Do you love Wuthering Heights? If you do, will you please tell me why? I think I'm missing something. Am I supposed to admire Heathcliff's devotion to Cathy, or her passion for him? To me, they both seem like awful people.
Please help me. I am missing out. I think.
6 comments:
I can't help you there. I was completely at a loss myself after reading it. Definitely not my favorite Bronte.
I don't think I ever even made it through...although I know I started it once.
Amen, sister. We read it in my book club a couple of years back and I was completely disgusted with both of them. I was totally expecting a Jane Austen-type romance, and it wasn't at all. I despised Heathcliff. It was all so dysfunctional.
I agree with you. Wuthering Heights was not my favorite. Even the movie depressed me. I did on the other hand like Jane Eyer.
I liked the orange cat Heathcliff much more than the vengeful, Victorian Heathcliff. There was so much in-marrying that bad stuff was bound to happen. And you had to wonder if Nelly was telling the truth all along anyways. I would say I genuinely cared about zero of the characters in the book.
Another embarrassing disclosure here, but I actually love Wuthering Heights. One problem, in my opinion, is that film versions have focused on the mushy stuff, and not the despair, chaos, hatred, caprice, mystery, confusion, and overall cornucopia of human angst and suffering within the characters and the storyline. The characters are complex, not two-dimensional. It's not immediately clear want they want. In fact, the most powerful characters don't want, they need. Their needs are primal, but also conflicting and often destructive. Another problem is that we can't readily identify with characters in such a strange story. But they aren't just characters, just people, they are themes and forces of nature. I can as much identify with Heathcliff as I can a hurricane. It is his nature, mysterious and elemental, that I find interesting. Along these lines, there is a supernatural undercurrent to the entire story; not overtly religious (as so much literature from the mid-eighteenth century was) but mystical and organic, as if the wind-swept moors are as much of a character as anyone else. How Emily Bronte, who by all accounts lived a rather sheltered live, ever came up with this story is a testament to me of the strange and inspiring place that is Northern England.
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