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I’d been meaning to re-read Wuthering Heights for a while, but the threatened Emerald Fennell adaptation finally got me to do it. If I’m going to have to live through a Wuthering Heights take cycle in two years, I’m going to be ready.
I expected to find more in it than I did when I read it as a teenager—not a risky bet, granted—and I did. When I was a teen I often had a lot of difficulty with books about people who seemed the sole source of their own problems. Then I realized some things. That, however, is another piece, perhaps for another venue, and definitely about a different book.
In fairness to Cathy and Heathcliff, in addition to being the source of their own problems, they are also the source of the problems of everybody around them. You can’t say they were slacking off in the problems department. They put in the effort.
And, naturally, there are many ways people read Wuthering Heights, infinite ways, probably, but what I found myself thinking about throughout is what it means to think love redeems. It does seem, to me, to be preoccupied with this question, both in its treatment of the Heathcliff–Cathy relationship and also in the way the next generation begins to do the work of healing the wounds of the past. Redeems who, redeems how, redeems from what. Is Heathcliff redeemed by love? Damned by love? Both, somehow? (And what about Cathy?) Does the hard-won happiness of the next generation retroactively redeem what happened before?
One thing about Wuthering Heights: when Heathcliff goes off to make money and then comes back, he has become a genuinely bad person. That statement isn’t quite true of the boy Heathcliff, who is probably more sinned against than sinning. But when he comes back, he’s a monster. Cathy, in his absence, has become, if not exactly a better person, a more clear-sighted one. She grasps fundamentally what Heathcliff has become. When she mercilessly lays his character bare to Isabella, her naive and foolish sister-in-law who believes herself to be in love with Heathcliff, she says,
It’s deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He’s not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.… There’s my picture; and I’m his friend—so much so, that had he thought seriously to catch you, I should, perhaps, have held my tongue, and let you fall into his trap.
Much of the book’s artistic achievement, to me, is the way Heathcliff is nonetheless rendered sympathetic due to his love for Cathy. He’s an abuser of children. He tries to kill Isabella’s dog in a slow, painful way, just to show that he can. But when he cries out to Cathy, “having levelled my palace, don’t erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home”—your heart does twist for him, just as it does when you understand his desperation to see Cathy’s ghost. Heathcliff is that man who is simultaneously beast and god. He is worse than you can imagine and he loves Cathy in a pure-hearted way that is higher than you can imagine. They live in a realm that is simultaneously heaven and hell.
So reading Wuthering Heights was a reminder that when most people talk about wanting flawed characters they mean people who maybe, I don’t know, cheat and then feel bad about it, or who get mad sometimes, not people who are walking clouds of violence, spite, and rage. Sometimes I think the average “I want flawed and unlikeable characters” thinkpiecer might not be able to handle a character who just doesn’t tip on coffee orders.
Years ago, for instance, I read the book that ended up becoming synonymous with “unlikeable characters”—Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs—and what I really remember about it to this day was not only was the character in question not particularly “unlikeable,” she never even did anything all that wrong.1 The big reveal that the book leads up to is—somebody betraying her. You pick up the book expecting to meet a twenty-first century Underground Man, Upstairs Woman, and in the end it’s just somebody who’s mad for understandable reasons.2 Which is not per se a problem with the book—though I didn’t much care for it back then—just its discourse, which indicated a narrator with a normal level of anger was too spicy for some people.
And then when one does read a book that’s narrated by somebody who is A Bad Person, usually you’re not supposed to love them, you’re supposed to regard them as an object lesson, a point of satire, or a source of uncomfortable and self-implicating identification. If you read American Psycho (I have not) and find Patrick Bateman in some sense sympathetic, you have “missed the point,” I assume. But in Wuthering Heights, there’s no “point” to miss. There’s just the onslaught of emotion, the landscape, the weather; the commitment to telling the greatest love story ever felt by the worst possible people.
By way of illustrating what I mean—after rereading Wuthering Heights I decided to read Minae Mizumura’s A True Novel, a retelling of Wuthering Heights in post-war Japan. I thought it was great, but it wasn’t Wuthering Heights. Taro Azuma, the Heathcliff analogue, isn’t even sort of a bad person.3
Taro is indeed a “pearl-containing oyster of a rustic.” He’s much closer to Gatsby, down even to the mansion on Long Island, than Heathcliff. But he doesn’t even have Gatsby’s flaws: he’s not a fraud or a liar. There are other points of divergence between Mizumura’s novel and Brontë’s and I don’t think Mizumura wanted to copy Wuthering Heights beat for beat.4 But it stuck out to me very early on that we were not dealing here with a bad guy.5 That Taro and Yoko, the book’s “Cathy,” can’t be together is thus much less explicable—they do not have the raging and unbearable chemistry that drives Cathy and Heathcliff together while also keeping them apart. They’re divided by much more mundane things. In the scenes between Taro and Yoko that most closely mimic Wuthering Heights, some of the heat remains, but it’s defanged by the ways in which they’re both much more likeable and sympathetic, even reasonable, people.
