Why wuthering heights

It seeks both to dramatize and to explain how the ancient stock of the Earnshaws are restored to their rights the somber house of Wuthering Heights, built in , and, at the same time, how and why the last of the Earnshaws, Hareton, will be leaving the Heights to live, with his cousin-bride, at Thrushcross Grange.

One generation has given way to the next: the primitive energies of childhood have given way to the intelligent compromises of adulthood. The history of the Earnshaws and the Lintons begins to seem a history, writ small, albeit with exquisite detail, of civilization itself. He has no opposition worthy of him; he has no natural mate remaining; he is characterless and depersonalized will—a masklike grimace that can never relax into a smile. The mass murderer who is really tenderhearted, the rapist whose victims provoke him, the Fuhrer who is a vegetarian and in any case loves dogs.

If Heathcliff grinds his victims beneath his feet like worms, is it not natural to imagine that they are worms, and deserve their suffering, is it not natural to imagine that they are not us? We feel only contempt for the potential sadist Linton, who sucks on sugar candy, and whose relationship with his child-wife parodies a normal love relationship he asks her not to kiss him, because it makes him breathless.

Oh Heathcliff! Oh Cathy! It was the moors, the sort of bleak desolate nature of this place which was just on the periphery of Leeds. I was growing up in Leeds, a place where if you saw a blade of grass, you immediately ran out and kicked a football on it. But as I was getting older, I was aware that right on the edge of Leeds, there was this wild strange place that, as an urban kid, meant nothing to me. That was the prism through which I looked at Wuthering Heights , and I had no fascination with the origins of Heathcliff or the romance at the center of it.

It was just these brooding descriptions of this place that was slightly out of reach to me. Why did he become so malevolent? Why did he become so cruel? Why was he so angry? Why was he so prey to these spasms of bitterness? And so I was as much fascinated with what kind of sensibility had written this as I was with what was in the book. I never know what to think of it. I have just read over Wuthering Heights , and, for the first time, have obtained a clear glimpse of what are termed and, perhaps, really are its faults; have gained a definite notion of how it appears to other people — to strangers who knew nothing of the author; who are unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid; to whom the inhabitants, the customs, the natural characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets in the West Riding of Yorkshire are things alien and unfamiliar.

To all such Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production. The wild moors of the North of England can for them have no interest: the language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts must be to such readers in a great measure unintelligible, and—where intelligible—repulsive. With regard to the rusticity of Wuthering Heights , I admit the charge, for I feel the quality.

It is rustic all through. It is moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise; the author being herself a native and nursling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have possessed another character. Even had chance or taste led her to choose a similar subject, she would have treated it otherwise.

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself. Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor; gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur—power.

He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but the vision of his meditations. Wuthering Heights is told so brilliantly. Heart of Darkness also blew me away when I first read it. That, Wuthering Heights , and Hemingway showed me what literature could be; I could do whatever I wanted! Heathcliff embodies the idea of acting on pure id. I read Wuthering Heights when I was sixteen and had just left home. I did not read it as a love story. I thought it was a loss story. Heathcliff loses Cathy.

But to her it is a chance to imbue a simple shrub with an almost spiritual quality. It was the first time a major romantic novel was located on this wild landscape. Emily, along with her siblings Charlotte, Anne and Branwell, and their father Patrick, lived in the quiet village of Haworth, in a modest house called The Parsonage. Every day she walked the same 10 or 12 miles over the moors which she adored, and it was there that she gleaned all of the locations for her tempestuous tale.

When I was asked to illustrate Wuthering Heights some years ago, I visited the parsonage on several occasions. To research my drawings I walked all of the moors that Emily trod each day, and visited the same ruins, buildings and natural landmarks that she was familiar with.

I was struck by the astonishing beauty of the moors and felt as if I was transposed into the living, breathing world of the novel. My visits to the ruin called Top Withens which Emily used as her model for the fictional building of Wuthering Heights, left me mightily impressed with its close resemblance to the doomed house in the story.

Emily had a brilliant eye for choosing a dramatic architectural structure. Similarly when I hiked a further two miles over the moors from Top Withens I stumbled across Ponden Hall, a beautiful and still occupied home from the s, which Emily used as her model for Thrushcross Grange. And further up the moors I climbed to the top of Peniston Crag, a stone promontory that Emily adopted as the romantic meeting place for Cathy and Heathcliff when they were children.

I was in awe of the natural beauty of these places. Having set up the perfect stage, she then invented the two most passionate romantic characters of all time: Cathy and Heathcliff. Their creation is a testament to her powerful imagination because we know that Emily was a recluse who never had a romantic relationship with anyone in her life.

Heathcliff is a remarkable invention — a dark, handsome, brooding, possessive, violent and mercurial brute, who exudes a form of animal magnetism and masculinity that female readers cannot resist. If he was a real person in the 21st century he might be regarded as a thug, a sexual predator, and could possibly be jailed as a violent partner. Deep down we believe that he has been cheated in life and that his love for Cathy is pure and powerful.

He is a tragic victim with whom we identify and sympathise. Cathy is no less alluring: beautiful, intelligent, wild, coquettish, obstinate, sensitive and beguiling. Nelly, I am Heathcliff. Cathy and Heathcliff are the two halves of one soul and until they are united they will languish in misery. Tragically of course they both die alone and separated. But Emily does strongly imply in the final chapter that they do find peace as their souls unite in their final resting place together.

It is this implied hint of a supernatural subtext throughout the story which has made Wuthering Heights a recognised Gothic masterpiece. The appearance of the child spectre of Cathy during the snowstorm is one of the most beautiful and haunting ghost scenes in literature.

The hook was soldered into the staple, a circumstance observed by me, when awake, but forgotten. Anyone who has read this scene can never forget it. I remember getting goose bumps and chills as a year-old devouring this vignette of terror. All are superbly written. Finally, Wuthering Heights has one of the best closing sentences ever penned in a novel.

When you have completed reading the book I would thoroughly recommend following it up with a viewing of the excellent three-part BBC TV adaptation from , starring Ken Hutchison as Heathcliff and John Duttine as Hindley. Nov 28, ISBN Oct 01, ISBN Oct 15, ISBN Sep 30, ISBN Jan 14, ISBN Audiobook Download. Paperback 4 —. About Wuthering Heights Perhaps the most haunting and tormented love story ever written, Wuthering Heights is the tale of the troubled orphan Heathcliff and his doomed love for Catherine Earnshaw.

About Wuthering Heights The title of the novel comes from the Yorkshire manor on the moors of the story. Also in Modern Library Torchbearers. Also in Vintage Classics. Also in Modern Library Classics. Also by Emily Bronte. Product Details. Inspired by Your Browsing History. Pride and Prejudice. Our Mutual Friend. Charles Dickens. Mansfield Park. The Complete Novels. A Room with a View. George Eliot. Silas Marner. Sense and Sensibility.

Virginia Woolf. Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte. The End of the Affair.