A Delightful Disappointment

This is my first time reading Wuthering Heights. Being so, I found it necessary to return to the beginning and reread the assigned pages armed with a better knowledge after having finished. There seemed to be so many characters sharing either the same last or even first names, tangled in connections that were easy to confuse, especially when presented through the language of the book. Not only that, but the story switched back and forth from Mr. Lockwood’s thoughts to Nelly’s storytelling as to further complicate my initial read.  Thankfully I sped through it the second time fully engaged and better humored by the passages.  Although I had not previously read the book, I had seen the 2009 BBC adaptation a year ago with Tom Hardy playing the lead role of Heathcliff. The curiosity which led me to watch the movie (which surprisingly enough was not the gorgeous Tom Hardy) is still the same motivation that I felt inspired me as I read through the first ten chapters: the atmosphere of the story.

This dismal atmosphere begins to take form before the first chapter has even begun. The name of the book, which is the dwelling of Heathcliff, is enshrouded with imagery, with “‘Wuthering’ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather.”  Since the book is after all a classic, I had heard the name mentioned many times throughout my life, and gleaned from the title alone that there was something dark and looming to be discovered behind its pages. I ventured upon it with the same excitement of driving into a brooding thunderstorm on a dull afternoon. I was not disappointed. Emily Bronte pulled me into the dreary, rustic world of the Heights with descriptions of the dwelling such as “… gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving the alms of the sun”, and “… grotesque carving lavished over the front [door]… among a wilderness of crumbling griffins…”, and with words like bleak, black, blustered, bitter, wailed, and wild to depict the weather.

The best example of this gothic imagery was the nightmare that Mr. Lockwood suffered during his stay at the Heights. It is creepy to picture the “little, ice cold hand” that he rubs against the glass of the broken window pane until the blood drenches the sheets in order to loosen the vise it has him in, and to hear the “doleful cry” of Catherine’s apparition that begs him to let her inside. The way it is portrayed, I can’t help but picture the Heights as a strange purgatory that both Heathcliff and Catherine are damned to for eternity. The dream that Cathy has where she is flung out of heaven by the angels onto the heath of Wuthering Heights and rejoices to be home confirms the eerie connection for me, and Heathcliff being colored as a ghoul or demon is only suitable.

As much as I enjoy a Gothic novel with a melancholic ending, when I watch the movie and now while I am reading the book, I am wishing the rugged Heathcliff to break free from his dark past and become Cathy’s reformed lover. I find myself rooting him on despite my knowledge of his ruinous end. I almost feel as if Bronte is teasing all of the female readers that try and follow along with the plot according to the archetypal structuring of the romantic hero that we have been bred to adore. However, this is the very thing that sets the novel apart in my mind as something different. I did not get to have the ending that I wished for, but instead was confronted with something unpredictable and thought provoking; a delightful disappointment.