Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë Summary
I smudged my eyeliner but that seems totally appropriate. What's so great about Wuthering Heights? Wuthering Heights is actually one of the few books that I've read and reread a bunch of times. I'm terrible at rereading books, but if there are two books that I've read like five times, it's Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein. And Frankenstein is my favorite book ever.
I also know that a lot of people don't like Wuthering Heights and I think the main reason for that, judging from the people I've talked to and friends who don't like it, is that people seem to think that Wuthering Heights is a romance novel. And it's not. It's a gothic novel, and with that comes a shadow of romance that actually, when revealed, turns out to be grudges and hatred and pain and abuse, isolation, misery, aggression, despair. It's a horrible, horrible book and I love that about it.
So I think if people went into Wuthering Heights with different expectations, they would have a very, very different time. In fact, this happened to me. I was about 22 or 23 when I first read Wuthering Heights, and the co-founder of Books and Bow, Jess, was the person who told me to read it. When I started reading it, I said to her, "But these are horrible people. Everyone in this book is a villain. Who are you supposed to root for? Where's the love, where's the romance?" And she said to me, "Just keep going. Just enjoy that. Enjoy hating all of these people, enjoy the misery of it. It's kind of fun."
And I did. I then went into the book with a kind of different perspective, a different mindset, and it ended up becoming one of my favorite books ever and one of the reasons that I love the gothic genre so much. So people need to adjust their mindset when they go into Wuthering Heights. It's not a romance.
But what is it? Wuthering Heights, if you don't know anything about it, was the only novel that Emily Brontë wrote and got published before she died. As I said, it's a gothic novel. It begins with a man called Mr. Lockwood who is venturing out from London, I think, and he ends up on the moors of Yorkshire. There are two houses pretty separated from one another: Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, which is really hard to say out loud.
When he gets there, Wuthering Heights is owned and run by this curmudgeonly, horrible, broken, narcissistic, abusive man called Heathcliff. Heathcliff owns both properties and we can see that he's pretty wealthy, but he's awful. He treats everyone around him like dirt. So Mr. Lockwood, after experiencing a haunting, talks to the housekeeper and says, "Okay, what's going on here? Can you tell me about this man Heathcliff and the history of these houses? What is this place, what is going on?"
The haunting itself that he experiences is the ghost of a woman who tries to get through the window of his bedroom, and he's learned that her name is Catherine because her name is scrawled on the windowpane a bunch of times with different surnames. And that's pretty compelling. Catherine tries to get through the window and she tells him that she has been waiting for 20 years. She's been haunting this place for 20 years. So Lockwood has to know the history of this place—what happened 20 years ago?
So you get this iconic image of Cathy at the window right at the beginning, and then we go back in time, and the housekeeper tells Lockwood the history of the house. Wuthering Heights was owned and run by a lovely man called Mr. Earnshaw, who had two children. Pretty wealthy guy, his kids were very, very spoiled rich kids—Cathy and Hindley. One day at the beginning, Mr. Earnshaw goes off to Liverpool and he says, "What do you want?" and they say, "I want a toy, I want this, I want that," because they're spoiled kids. But what he brings back from Liverpool is a street urchin called Heathcliff.
I think he names him Heathcliff, and Heathcliff has no first or last name exactly—that's his whole name: Heathcliff. They remark on how grubby and dirty he is. He's an orphan, he doesn't speak much, we don't know where he came from, he just turned up. And Mr. Earnshaw decided to take him in and adopt him. From here—and this all moves really, really quickly—Hindley, Earnshaw's son, hates and abuses Heathcliff, while Cathy takes a liking to him. The two of them very early on start a kind of friendship-turned-budding romance.
And that's where this book misleads a lot of people—not that it's the book's fault. People seem to think that the romance between Cathy and Heathcliff is this iconic, beautiful, wonderful thing. And it's not. It's just a cycle of abuse and mistreatment of one another. Cathy is a spoiled, horrible child and Heathcliff has been tormented and abused and is very, very bitter and curmudgeonly, even from his youngest years.
A lot happens in the book. There is so much death. People die one after another, and that moves the plot forward and things change. The one constant is Heathcliff. After Mr. Earnshaw dies, Hindley inherits the house and he turns Heathcliff into this dog's body and just treats him like a slave in the house. But Cathy and Heathcliff remain romantically attached to one another until she gets sick and ends up getting nursed back to health in the other house, Thrushcross Grange, which at that time is run by a different family.
She falls in love with the son of that family, and they very quickly get married and have a kid. Heathcliff is angry and furious, and he runs off and disappears to go get his fortune. He comes back a very, very wealthy man, and we never find out where he got that money from. But the reason he ran off is because he overhears a conversation—and you see this in things like sitcoms and soap operas all the time. People overhear conversations, get the wrong end of the stick, and run away. And, ah, what could have been never happened. I guess this is probably where that trope all started.
But Cathy and Heathcliff are never to be. Again, I think the romantic aspect of this book actually comes from the fact that the most beautiful passages, the most beautiful language in Wuthering Heights, comes from the moments where Cathy and Heathcliff talk to or about each other.
In fact, I'm gonna try and find and read one right now. Okay, so I found some random quotes from bits where Cathy and Heathcliff were either talking to or about—usually about—each other, because they would say these things to other people. This is when the language of Emily Brontë is just at its peak. Here's Cathy talking about Heathcliff:
"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 into a mighty stranger."
And this is after Cathy has died—she dies about halfway through the novel—and Heathcliff is left alone. He's talking about her, kind of to the idea of her, to her ghost, whatever. He says:
"Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you. Haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers—I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always, take any form, drive me mad, only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you. Oh God, it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"
These moments where Cathy and Heathcliff talk to and about each other are harrowingly beautiful. But it is still not really romantic, because these are not two happy, healthy, lovely people. They are still abusive to one another and to the people around them, and they've been abused. It's just cycles of abuse in this novel. Cathy and Heathcliff do not have a happy, healthy relationship. They never have, they never will.
In the second half of the book, after Cathy dies, Heathcliff is haunted by her night after night after night. He claims that her ghost haunts him, and we have to believe that's true, because she haunts Lockwood at the beginning of the novel, and so she must be real. This ghost must be a real thing. Heathcliff has been twisted and frightened by this ghost, and by the end of the novel he's so looking forward to dying, to being with her in the afterlife, being two ghosts that roam together.
When the book ends—and I'm gonna spoil it because it's old as hell—in the very last few pages people around the area remark on seeing Heathcliff's ghost with the ghost of a woman walking around haunting hilltops and graveyards. So there is a romantic aspect to it—the idea that they end up together in the afterlife—but they were awful to each other the entire time. They are awful people, and they're people who have been tormented and torment. There's nothing romantic about it really. It's this cycle of abuse that is very, very gothic.
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