"Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." - Catherine Earnshaw
It would be impossible to discuss Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights without discussing romance. In one of the strongest and yet most atypical romances in all of literature, Bronte's characters, Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, begin, cultivate, and essentially kill a love affair far from the standards of a classically acceptable relationship. Catherine, a headstrong and self conscious woman, born into mediocrity yet altered until she fit the demands of good society, seems the direct opposite of the darkened outcast known as Heathcliff. Though the greatest friends throughout their adolescence, the two were eventually divided - for why should a lower class adopted orphan boy be the mate of such a pretty young girl destined for upper class greatness? And thus, the story unfolds as a force stronger than any other brings the two together despite Catherine's marriage to another man, despite Heathcliff's destestable cruelty, and finally, despite the death of his love and his soul.
The rest of the book unfolds around this impossible romance. In her wake, Catherine leaves a disconsolate husband, a heartbroken Heathcliff (if he did indeed, ever have a heart), and a beautiful daughter, the mirror image of her blonde curls and stubborn intuition. As Heathcliff schemes and Catherine builds her own fate, the frame narrator of the story (a man living in the house across from Heathcliff's Wuthering Heights who hears the tale of the broken family through an old maid) begins to see the true ruins left behind by the affair, the marriages, and the omnipresent sense of happenings that never should have happened.
The novel is in itself, a whirlwind of activity. Bronte leads the reader down several paths in every chapter: hope, disappointment, impatience, excitement. I couldn't have picked a better novel.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
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