Wuthering Heights

I did it; I actually read Wuthering Heights.

This is huge, considering that I turn up my nose at anything written by one of the Bronte sisters. (I had a teeny altercation with my freshman honors english teacher over the book Jane Eyre that has since soured me towards anything Bronte.) Moreover, I feel triumphant anytime I finish anything "British." You'd think spending my childhood in Canada would make the whole British Literature thing a tad easier for me, but it does not. Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte...these authors require you to pay attention and expand your vocabulary immensely.

I ran into that "I kind of don't want to read this book anymore" mentality about a week ago, but somehow found that spark of perseverance to continue reading. If I want to be educated, I'm just going to have to push through some books that don't strike my particular tastes. A week later, after a few more one hour reading sessions, and I can now feel satisfied and enormously pleased with myself on a job thoroughly completed.

The thing that I kept saying over was, "How does a nice little Victorian England girl write a novel so filled with passion and ferocity and hate?" I could not believe the intensity of this novel--the characters are wild, the emotions run fiercely deep and the plot was just heartwrenching and horrifying. It creeped me out many times.

This was an interesting look at the double nature of love. I personally believe that love itself is a wholly positive emotion that can only encourage positive actions and feelings. The counterfeit of love, being lust, is the emotion that drives people to do insane and jealous things that seek to only gratify the offended "lover." This work is brimming with examples of what lust and greed and the desire for revenge can do to a person and all that surround him. How would the world of Wuthering Heights have been different had Heathcliff had his lust fulfilled? Would he truly have been capable of love or would his lustful nature have continued on despite capturing the one thing he wanted most in the world? Would he have remained the inflexible person he was from the start or would love have molded him into something better? Were Catherine and Heathcliff ever truly capable of a loving relationship?

I did appreciate the redemptive turn of events at the end of the novel. It went to show that time can truly turn the worst into something admirable. However, there is much to lament over the course of the novel, and the end doesn't change any of the bad into good, but there is hope that things can get better, despite not being able to change the past. There are a lot of good lessons in this book.

Something I really didn't like--the recycling of the characters' names was incredibly annoying and served to confuse me at so many points. Ugh. I understand the symbolism behind this decision; but really, how many different combinations of Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Linton and Hareton can you use before thinking it might be too much?

I feel that I can't sum this book up in one sentence because it seems like such a big work. It covers a huge scope of emotion, imagery, symbolism...it's just intense and it's weird and somewhat diabolical at times. The world that exists within its pages is constantly warring with itself and as a reader, I felt myself getting worked up and agitated while I read. Reading this book was a new experience in reading for me.