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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Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
Date Published: 2006-11-01
ISBN-13:9781419542268ISBN:1419542265
Description: Good. Save some $$$. Perfectly Good Reading Copy. Shelfwear from storage in box with other books. Collectible 1995 Peguin Classics printing. Great Copy. Ships Lightning Fast. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Kaplan Publishing
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781419542268ISBN:1419542265
Description: New. Brand New! Buy with confidence-your satisfaction is guaranteed at B-Logistics! Due to the large scale of our operation, we do not have access to the specific contents/condition of our items. Please note that Expedited shipping is not available at this time. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Kaplan
Date Published: 2006-11-01
ISBN-13:9781419542268ISBN:1419542265
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9781419542268. read more
Description: Good. Minimal damage to cover and binding. Pages show light use. With pride from Motor City. All books guaranteed. Best Service, Best Prices. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Kaplan
Date Published: 2006
ISBN-13:9781419542268ISBN:1419542265
Description: Good. "Wuthering Heights: A Kaplan SAT Score-Raising Classic "features: *The complete tale of the classic novel, "Wuthering Heights" *More than 700 vocabulary words frequently tested on the SAT highlighted throughout the text *Definitions for each highligh... read more
"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."
"When one thinks of books of the past, one typically thinks that today's novels and entertainments are far more violent and vicious. There is a tendency to think of our own generation (or the one or two immediately preceding ours) as having invented sexual perversions, brutal literature, and genre bending and mixing. No one truly believes this intently, but it is a kind of humming substratum to our lives. That previous ages were "simpler" and "more innocent" and "better" and "more pure and wholesome" is not only a nostalgic commonplace, but it also one of the traditional props to conservatism. "Back when I was a kid" is a statement denoting how old you've become and is either followed with "things were a lot more etc." or "we never etc."
The first few pages of Wuthering Heights must surely disabuse of anyone of this notion of the good old days. We are introduced to Mr. Lockwood, a young man in retirement from some private sorrow, who ends up at Thrushcross Grange. Upon visiting the home of his landlord, the famed Mr. Heathcliff, he is set upon by a dog, Heathcliff abuses both him and all of his servants, Joseph, Hareton Earnshaw (who is also Heathcliff's nephew), and his own daughter-in-law. What unfolds is a tale of madness, revenge, rage, and abuse that puts many a melodramatic serial killer novel of today to shame for the sheer vituperrious spite.
And as the book progresses, Emily Brontë shows herself no slouch in putting plain savagery and abomination on the page. Catherine, the young sister of the adopted Heathcliff, with whom he falls in love, as just a teenage girl slaps a servant, beats a small baby, then turns on her cousin Edgar Linton and boxes his ear. Her older brother, Hindley, gets drunk and attacks everyone, plays with his rifle, abuses his child, and tries to shove a carving knife down his servant's throat. Isabelle Linton, the sister of Edgar (and Heathcliff's later wife), on being held by Catherine, sinks her fingernails into the woman's arm. After her departure, Catherine tells Heathcliff that such nails would dart for his eyes; to this he promises he'd wrench them off her fingers should she even try. When a boy, Hareton throws a rock at his nurse and damns her when he first sees her after many years.
All in all, the book is a primer on the vicious circle that is revenge and hatred. One can easily imagine, while reading this book, all the characters in a circle, everyone beating the person first in front of him or her and being beaten by the one behind in turn. And so it turns, on and on. If literature of that time was generally expected to demonstrate some kind of moral, Wuthering Heights demonstrates it in the inverse.
What sets everything in motion is the maltreatment of the found orphan, Heathcliff which starts from the very beginning with everyone calling him an "it." His ferocious revenge is, while truly awful in all senses of the word, such a profound manifestation of hatred against everything, against the entire world, himself included, that he rises (or is it sinks) to the level of supreme tragic hero. He is like a Samson destroying the temple with his own soul within it. Emily Brontë is remarkably less sympathetic to Catherine, with whom she deals rather sternly whereas Heathcliff gets the backlit, shadowy, windswept fen romanticism. She is Frankenstein, while he is Shelley's monster, a tortured agent of vengeance.
