Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
There seems to be a consensus that Wuthering Heights is a book that must be read. So say high schools across this nation, the New Lifetime Reading Plan, and the authors who voted for the 100 Most Meaningful Books. As this book makes clear, however, just because something must be read does not mean it must be enjoyed.
The surface problem with Wuthering Heights is that the characters are just so horrifically unlikeable. There is simply no one to identify with: Mr. Earnshaw is a doddering fool who overtly favors his adopted child, Heathcliff, to the detriment of his biological children: Catherine, who grows up wild and self-centered, and Hindley, who grows up spiteful and bitter. It does Heathcliff no favors, either, giving him a taste of the glories of monied life before Earnshaw's death and Hindley's return doom him to the subservience his low birth would seem to dictate. The Linton children are weak, vain, and walk blindly into the wicked webs that issue forth from the Heights. Even the primary narrator, the servant Ellen Dean, is unable to fully scrub her own defects from the story, in which she is complicit in the interweaving tragedies that sweep the two families. It is only with the next generation, in the closing chapters of the book, that pity or hope seems at all appropriate.
Heathcliff, the driving force of the novel, defies the expectation that there must be some hidden romantic soul that will eventually break through his troubled veneer and make him the hero of the tale. Instead, his evil simply grows and grows, testing the outer limits of the reader's sympathy with each fresh atrocity.
Though this makes Heathcliff quite detestable by the book's end, it could work. There is, after all, no requirement that characters be likable. The length and depth of his Achilles-like rage is impressively portrayed. So if Heathcliff's thirst for vengeance were justifiable, or even just believable, the novel would really work.
But that's the problem that lurks beneath the surface. The entire plot basically hinges on one point: that Heathcliff and Catherine were truly in love. That is the only way Catherine's marriage to Edgar Linton is such a betrayal, the only way Heathcliff's multi-generational devotion to revenge bears any sense of justice. But it just does not seem true. There is nothing about the way Heathcliff and Catherine interact that strikes me as love. Mutated obsession, yes. But not love. The childhood scenes take place too fast, the shifts in the balance of power too sudden, to get any sense of why the Earnshaw household is the way it is, or how love could blossom under that roof.
And without real, genuine love, this is essentially a book about a bunch of psychological defectives torturing each other and their children. The book does have its strengths. As I said, the endurance of Heathcliff's villainy is breathtaking. The claustrophobic setting of the novel and the incestuous relationships of its inhabitants play off each other quite effectively (it's easy to forget there is even a world beyond the moors, let alone other people). These strengths, however, can not mask the basic defects of the plot.
