Emily Bronte again

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights is in my opinion one of the greatest novels of the Victorian age.  Some critics and readers find it too Gothic, overblown and with violent sadistic characters.  There is a lot of violence and some of the dialogue and action is “hammy” and overdone.

But the novel is true to Emily’s vision of life, which was that the world and universe were harsh and frightening places and that love and hate were fierce passions that were very close together. Like her sister Charlotte, she was drawn to men who were “macho” and capable of passionate love and violent hatred.  (At least Charlotte was attracted by that sort of man in real life and fell in love with a “realistic” version of such a man, Heger, who was domineering, occasionally bad tempered but kindly, whereas Emily perhaps intuitively knew that no real person could come up to her visions so she never seems to have been involved at all with any man.)

 In the second part of the novel as in some of Shakespeare’s plays, a new vision of life is seen to be growing out of the wild and passionate early years.  Emily’s younger characters, Hareton and young Cathy, are less exciting than their parents and Heathcliff, but gentler and more civilised and lovable.  They gave some of the good qualities of the Lintons, but some of the passion of the Earnshaws.

  The novel isn’t a social comedy of manners or a conventional romance; it is more like a dramatic poem or a play so characters are not completely realistic – they are symbolic of various emotions and ways of thinking.  As one critic has said the book is about love, but it is about the painful difficult aspects of love.

Cathy and Hareton have some of the quality of the young lovers in Shakespeare’s later plays, Like Ferdinand and Miranda or Florizel and Perdita…They are touched by the tragedies and drama of the first part of the book and the older characters -but they are able to rise above it and find a new happiness together.  She teaches him to read, civilising him and helping him to learn what he needs to know, in order to take back his inheritance as owner of the Heights and Thrushcross Grange.  Living in Wuthering heights, Cathy has had to become more practical and learn to work, so she has grown from the experience of being with him too.