Great Books I Hate: Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte (Wikimedia Commons)

I was pretty sure I read this novel a long time ago. I even remembered disliking it, which means I must have read it, right? And much like The Great Gatsby (another great book I hate), I thought I should revisit it as a mature adult, and not as a harried college student or doltish middle-schooler. After all, I have a graduate degree in English Lit, a love of 19th century British novels, and Charlotte and Anne Bronte are both among my favorites, so Wuthering Heights would seem to be squarely in my wheelhouse. The first thing that struck me was that I remembered nothing about the narrative structure and the various characters relating the story (dopey Lockwood, annoying Nelly, that sap Isabella). If I never read it, why did I have such a visceral sense of having disliked it? Puzzled, I kept plugging away, and gradually came to believe that I must have blocked it out as one does a childhood trauma. Good lord, I hate this novel.

Emily Bronte was a great poet, a visionary, a square peg in a round hole, no doubt, and for her personally, I have a great deal of admiration. I can only speculate that she died partly from the effort of repressing the consuming rage that would have burned Haworth to the ground, but for her writing Wuthering Heights.

This novel is full of really awful people -- in particular, the romantic duo of Heathcliff and Catherine. Heathcliff makes Lord Byron look like Mr. Rogers. Case in point: Byron loved his dogs so much he wanted to be buried beside his Newfoundland. Heathcliff. Hung. A. Puppy. (Did they leave that part out in the Olivier movie version?) Emily was also a great lover of animals, so I'm guessing she had a point to make about Heathcliff's brutishness. But why are there readers who think he's romantic? (Fellas, if you ever meet a woman who claims to love Heathcliff, run.) He's no Byronic hero. He's not even funny. Actual Byron was a hoot. (“I should, many a good day, have blown my brains out, but for the recollection that it would have given pleasure to my mother-in-law.”) Shakespeare gave his villains all the best lines, but Bronte's Heathcliff  is a cursing crashing boor/bore when he isn't mawkishly blubbering nonsense about Cathy.

There's also nothing sympathetic about Heathcliff. He was lucky enough, as a poor orphan, to be plucked out of the gutter by a generous benefactor. But of course, the other kids were mean to him. If that's the worst thing that happens to a dude in the 1800s, you'll never make it in a Dickens novel. Hell, Emily had it harder than that. (She was a bad-ass. Her sister Charlotte said she once cauterized her own wound from a dog-bite with a hot fire iron.) And his tormented love for Cathy? Oh, boo-hoo. This is what T.S. Eliot would call the absence of an "objective correlative." None of Heathcliff's "sufferings" are enough to account for his overwhelming nastiness. The object of his affection is just as wince-inducing as he is. It's as if Bronte set out to create a Rogue's Gallery of hateful characters.

What was Emily up to here? Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar suggest that it is a novel not so much about people as "forces or beings," and that Catherine/Heathcliff are just two halves of one consciousness. Heathcliff is the imaginative "whip" of the powerless female -- a sort of wish fulfillment of the lady who has to sit by the fireside while her other half can go running out on the moors and knock heads together. I imagine a lot of genteel women in the 19th century would have liked to do that, so if you look at Heights not as a novel, but a psychological portrait of frustrated and oppressed womanhood, it at least makes more sense. But it certainly doesn't make it lovable.