Wuthering Heights is not a love story, actually - review

Did I make this video yesterday just so that I could capture my mane in its untamed glory on video before trimming? It very well may be. Either way It's been one I've been wanting to make for a while because Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte is a darn good book if you're into learning about the costs of love. You can a pick up a copy with the link below (this is not an affiliate link I make no money from it, go support a local book shop)!

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Music Attribution for our little intro goes to:

[maiko]

Thank you so much for this.
The anger, the screams, and the hatred that I saw in this book also exist in me I guess. I couldn’t put the book down because I knew they were all true. All those negative emotions were true, but there were hints of kindness and compassion in places I didn’t expect in the story and they held the story together for me. And the beauty of the words!!! It became one of my favorite books ever written.

[simonregan]

I take the seemingly unpopular view that Cathy Linton and Hareton Earnshaw are the protagonists of the book, with Heathcliff a tragic villain and Lockwood being a narrator of a sort popular in Victorian novels, which is a largely unengaged character who observes the action. Through this lens, Wuthering Heights reads as a very popular type of contemporary story - the inheritance drama. Heathcliff's plot is to keep his ward ignorant of his birthright until he is 20, at which point Heathcliff can claim adverse possession over the Heights; and in the course of the story also steals the Grange by forcing Cathy to marry his sickly son and then having his son will the property to him. In the end his schemes are undone and Cathy and Hareton, who have fallen in love, end up uniting their families and possess both properties.

At the start, Lockwood has two disturbing dreams, and all adaptations focus on the latter, where he encounters the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw. However, the first one - about the 'first of the seventy-first', the unforgivable sin, the straw that breaks the camel's back - is vitally important as it furnishes the central question: will the second generation be able to rise above the sins of their parents, or is Wuthering Heights itself damned through so many acts of cruelty over the years?

I should note that this reading - seeing Cathy and Hareton as the main characters, with the first generation as an extended flashback - is also supported by the real-life story that inspired the book. Hareton is based on Emily's grandfather, Hugh Brunty, who fell into the care of 'Welsh' Brunty, an adopted foundling who resented the family and had abused his position as letting agent of their landlord to blackmail them into marrying the youngest daughter (and his adoptive sister) Mary. Hugh eventually escapes Welsh (in a dramatic scene not included in the book - swimming down the Boyne river) and marries the daughter of a neighbouring farmer, Emily's grandmother.

In light of this, it's important to note that Heathcliff raises Hareton as a sort of social experiment - 'we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it". Ultimately, Heathcliff is defeated, because despite subjecting Hareton to the same kind of degradation he experienced as a child, Hareton ends up a decent, honourable man while Heathcliff dies a cruel miser.