Passion Without Boundaries
Re-experiencing the Brontë Sisters, Part Two
I am re-reading Wuthering Heights, and doing a slow study of the Bronte Sisters. I have decided to give myself no deadline and maintain personal permission to read whatever I please between my studies. (Part One to this little blog series I am attempting may be found here.) I learned long ago, when it comes to a blog series, not to force myself into a formulaic mold or dictate a strict schedule or I would set myself up to fail. I love my readers and want to respect their time and curiosity, but also, I write for me as a thinking process and this blog has been (over the years) a way to grow as a writer, a way to grow as an author, a way to grow as a human, and sometimes a way to pay an electricity bill. It hasn’t done that last bit in a long, long time, as I went un-monetized for nearly a decade, but once upon a time I did rely on my blog to keep on the lights.
Although I hadn’t picked up Wuthering Heights to read in quite some time, I had several copies in various editions on my personal shelves, none of which were the copy I read out of in high school or my early twenties. I have a tendency to donate things I’m not reading and acquire different copies with different editorial essays than the other editions, because I happen to enjoy reading essays. Even bad ones with bad takes I will find entertaining sometimes. This time I am reading out of The World’s Popular Classics Art-type Edition. They were inexpensive hardbacks made in the 1940s and 1950s, printed in New York, and mine has a little burgundy spine. I plucked it out of a library sale for $2. It used to belong to one Carolyn Coppock. She left her bookplate on the front endpapers. It opens with a 1930 Editor’s Introduction that discusses its uniqueness in literature, describing “the peculiar quality of its power.” (pg 7)
As an older adult, I am having a much harder time getting into Wuthering Heights. As a child and teen the intrigue for me was: Will this be a Human Redemption story? Or a Kill the Monster story? And it is, in fact, neither. (Or both?) Well, not in the expected way, at least. I remember loving it because it was neither and it managed to surprise me. I didn’t see the cautionary tale coming and I didn’t recognize the redemption arc for the secondary characters. As a child, I wanted the redemption story, the knowledge that everyone can be saved tucked neatly in my back pocket. As a teenager I was more of a cynic and wanted the monster vanquished and judgments doled out. As a forty-one year old, I’m just too tired for all these people. I don’t want anything to do with any of them… I don’t want to save them or slay them. I want to walk away, close the book, and read something else. For that reason, I have been camped out re-reading Wuthering Heights for nearly a month, when normally it would take me a few hours. I keep putting it down in annoyance rather than feeling the rush of curiosity I had when I read it for the first time. I keep ping-ponging away from the characters to see what others have to say about them in essays. An easy task because the author herself didn’t give us personal access to them, but told us the story through the gossip of several first person narrators, with varying levels of reliability. This writing tactic is equal parts annoying and clever.
“Not Nature, but Fate, seem to take the pen from the writer, and write for her,” H.W. Garrod states. Pinning down a “review” or even a “literary criticism” of Wuthering Heights that feels true and accurate is a struggle because the entire work feels feral, but it’s obviously a controlled feral, so you know there is a purpose if only you can step away from the roller coaster ride long enough to look at it clearly. The characters seem to fight against the pen itself, wriggling and writhing under the documentation of their actions. Perhaps that is why everyone focuses on the madness of the Brontës, even Currer Bell (the brother) touches upon Emily’s taste for the grotesque and praises Sidney Dobell for recognizing his sister’s ability to look into the human psyche, her desire to see things that are criminal as not necessarily rooted in evil. The sisters not only attacked “societal norms” (as so many critics say) but also seemed to have a complicated relationship with the literary tradition, flirting with it while attempting to disregard it. “Neither Emily nor Anne was learned; they had no thought of filling their pitchers at the well-spring of other minds; they always wrote from the impulse of Nature, the dictates of intuition, and from such stores of observation as their limited experience had enabled them to amass.” (pg 20)
The Editor’s Preface is also written by Currer Bell. There he discusses the wildness of the moors and the story. He warns the reader of the “perverted passion and passionate perversity.” He goes on to explain that “the single link that connects Heathcliff with humanity is his rudely confessed regard for Hareton Earnshaw–the young man whom he has ruined; and then his half-implied esteem for Nelly Dean. These solitary trains omitted, we should say he was child neither of Lascar nor gipsy, but a man’s shape animated by demon life–a Ghoul–an Afreet.” (pg 25) Indeed, the work itself is “swarming with ghosts and goblins!” despite no goblins or ghosts in the traditional sense being present, but simply grotesque carvings in the architecture, bitter swirls of wind, and intrusions in dreamscapes. In typical Gothic fashion, there is “atmospheric tumult” and hints at the black arts, while the moors (symbolizing hell, the wilderness, the damned, the otherworldly) intermingle with the depictions of the characters’ souls.
