(Note: while this is a critical opinion, it’s a reflection on the novel itself, not on the people who may enjoy it. As my Grandma used to say, “It takes all kinds.”)
Ah, Wuthering Heights.
Come for the spooky highland moors setting, stay for the…well, I’m not sure why I stayed, actually. For me, it was 320 pages of, “Wow, this guy is irredeemable.”
I bought it for my Kindle because I have always been told that the novel is a mainstay of gothic romance literature. Could I really call myself a gothic literature fan/author if I never read Wuthering Heights?
(Narrator: “Yes, she could have.”)
I downloaded it to my Kindle app during a third trimester fit of restlessness and fatigue. Curled into a ball on my bed in between my fourth and fifth trips to the bathroom in one hour, I began.
I had zero expectations other than maybe a spooky setting and some type of love story. I didn’t anticipate perfect heroines or even a reliable narrator. In fact, one of my favorite novels is Lolita—the ultimate unreliable narrator. I don’t share this to brag, I’m just telling it as plainly as I can: my standards for readable characters aren’t high. I don’t need them to be likable or moral. The bar is on the floor.
Nevertheless, by page eighty, I was googling in earnest whether or not I was meant to despise the main characters of Wuthering Heights. I kept reading only to make sure everyone got what was coming to them. (Spoiler alert: they don’t.)
We all know the main couple. Even if you’re thinking, “No, I don’t,” I promise that you do. None of us has escaped witnessing this particular type of dysfunctional relationship.
Catherine and Heathcliff went to your junior high wearing vials of each other’s blood. They rode the bus with you in high school because Heathcliff punched his driver’s ed instructor. Catherine worked with you at the movie theater in college until she got caught recording films on her phone to upload to the internet. They’re chaotic, they’re messy, they’re likely third cousins, and they have matching Insane Clown Posse tattoos. We know them, we tolerate them—one time, we even lent them twenty bucks for Pall Malls and Monster Energy drinks.
The only successful love story comes at the very end and involves first cousins, one of whom repeatedly abuses the other for being illiterate. I got the impression this was meant to be heartwarming. (?)
I’ll admit to not being much of a romantic (or Romantic) novel reader. Still, I think a better love story would be Romeo and Juliet. Yes, it is a three day love affair between two teenagers resulting in the deaths of six people. I said what I said.
All of this with apologies to Emily Brontë. Bad reviews sting, and even though she’s been dead more than a century, I feel a little guilty lambasting her only novel. Technically, it’s fine. The writing itself is good, it’s organized and edited, it’s thorough and complex. I enjoyed the descriptions of the settings and weather in the moors. That part was peak gothic. But…
We don’t have to like characters, but we need to care what happens to them. By the end of Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and all but one of the others could have hurled themselves into the sun and I would have barely registered a yawn. It’s not poorly written—I just don’t care. I wasn’t made to care. And that is the ultimate poison for readers. Apathy.
I’ll leave you with this exchange from Heathcliff, the “hero,” and Nelly, the housekeeper and narrator.
“If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable.”
“Because you are not fit to go there,” I answered. “All sinners would be miserable in heaven.”
Nelly gets it. I like to think Emily Brontë got it, too, and she’s winking alongside her. I’m willing to give the genre another shot. Jane Eyre awaits on my Kindle.