What is amusing about this kind of novel, amusing for literally dozens of novels of the nineteenth century, is the level of suspension of disbelief the mechanics of the book require. Firstly, there is the narrator himself, Mr. Lockwood, Heathcliff's tenant, who tells the story of being told the tale by Ellen Dean, the nurse who witnessed most events and tells it in a pastiche of letters, personal recollections, gossip told to her, and other such secondary type narrative devices. It is a story about a story about various stories. And we are to accept Ellen having such a detailed memory as well as Mr. Lockwood.
This is something we simply overlook after a certain point; that we disregard that we overlook it is rather interesting and a stirring testimonial to Emily Brontë's skill as a novelist. That this should be her only novel is a powerful statement to its lasting fame and a melancholy fact: that such writing should be confined solely between two covers and no more. I never finish Wuthering Heights but wish there were a second Emily Brontë novel to read. Alas for the tuberculosis that ravished the family (at least three of the sisters died from it, and there is conflicting evidence that it killed the remaining sister and the only brother). That Emily had two sisters who were also novelists is scant consolation, no matter how enjoyable their novels may be. That she died at just thirty is as tragic as Keats death at twenty five. That the Oxford English Dictionary to this day doesn't recognize and define "wuthering" is a shame in and of itself."
"It's not often that I hate a character. Sure, I've read plenty of books with all manner of villains and antagonists, but they've always been people that either had good reason for what they were doing or were simply Snidley Whiplash style evil-for-no-good-reason sorts and it's hard to really hate either brand. Heck, a lot of the time the villains are more interesting and enjoyable then the heroes. So I have to pause here and say congratulations Miss Bronte, you've managed what no one else to date has been able to accomplish. I hate Heathcliff,
He is arguably one of the stupidest, pettiest, most self-centered and spiteful characters in literature. And by stupid I don't mean unintelligent (throughout the entire book he displays, if not a book-larnin' type of smarts, at least a serious level of cunning and guile), I mean this is a man who makes a critically poor choice - his love for Catherine. Catherine manages to rival Heathcliff by being a conceited, spoiled, tantrum-throwing baby all the way through her womanhood, and therein lies the crux of the problem with this whole book. The entire plot hinges on Heathcliff and Catherine's love, and Heathcliff's revenge after her death against those he blames for keeping the two lovers apart. But Catherine is so blatantly unlikeable that I just couldn't buy into their romance, and, by extension, the rest of the novel. It would be like writing Pol Pot a love letter - no matter how pure the words and intent, the entire basis of the act is so ludicrous it would be impossible to take seriously. Every time he performs some loathsome deed it's multiplied a hundredfold when you remember the daffy bitch who's memory he's doing it for; by the end of the book you can't help but feel that the only true injustice in the story is that Heathcliff dies in his sleep instead of being torn apart by animals.
Not that I can really lay all of the character flaws at Heathcliff and Catherine's doorsteps; the dramatis personae for Wuthering Heights is a veritable buffet of loathsomeness. Cathy is almost as spoiled and conceited as her mother. Linton is spineless, manipulative, whiny little husk and clearly not a bully for the sole reason that he's too sickly to be one. You get the feeling that he's the kind of kid that would torture animals if he could, and Cathy's affections for him make as little sense as Heathcliff's love for Catherine. Hindley is spiteful, cowardly, drunken wreck, and his abuse of Heathcliff at the beginning of the book probably makes him the most responsible for every bad thing that happens in the story next to Heathcliff himself. Isabella is a brainless, starry-eyed idiot; Edgar falls in love with Catherine, marries her, and suffers the consequences despite mounds of evidence that bitch be crazy; Joseph is a raving fundamentalist. The only two characters in the entire book you can feel at all bad for are Nelly Dean, who's drug into pretty much everything bad that happens against her will, and Hareton , who's character flaws are by and large thrust on him by others and aren't his fault.
In the end, the characters torpedo the story. Although the novel is beautifully written and evocative, there's just so little to enjoy here that it's hard for me to imagine opening this book up again any time soon."
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