Wuthering Heights
From my trip to Wuthering Heights to meet Emily Bronte, I will never return.
Emily Bronte only wrote this one novel before she died of tuberculosis.
Friends and teachers and writers I respect told me I should read Wuthering Heights. Margaret Atwood recommended it when I took her online writing class. My teacher in my last creative writing course at university assigned us several poems by Ann Carson to read that were dialogues with Bronte, her life and her work. I asked a friend who’s a good writer over coffee after workshopping each other’s work: “Which Bronte should I read first? Charlotte or Emily?”
“Emily,” she said without hesitation.
I finally bought a copy. It’s a beautiful leatherbound edition manufactured by Barnes & Nobel. I finally followed the path so many had recommended to me and I’ll forever thank them for pointing the way. That path has led me to a woman who will command my admiration, respect and love forever. From my trip to Wuthering Heights to meet Emily Bronte, I will never return.
I didn’t just make the trip on all those recommendations. I also wanted to read Bronte and her sisters because I’ve always loved the 19th century Romantics. Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne were my first literary loves and later Twain, Byron, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Shelleys joined them. To read the Romantics is to find the rabbit hole inside words that can lead you down into one wonderland after the next, but Bronte blows all my previous Romantic idols away as if they were mere twigs and she a typhoon. They were just shots. She’s the bottle.
Wuthering Heights is a romance and family drama told like a horror story and a fairytale. The story hinges on the love between the surrogate siblings Catherine and Heathcliff. That love starts as one between brother and sister but becomes that of lovers. It’s an all-consuming love. Even after Catherine is dead, Heathcliff continues to see her ghost, which may or may not be real or just a figment of his fevered imagination. “Be with me always-” Heathcliff implores Catherine, “take any form-drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” Those two exclamation marks are warranted. Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is so intense and tempestuous that it seems inhuman.
It’s a supernatural force that breaks asunder the barrier between reality and fantasy. Throughout the book, Bronte bewitches objects, the weather, even abstract concepts, thoughts and emotions, instilling them with violent life of their own like demonic versions of the enchanted objects who staff the castle in Beauty and the Beast. Clouds appear “inclined to thunder” and come “rattling over the Heights in full fury,”[1] “ancient associations linger[ed]”[2] around character’s hearts, and a “half-civilized ferocity” lurks in Heathcliff’s eyes.[3] His and Catherine’s love is a Pandora’s Box that unleashes demons upon the Earth.
Their story is told to Mr Lockwood, Heathcliff’s tenant, by Nelly Dean, Heathcliff’s housekeeper, and some parts of the story are relayed through letters to Nelly recounted to Mr Lockwood from memory and others through what Nelly tells Mr Lockwood that someone told her. The story comes through twice-told tales until tales become reality in Bronte’s universe. The only way Mr Lockwood, the story’s principal narrator, finds out what’s going on is through hearing others’ stories.
In 2022, I saw the film Emily about Bronte’s life, directed by Frances O’Connor and starring Emma Mackey as Bronte. My favourite scene was when Bronte plays a game with her sisters. Everyone puts on a blank mask and pretends to become a character. Emily chooses to become their dead mother. She does it so well that by the end her sisters are crying out to their mother, telling them how much they love her, as if her spirit really had visited them in Emily’s body and spoken to them through Emily’s lips and I too was wondering if there really had been a real ghost or if Bronte was just a terrifyingly good storyteller.
After reading Wuthering Heights, I think Emily Bronte could do what O’Connor showed her doing in that scene. She was a literary witch (more powerful than any in Harry Potter) able to conjure love and raise the dead. Her magic was her words and no spell was beyond them.
[1] Page 82.
[2] Page 180.
[3] Page 93.