I tossed the book in a bag and abandoned it for a week or so while I laid out Geometry lessons in my mind. One of the hazards and joys of being a homeschool mom is having many ideas crashing around in your head at once. I love continuing my education by educating my children and was willing to abandon Wuthering Heights completely as something “been there, done that” in my life, but was spurred on by the atrocities of the new movie trailer, featuring Margot Robbie and various other actors, sticking their fingers in each other’s and their own mouths, I had to revisit this “greatest love story ever told.” (The algorithm has me all wrong on this point, because I keep seeing these ads on the internet and I do not want to be seeing these ads on the internet.) I needed to understand where the disconnect lay between the story I thought I read and the one being advertised, because to me Wuthering Heights is as much a love story as Romeo & Juliet. Making that comparison it how I figured out why so many people have conflicting reactions to Wuthering Heights.
I suppose it is time for me to clarify. My hot take on Romeo & Juliet is that it is equal parts cautionary tale and satire. Romeo & Juliet, I think Shakespeare is telling us, is what happens when two teenagers deep dive into feelings without restraint or wisdom: everybody dies.
Wuthering Heights reads the same way for me. Unbridled passions, “love” without boundaries, destroys everyone around you and leaves destruction in your wake. The only hope of redemption is for the future generations after you’re dead because your passions gave way to chaos. Wuthering Heights remains, for me, a cautionary tale. It’s not a romance at all, as good, truth, and beauty was never part of the Heathcliff and Catherine equation. Instead, Heathcliff and Catherine embody toxic power struggle dynamics, passion for the sake of passion, and the two being in remotely the same vicinity of each other makes everyone worse.
We see Catherine’s passion being set up for sinful rage in the first hundred pages as Catherine “never had the power to conceal her passion, it always set her whole complexion in a blaze.” (pg 96) It reminds me of Susanna Kaysen’s observations in Girl, Interrupted: “Crazy isn’t being broken or swallowing a dark secret. It’s you or me amplified. If you ever told a lie and enjoyed it. If you ever wished you could be a child forever.” Catherine seems to enjoy her manic episodes and passionate rages and reminds me of my toddler who screamed at me mercilessly the other day because she wanted to wear her shirt on backwards. The character has bought the lie that feeling of any kind is what makes us alive, even if what we’re feeling and how we’re choosing to show that feeling to others, is leading us down the road to death.
Then we have Heathcliff, neither man nor monster, but for sure a monstrous man. “Heathcliff to me is a sort of sprite of the bergs, a cousin to Mary Shelly’s monster, a creature of the northern mists, a gnome,” Philip Larkin wrote to Monica Jones in 1955. Mary Shelly’s Monster was created. Beowulf’s Grendel simply was, Heathcliff, we could argue was both born monstrous and created to be more monstrous (“total depravity of man” theology plus abuse and ill treatment he received). Heathcliff is where the monster metaphor meets the psychological truth of human nature. Having re-read Count of Monte Cristo last year with my oldest daughter, I now see a lot of the similarities in the revenge stories. Both go away and return better educated and financially stable, but that education and financial gain combined with their anger becomes weaponized and ruthless. On page 130 on my edition, Heathcliff is described as “not a rough-diamond–a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.” As humans we want so badly for education and money to refine character, but character is refined by Jesus Christ, not worldly gains.
What makes the book worth reading is the redemption of the next generation. Despite Heathcliff’s abuse, the cycle was broken, generational curses do not have to exist. Human beings are free to choose the gift of peace. I’m not done re-reading the book, but I am seeing the light at the end of the tunnel while recalling what I do remember of each character’s ending.
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“Emptiness and boredom: what an understatement. What I felt was complete desolation. Desolation, despair, and depression.
Isn’t there some other way to look at this? After all, angst of these dimensions is a luxury item. You need to be well fed, clothes, and housed to have time for this much self-pity.”
