I cannot count the number of times I’ve read Wuthering Heights. It’s a romance, it’s a Gothic, and it’s a brutal revenge story. Emily Bronte’s novel is gorgeous and lyrical, but it is also violent – some Bronte fans find it too disturbing to include in their personal Bronte canon.
When I first read Wuthering Heights I focused on the perfect love between Catherine and Heathcliff, who are twin souls, raised together, romping on the moors, falling in love. And it is the fault of Catherine, who decides to marry rich, mild, blond Edgar Linton instead of her beloved dark, déclassé Heathcliff, that Heathcliff becomes a human monster.
Dreams are important in Wuthering Heights. Before Cathy marries Edgar, she confides in Nellie, who is one of two unreliable narrators, that she dreamed that she was in heaven and “I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”
And she goes on: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now, so he shall never know how I love him…. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightning.”
There is another important dream, near the beginning of the novel. Mr. Lockwood, the first narrator, is Heathcliff’s tenant at Thrushcross Grange. He pays a visit to his misanthropic landlord, and is snowbound overnight. The housekeeper puts him into Catherine’s old room, but warns him to be quiet because Heathcliff keeps the room shut up. It is never used.
Mr. Lockwood is curious about Catherine. She has written three diifferent versions of her name: Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, and Catherine Linton. He also reads her diary and learns about her friendship iwth Heathcliff.
Is it any wonder that she features in his dream?
In Lockwood’s nightmare, he hears Catherine at the window: “Let me in! Let me in!”
And then “Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes…”
He screams in his sleep; Heathcliff finds him in Cathy’s room; and literally believes Lockwood’s nightmare, and that Cathy has come back to him after 20 years.
There is, I might add, another scnee where he digs up her grave.
I love the intensity of Emily Bronte, and I have a rather strange recommendation. Read an edition without notes, and fall into the poetic rhythms of the prose.
It is still possible, after many years, to enter this novel as if it is a different world. And at the end Emily Bronte circles back – and there is a new generation, Catherine’s daughter Cathy and nephew Hareton, become a joyful new version of Catherine and Heathcliff.
DIY WUTHERING HEIGHTS MERCH.
At the coffeehouse, a barista picked up her pen and asked, “What’s a convenient name for you?” I was so struck by the idea of a “convenient name” that I decided on a homage to Wuthering Heights: “Cathy with a C,” I said.
Yup. There it is.