But Wuthering Heights is huge in every way—its ornate structure, its emotions, the way it pushes its characters to extremes. It’s not just Cathy and Heathcliff. Everybody is maximally the way that they are. Linton, Heathcliff’s invalid son, is so pathetically weak, selfish, and self-serving that it’s funny; but he’s also genuinely sick, not playing it up for attention, even vomiting blood when he over-exerts himself. Lockwood, the narrator for some of the book, is dense and unobservant to the point of mistaking a pile of dead rabbits for some living cats. Nelly Dean tells her story while also making it clear in the telling how often she’s strategically omitted information in the past. Despite this, Lockwood takes everything she tells him at face value, because he is, as previously established, an idiot who sees and understands nothing.
Furthermore, it doesn’t escape me that Heathcliff’s ultimate plan for revenge, after Cathy’s death, is essentially to destroy the future by blighting his child, her child, and her brother’s child. That after much scheming, manipulation, and outright violence, he fails—that human qualities persist even in the most inhospitable of circumstances—is part of the book’s triumphant conclusion. In the face of courage, cruelty cannot win forever.
But Heathcliff, finally reunited with Cathy’s ghost, gets his happy ending too. A book that ended with him simply alone and abandoned is imaginable. But would it be satisfying? I feel we probably need him to lose and to win—the monster has to lose, but some part of him should be given this warped paradise of his own choosing.
It’s funny to me how often “I hate Wuthering Heights” pops up whenever some “confess your unpopular book opinion” prompt does the rounds on social media. Like, it’s not that I don’t get it, because as mentioned above I too hated Wuthering Heights as a teen, and I didn’t even have it in class or anything, I just read it because it was around. And you’re like—these people are too much, and they’re all named Cathy.
But it’s also funny. It’s like that Dylan song: I was so much older then. I’m younger than that now. When I was a teenager, I think I valued maturity more than anything else. (This is not to say I was particularly mature.) I never wanted to act my age. I wanted to act like I was eighty years old. Now I value storms.
Anyway—did you know that MTV made a musical movie of Wuthering Heights? featuring music from Jim Steinman? but not, apparently, the song that Jim Steinman actually wrote about Wuthering Heights, i.e., “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now”? Because it is out there and even without having seen it yet, I really feel like Emerald Fennell is not really going to be able to top it.
OK she does sleep with somebody’s husband.
Going to check my memory, I ran across this very funny line from a (positive) review:
This is not, you intuit fairly quickly, a novel rich in incident. I think about four things happen in it, maybe five. At one point it looks as though a fifth (or sixth) thing will happen, but it doesn't.
A True Novel also cuts out all the “next generation” stuff, but that decision is less egregious here than it might be because of various formal choices Mizumura makes.
In fact, where she’s most interesting in her repurposing of Brontë’s novel, I think, is in her formal decisions. The first quarter or so of A True Novel is written as what they call in Japan an “I-novel” (as distinguished from a “true novel,” which she calls “the type of novels written in nineteenth-century Europe, ones where the author sought to create an independent fictional world outside his own life”). Which is to say it’s a first person account from a narrator named “Minae” whose biography resembles Mizumura’s own. As she defines it herself:
In an “I-novel,” readers expect the writer to figure in the work in one way or another. Whether the work is in fact based on the writer’s life or is a contrivance is ultimately irrelevant. The author-protagonist of an “I-novel” is perceived as an actual, specific individual, one whose face may be publicly known in other media. The work is necessarily assumed to be truthful about that individual’s life. Moreover, readers tend to favor works that have no beginning or ending, and are fragmentary, finding them true to life, as life also has no opening or closure as such and is nothing but an accumulation of fragmentary experiences. In other words, what readers look for in this genre is the absence of the authorial will—of the intention to create, through words, an independent universe.
The “I-novel” gives way to the “true novel,” which is self-consciously fashioned, as we are told up front, after Wuthering Heights. This decision sets up a series of nesting narrations that is as complicated in its own way as Wuthering Heights’s structure, and raises the questions about how much you can trust any given narrator in a new way. (Is the I-novel a “real” I-novel, or a false one? And so on.) For more on the book I recommend this interview with the translator.
A True Story heads for a while toward a strangely Utopian resolution to Taro’s problems that simply could never have been a possibility in Wuthering Heights because Heathcliff does not possess Taro’s generosity of character.
I’ve read wuthering heights twice, but both times pretty young, and perhaps before I’d “been in love.” It might be time for another try, because I’ve always felt like I read a totally different book from everyone else. For me it was basically just straight horror, claustrophobic and terrifying, about living in a world surrounded by sociopaths where no one was kind and nothing good could happen.
"When I was a teenager, I think I valued maturity more than anything else. (This is not to say I was particularly mature.) I never wanted to act my age. I wanted to act like I was eighty years old. Now I value storms."
well, this has fully cracked the mystery of my ongoing taylor swift obsession!!! as a former "mature" teen myself, maybe I should give wuthering heights another try.......