― Susanna Kaysen, Girl, Interrupted
The Mad Women of the Moors
Re-experiencing The Brontë Sisters, Part One
In 2024 I read Brontë’s Agnes Grey alongside the Literary Life Podcast. I hadn’t read a Brontë novel in years, more than a decade I believe. Though I greatly appreciate the Brontës, I’ve always been more of a Jane Austen girl. It’s a rare reader who loves both equally, I find. The Brontës wrote Gothic revival tales with a flare for romanticism (romanticism the movement, not romanticism featuring a meet-cute and happily ever after), whereas Jane Austen wrote satire. The Brontës make me sad and despair for humanity while Jane Austen makes me laugh at society’s nonsense. All four women had much to say about the world around them, they just said it very differently.
Agnes Grey, written by the youngest Brontë, Anne, is not the most riveting of classic works and I suspect it wouldn’t still be in print if Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre weren’t currently so popular. I love to pair reading experiences, rabbit trail from one book to another, an exercise of associative reading, so I plucked a book I already had on my shelf and read it as well.
The book was The Madwoman Upstairs by Catherine Lowell, a contemporary literary mystery with the meet-cute kind of romance thrown in. The book follows fictional character Samantha Whipple through Oxford as the author fan-girls over Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. In a season when I am aggressively purging subpar books from my collection (we have over 5,000 volumes–I stopped counting long ago–and have legitimately run out of space) The Madwoman Upstairs is one I have chosen to keep, for now. I think my oldest might enjoy it after studying a Brontë book or two, it’s an easy breezy weekend novel.
That time might be coming soon as the trailers for this new Wuthering Heights movie blasts across the internet, appalling most readers I know. Teaching Wuthering Heights just moved up my to-do list as I counter parent pop culture, so that when my teen encounters the story for the first time it is not at the hands of the debaucherous movie industry who is advertising what looks like a Fifty-Shades version of what they are calling the “greatest love story ever told.” I thought it was a cautionary tale of what happens to humanity when we give into the monster of sin instead of slaying it. On a supernatural level, Wuthering Heights brings me back to Beowulf (I might be broken, because everything brings me back to Beowulf, it’s a favorite) and the torment of the wild (sin nature and Satan… Heathcliff has that whole Esau archetype going for him that reminds me of Grendel). On a psychological level, Cathy and Heathcliff remind me that sin nature is to be quashed lest we wander the moors ever after as lost souls unable to reach heaven. Apparently, that is not the popular reading, and Hollywood has turned it into some steamy lip biting panty dropper. Gross. But, I haven’t read the book in a coon’s age, and it’s possible I read it poorly and just saw the message I wanted to see.
Alice Hoffman said, “Read Wuthering Heights when you’re 18 and you think Heathcliff is a romantic hero; when you’re 30, he’s a monster; at 50 you see he’s just human.” When I was in my teens, I definitely read him as a tempting monster. I know I read Jane Eyre and Tenant of Wildfell Hall in my twenties, but I cannot recall if I re-read Emily’s work when I first read her sisters’ and stumbled across Gaskell’s biography. I’m 41 now and I’m curious to know how I read Heathcliff today.
English author Jeanette Winterson wrote on her website in 2011:
I read Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen and had just left home. I did not read it as a love story. I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy. Cathy loses Heathcliff. Edgar Linton loses Cathy, their daughter, his life, and Thrushcross Grange. Hindley loses Wuthering Heights. His son Hareton is dispossessed, Heathcliff’s revenge on everyone, including himself, is matched by Cathy’s death-wish (Why did you betray your own heart?). Heathcliff is a foundling. As an adopted child I understood his humiliations, his ardour, and his capacity to injure. I also learned the lesson of the novel that property is power. It seemed to me that if you want to fall in love you had better have a house. Whatever Emily Bronte was doing, it was not the sentimental interpretation of this novel of all for love and the world well lost. Cathy is a woman and can’t own property in her own right. Therefore she can’t rescue Heathcliff unless she marries Edgar (and that is part of her plan but Heathcliff has already misunderstood and disappeared). Much later when her daughter marries Heathcliff’s horrible son Linton he gleefully claims that all her property is now his – and when he usefully dies, all that was hers passes to Heathcliff. Heathcliff himself starts with nothing—and so can’t marry Cathy. His gradual gain of every house, horse and heirloom belonging to the Earnshaws and the Lintons is his revenge and his ruin. What’s love got to do with it? (All right, quite a lot, but this is not a love story).
As I begin my journey of rediscovery, I find I agree that it is a story of loss. I also think it is a story of revenge, and possibly a story of ghosts… I’ll get back to you in Part Two of this blog series.
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Anakalian Whims 