Wuthering Heights
Once again, it’s Wrath here. I think my brothers have given up already, leaving me to do everything. Well, I’ll show them!
The last post I did was on one of the best classics, Dracula, so for this one, I decided to go in the other direction, and review my least favourite classic: Wuthering Heights.
“What does Wuthering even mean?” I asked my mother, as she forced me to pick it for school reading. She didn’t know, and ignored my attempts to let me choose something else.
As it turns out, Wuthering doesn’t mean anything, it’s just part of the name of a house in the book; Wuthering Heights.
Most of the characters are jerks and act like children. And not like regular, semi-intelligent children. No, they act like babies in adults’ bodies, with the exception of the main character, Mr Lockwood, an impartial listener to the tale, and his housekeeper Nelly Dean, who tells him the story over the course of the book, a first-person account of the events.
At its most basic, the book is a ‘love’ story, about Heathcliff, an orphan taken in by the family of Wuthering Heights, and Catherine, that family’s only girl. At eighteen, Catherine is faced with a decision. She could marry either Heathcliff, who she loves, or Edgar, one of the children of the neighbouring family, who happens to be wealthy.
Guess which option she chose. If this were an ordinary love story, she would have married Heathcliff, and the book would have been about the consequences they faced as a result. But nooo, the characters are jerks, remember?
Catherine marries Edgar, intending to use his money to raise Heathcliff’s standing. The afore-mentioned housekeeper, one of the only intelligent people in the book, doesn’t think Edgar would be too happy with that idea, but Catherine is steadfast. She thinks that it would degrade her to marry a man of lower class.
Heathcliff doesn’t leap for joy at this decision. In fact, he leaves Wuthering Heights, returning three years later as a rich gentleman (The book never mentions where he got his money. Considering everything else in the book, I’d say he didn’t get it through honest methods).
In revenge for Catherine marrying Edgar, Heathcliff marries Edgar’s sister, Isabella. I’m not too sure of the logic here, but why not? These characters are insane.
It is now Catherine’s turn not to leap with joy. She overreacts, makes herself ill, and, shortly after giving birth to Edgar’s daughter Cathy, dies.
That should be the end of the story, but it isn’t. It’s actually only a bit more than half the book. The rest covers Cathy, grown up to a similar level of maturity as her mother. Heathcliff does his best to make everyone’s life miserable, and the story only ends when he finally dies.
Good riddance.
