd treat her completely different. Off to the island with him!

(Actually: he could also end up on THE island, come to think of it. The Lost one. *rubs hands gleefully and eyes Smokey*)

[violaswamp]

I need to re-read this book as an adult. I read it as a young teenager (I think I was 14?) and I'm quite sure I didn't get it. A few years later, when I discovered HP fandom, I diagnosed WH as a bad Snapefic.

But from everything you say, and everything I've heard others say, it's the precise opposite.

[selenak]

It really is. I mean, I don't blame anyone if they dislike the book for disliking the characters. But bad Snapefic imagines its characters are sympathetic and misunderstood, and Wuthering Heights really, truly doesn't. (See quotes above.) The older I get, the more this becomes a crucial point for me as a reader and viewer. I can find horribly messed up characters fascinating and like them despite them being horrible people - as long as their story doesn't insist they're really just woobies and everything they do is excusable. As long as their story holds them to account for what they do. And Wuthering Heights most certainly does.