Book report: Wuthering Heights, by Emily Bronte

It’s strange how often I have the experience of reading an “old” novel like this one, expecting it to be dry and boring, and find that it’s anything but. You’d think I’d learn, but no. There’s a reason these are called classics: people have been thinking they’re really good for a long time, and they’re still really good. This is the kind of book I would have gone out of my way to not read in high school, which is probably just as well. I wouldn’t have appreciated it then.

One thing I noticed right off the bat is that this isn’t Jane Austen, which just goes to show that female British novelists of the early 1800s can be very different. Jane Austen is very funny and satirical. Emily Bronte is very serious. There are flashes of humor now and then, but she’s mining the human soul, and it’s dark work.

This book was written in 1845, but describes fictional events that took place from the 1770s until 1801. I don’t know why she placed the events in the novel so far in the past. Maybe people of the 1840s would have thought, “Oh, the 1770s! Yeah, that’s how people behaved then.” The same way we would think of the 1940s, I guess. But I don’t have that perspective, so I don’t know what she was going for.

She does some pretty complicated stuff with the narration, too. She doesn’t just tell you what happened, starting at the beginning and moving on to the end. She actually starts at the end of the story, with the main narrator meeting the surviving participants in what happened 30 years before. Then she begins introducing various other narrators who describe what happened from their point of view. This really plunges you into the story, because you’re not looking at it from the outside, but from the perspective of someone actually involved with the events at the time. You’re in the moment and in the place. I was impressed by such sophisticated storytelling in what I think was her first novel, and in 1845.

There are only a handful of characters in the story, and each one is sharply delineated. You can just picture these people. Bronte has a knack for apt description. I was glad this wasn’t one of those novels that describes every nail in the floor, but what description there is is always telling and to the point. She’s not just filling up pages like some authors ::cough:: Dickens ::cough:: sometimes do.

The plot is simple enough. Heathcliff is a boy of unknown origins who is brought up in the same family as the girl Catherine. They’re inseparable companions. However, when they grow up, Catherine marries someone else. That’s it. But the consequences and the complexity of the interactions of these two characters with each other and with everyone around them are amazing. Bronte wrings every drop out of the situation. At some times, you get the feeling, “Wait: you mean, if he had heard the rest of what she’d said, none of this would have happened?” But that’s what life is like sometimes. It depends on a single word or look or gesture.

I think that people of the time would have been pretty scandalized by some of the goings-on. People play pretty loose with “the sanctity of marriage”, for instance. And I think it would have absolutely terrified women about getting pregnant. Everybody dies in childbirth in this book.

I also think this has to be one of the first novels that has an actual sociopath as a main character. Dropping someone like Heathcliff into ordinary polite English society is like tossing a hand grenade into a cricket match. The effects are devastating, and all the more so because people don’t expect it and have no idea how to deal with it.

To modern audiences, there are other parts that are at least as disturbing. The idea of first cousins marrying seems to be perfectly fine with these people – in fact, one character does it twice – but probably gives readers today a Ewww feeling. And the casual way that Heathcliff can beat people, or kidnap them, or lock them in their rooms for weeks, all without even the mention of the possibility of some kind of police or legal reckoning is chilling.

Bronte shows a perfection of wording that is astonishing. She always selects the right word to describe even the most commonplace of actions, such as walking or talking. It’s an unobtrusive thing, but she words scenes with a precision that is admirable.

Ultimately, this is a fascinating novel following events from a simple source that eventually engulf and destroy almost everyone connected with them, like a slow and remorseless tidal wave.

Highly recommended