Emily Bronte

A wild setting and free, violent personalities are the hallmarks of a complex and difficult novel. The complexity stems from the book’s “matryoshka” architecture: a first-person narrator records the story recounted by a second first-person narrator. Furthermore, the novel unfolds across different timelines, with frequent flashbacks. The difficulty lies in its language: the frequent use of dialectal English, a vocabulary-rich style, and an involved syntax. A gentleman moves to the country and, on a stormy evening, finds himself at Wuthering Heights (*Wuthering Heights*), undergoing an unsettling and, in some respects, terrifying experience. One feels transported back in time to a pre-industrial era unfamiliar with the manners of Victorian England, where a magical interpretation of the world still holds sway. This regression, which underscores the divide between city and country, between civilization and barbarism, is heightened by the use of dialect among many of the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. From the outset, the novel’s opening foreshadows what will become the book’s underlying theme: the eruption of man’s primordial passions. Having struggled back to his residence, the gentleman has Nelly—the housekeeper who raised all the protagonists—recount the family’s history to him. Without presuming to detail the entire plot, one can summarize that the narrative hinges entirely upon the love between Heathcliff and Catherine; a love grounded precisely in the shared nature of the two characters: free, wild, and violent. Their love cannot be consummated in marriage—and thus recognized by society—precisely because Victorian respectability cannot accept that Heathcliff, a poor, dark-skinned orphan, might aspire to the hand of a young lady of good family. Yet Catherine happens to share Heathcliff’s temperament, and thus chafes against the rules of polite society. Catherine’s death, following a dramatic encounter with Heathcliff, unleashes the latter’s vengeful, sinister soul. At this point, the narrative drifts increasingly into the effects of terror and mystery typical of Gothic fiction, to the extent that at times Catherine’s ghost returns to haunt Wuthering Heights, reminding Heathcliff not only of their love, but also of his guilt. Yet the ending is predictable: bourgeois rationality prevails (there is no ghost), and the family scions marry happily. Yet is the story true, or merely a figment of the narrator Nelly’s imagination? Could it be that the housekeeper interprets the family’s affairs through the lens of her own fancy and local gossip? Heathcliff and Catherine are characters both modern and ancient at once. From modernity they bear the yearning for freedom and self-actualization; from the bygone world they retain a crude, vindictive spirit. The contrast with Victorian society is framed nostalgically—that is, as a return to a rural world where feelings could be expressed with greater freedom and transparency than under the strictures of bourgeois society. This sociological interpretation does not, however, translate into a genuine analysis of the characters, who remain impersonal and trapped in the roles assigned them by the author. The plot unfolds slowly, devoid of rhythm, often predictable and repetitive. Why not read it? The book is fundamentally boring, and the reading experience is weighed down by an unnecessarily difficult English.