Brontë Odyssey: Part One

Wuthering Heights

On a scale of one to ten, I'd say I enjoyed Wuthering Heights in the amount of 6.5. The good: it was entertaining and original. The bad: it went slowly at points, including the last several chapters. The crazy: it was CRAZY.

Why didn't I know that Wuthering Heights was totally insane? Also, I always thought it was supposed to be a love story, and it is not. It's a hate story. It's a story where the main character loves one person passionately, but spends more of his time hating everyone else. Each of the characters is horrible (in their own individual ways, which is interesting) and almost everybody dies and everyone is crazy.

Quick summary: we meet our official narrator, and I don't remember his name, because he is in no way important. He's a pompous twit, even in his own private thoughts. He meets Heathcliff, whose company he enjoys because Heathcliff is more horrible than he is. Pompousy McTwittington wonders what the deal is with Heathcliff and his messed up household, so he asks his maid. It turns out that his maid knows everything there is to know to about Heathcliff. It also turns out that she is our actual narrator.

So Ellen/Nelly/Mrs. Dean tells Pompousy McTwittington all about Heathcliff, and how he loved Catherine and hated everybody else, and how Heathcliff was creepy and Catherine was a spoiled harpy. But then Cathy married some wimpy dude, so Heathcliff hated that guy. So Heathcliff starts spinning elaborate plots to punish everyone who has wronged him--but not in a Count of Monte Cristo way. Heathcliff operates on a much smaller and pettier scale.

About halfway through, Cathy dies of . . . being annoyed? But not before she gives birth to little Cathy, who is less annoying. And eventually Heathcliff kidnaps teenaged little Cathy and forces her to marry Heathcliff, jr., who is a snivelling sniveller. Junior dies almost immediately thereafter. But then about a year later, Heathcliff dies of . . . um . . . ghosts? Did he die of ghosts? And for whatever reason, everybody accedes to his wishes to bury him next to Catherine, even though he had bullied them and beaten them up and told them how stupid they all were and extorted all their property and done his best to make sure their fathers died miserable. That was the biggest mystery of the book for me--why didn't they bury him at a crossroads, or better yet, leave his carcass out on the moor for the dogs? Why didn't they do that?

I also would have liked it better if anybody had taken any action against Heathcliff while he was alive. Pompousy McTwittington kind of has a thing for little Cathy while Heathcliff has her imprisoned and enslaved (Emily Brontë didn't use those words, but that's what it was). So the best ending (and the way to make the narrator important in any way to the story) would have been if he had burst into Wuthering Heights with a pistol in each hand and busted her out. But no.

The most hilarious thing, I thought, was lack of sex. Not in the way I would have assumed the book would have lacked sex; not in a "I'm going to tiptoe around this and do my best to avoid implying it" type of way, but in what I suspect might be a genuine "I have no idea where babies come from" type of way. Three babies are born during the story. One is to original Cathy's brother and his wife--she's sickly but they actually like each other. That's fine. But the other two? O.G. Cathy is not pregnant until after she has a mental breakdown and becomes basically semi-catatonic. Either her husband was a total perv or little Cathy came about by magic. Then there's Heathcliff and his wife, Cathy's sister-in-law Isabella. Heathcliff entirely loathes her, and says so a lot. It really doesn't seem like he ever could have been bothered to so much as touch her. So again, I think the only answer here is magic.

So anyway, I mostly enjoyed it because I was fascinated by how awful all the characters are and because it was, at the risk of overusing the word, crazy.

Now on to Jane Eyre!