Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë; narrated by Anna Bentinck | 2015; originally published 1847 | Dreamscape Media | Audiobook $ 21.80
Wuthering Heights is the only novel of Emily Brontë, who died a year after its publication, at the age of thirty. A brooding Yorkshire tale of a love that is stronger than death, it is also a fierce vision of metaphysical passion, in which heaven and hell, nature and society, are powerfully juxtaposed. Unique, mystical, with a timeless appeal, it has become a classic of English literature.
I’ve been wanting to read selections from all 3 of the Brontës. My first experience of these books was Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, read initially as a teen and then again just a couple of years ago. Wuthering Heights was next on my list.
I feel compelled to confess that I almost gave up on this one — but, unlike my previous near-DNF (A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess), I’m glad I soldiered on with it; I ended up appreciating the experience. My initial problem was that I had a totally incorrect preconception of what this story actually is… which is not a love story.
I was probably at least partly misled by vague memories of the old black-and-white film version starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, which certainly plays up the romance and plays down or entirely omits the darker stuff. I have also seen blurbs for this book that describe it as “a story of unrequited love” or “a tale of all-encompassing and passionate, yet thwarted, love” or “a tale of love that is stronger than death” (see above).
Once again, this is not a love story.
I was at first turned off by the rather unlikeable cast of characters, who all seem to to fall on a spectrum somewhere between naïve-wet-blanket and almost-cartoonishly-brutish, as well as the melodramatically abusive nature of most of the relationships between them. I was also initially a little irritated with the framing of the story as basically a third-hand narrative, in which the primary narrator is hearing the story from the secondary narrator, a gossipy witness to the events that involve the actual main characters.
About halfway through I was ready to call it quits, but I opted to pause and read a little more about the book to try to wrap my head around it. Normally I try to avoid reading too many other reviews or more in-depth articles about a book or its author until after I’ve read it for myself, in an effort to give the work a fair chance at being experienced from a not-too-biased perspective. But in this case, my expectations for the book had already been super misleadingly influenced!
I was relieved to find that I’m definitely not the first to fall for that poorly-considered marketing nonsense — “a tale of love”, my ass. Oh, sure, there is certainly an overabundance of romantic passion. Everyone’s emotions seem to be turned up to eleven for the entirety of the novel. But… I finally realized that I had to start reading this novel as basically a deconstruction of the star-crossed lovers concept. It’s a messy tragedy in which hurt people hurt people and the narrators themselves, even when not directly involved in the action (especially when not directly involved in the action), are deceptively unreliable. Once I adjusted my expectations, the book became more enjoyable.
In retrospect, perhaps if I’d been paying closer attention I ought to have been able to come to this conclusion on my own. First, there’s the way the author treats our primary narrator, Lockwood. He’s described with barely concealed contempt like some kind of pretentious pearl-clutcher who immediately makes all kinds of wrong assumptions about his new neighbors; I think this is kind of a warning to the reader not to be too optimistically credulous about the story you’re about to hear. Later, both the romantic hero himself and the woman who is the object of his obsession very clearly try to warn an unsuspecting girl with rose-colored glasses that the tortured soul she’s crushing on is absolutely not, in fact, a “romantic hero” — again, a warning to the reader as well as the character that this story is going to get progressively more brutal.
Well, I suppose it isn’t 100% brutal, in the end. Though most of the story seems to be dedicated to the idea of love as a destructive force, there is eventually a second-generation reconciliation at the conclusion that at least provides a kind of love-as-curative contrast.
This is a book for readers who are up for a near-horror sort of story about an absolute shitshow version of a romance.
Links:
- Biography of Emily Brontë from the Poetry Foundation
- The Brontë Society’s Brontë Parsonage Museum
- Public domain book available at Project Gutenberg
Publication information: Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Holland, Michigan: Dreamscape Media, 2015. Audiobook.
Source: Public library, via Hoopla.
Disclaimer: I am not compensated, monetarily or otherwise, for reviews of books or other products.
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