About this title: Drawing on the Gothic tradition, Emily Bronte's WUTHERING HEIGHTS is the tale of Catherine Earnshaw, a wilfull and romantic girl brought up to be a lady, and Heathcliff, the mysterious gypsy orphan. Bronte's use of a series of unreliable narrators to unfold their story heightens the mythic quality of the passionate attachment that is at the heart ...
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"Incredibly depressing and intense, Wuthering Heights is a hard book to read. The primary reason for this is not the writing, but the characters. After all, it's very very difficult to endear oneself to characters bent on destroying each other and themselves.
But at the same time, it's difficult to put the book down as Heathcliff and Cathy struggle to protect and possess one another - only to have it all end badly. The love between the two characters is deep and true, and their obsession with each other is tragic.
Wuthering Heights can be a cautionary tale towards deep and troubling love. After all, maybe loving someone till they simply consume you is not very healthy. But one can never deny that Heathcliff and Cathy loved each other - almost as much as they hated each other."
"I first read this as part of my english literature course when i was in school. It was heavy going and frankly I didn't enjoy it at all. I had the chance to re-read it as an adult and this time I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was now of an age to appreciate shades of grey in people's relationships and the emotions and entangled circumstances that drive people into making choices ( good or bad). I found myself feeling sad and deeply sorry for Cathy and Heathcliffe, I didnt like them but saw two people on the path of joint self destruction, taking people around them down with the sinking ship. I connected with the descriptive passages dealing with the landscape as I am Yorkshire born and bred."
"Wuthering Heights was one of the books that I was supposed to have read in high-school. I didn't. Too cool for that! "Just give me Cliff Notes!", was my motto. But those classmates who did read it loved it. So...years later, while browsing an absolutely HUGE bookstore in New York City (wish I could remember the name of that store) I happened upon a copy and decided to discover what my classmates saw in it; see what I was missing. Wow! I wasn't sorry. This has become one of my all-time favorite novels. It's one that I read again and again, from time to time. And it has spawned my deep fascination with the entire Bronte family. Over the years I've had the opportunity to travel to Haworth, England - walk through the parsonage in which the Brontes lived and wrote, through the church which Vicar Bronte served, along the hiking paths that Emily, Anne, and Charlotte strolled.
I can not say enough great things about this novel. It is filled with atmosphere; palpably gothic. The characters are well drawn and vividly memorable. It's a novel bursting with passionate emotion. Scenes from this novel will stick with you for the rest of your life. I wished I had read it earlier, when I was "supposed" to. But am so glad that I finally did; when the time was right. This novel has truly influenced the rest of my life."
"Knowing that my freedom of choice in reading materials will be limited come fall, I decided to wax nostalgic this summer and revisit some "classics" I read back when I was probably too young to know what I was reading. Nostaligia, then, was the the motivation for revisiting what I thought was an "AWESOME" novel when I was somewhere abouts 13 or 14. Oh boy, have times changed.
To begin, the narrative structure is tedious--most of the story is recounted by a servant as our narrator passively listens from his sickbed, breaking in every now and then right after a juicy part just to make sure we don't forget he exists (although his presence is completely unnecessary!! Help!!) I realize that the strategy is partially a reflection of the tastes of the time in which it was written, but the story is pieced together so awkwardly that I don't see how it could have escaped even contemporary criticism. It's your basic "alienated guy rents secluded house to escape society, gets a bit more than he bargained for, decides to go back to society" narrator--common to, well, much of American literature. Even so, he has no part in the action of the main characters and, though we are teased that he might be interested in striking up an affiar with Catherine Linton, he nixes the idea as soon as its suggested.
The Gothic genre has the greatest influence on the novel, and that may be the main source of my disappointment. The novel dwells on the sensational without any real groundwork to prepare the reader. Although we can sympathize with Heathcliff's trials as a young man, he is from the start described as unfeeling and brutish, which makes us believe he was not turned into a dark, malicious monster hell-bent on vengeance. No real explanation is given for the deep connection he and Catherine share, either. Perhaps in my early teenage years I was more willing to fill in the emotional gaps that created such violent swells of passion and rage, but I expect a bit more characterization from my novels in my old age. OK, psychological realism may be too much to expect from a novel of the 1840s, but I can't help but compare it to, say, Jane Eyre. (Not fair to pit sisters against each other, but I'll do it anyway.) They share Gothic influence and many thematic similarities, such as bad marriages, insanity, mistreatment of children, violence...and so forth. Yet the narrative structure, which enables the reader to experience the mystery and subsequent redemption with Jane and Roderick make it, for me at least, a more fulfilling read. And the writing is just better. Sorry, Emily."
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