~~Weary moods with Wuthering Heights~~Blog-Week-Athon Post # 7

So – “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte is what I chose for the next category of the book reading challenge - 19th Century Fiction! It was on my to-read list for quite some time & is also considered one of the best classics of English literature! An important aspect that increased my interest in the book was a Zero rating in one of the reviews posted by a fellow blogger! Led by the curiosity of difference in the way a top English literary classic was rated by a fellow blogger, and the announcement of book reading challenge on the same day, I JUST couldn’t resist choosing it for this category!

 

Wuthering Heights is about a passionate, yet a very very tragic love saga between the two significant characters Heathcliff and Catherine. They share a love so supreme, yet which makes life so miserable (for them and for others involved), that they can only find peace together after death! Heathcliff is found as an orphan by Catherine’s father & thus brought into the household; He is treated as THE favorite, by her father compared to the 2 children of his own. Though, Catherine is more accepting of this fact after initial hesitation and becomes gradually friendly with Heathcliff, it’s not the same for Hindley, her brother & this in itself, forms the basis for the first flicker of the hatred that would last for the coming generation as well! 

 

There are few excerpts that will probably remain etched forever in my thoughts!

 

Catherine’s justification of accepting another proposal (that of Edgar’s whom she marries), when in actual, she truly loves Heathcliff! 

 

“It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome, Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same, and [Edgar’s] is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.”

 

Only the first liner of the justification is heard by Heathcliff where she mentions about “degradation” & he heartbroken, leaves Wuthering Heights only to return later, as a much more bitter, manipulative & vengeful person (well, than he already was) !

 

You would want to hate Heathcliff for his brutality, but then you cannot, because the extent of Heathcliff’s love is very much soul stirring when he tries to explain his action of excavating Catherine’s grave!!

 

“That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination is actually the least, for what is not connected with her to me? And what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!”

 

It’s quite disturbing that this same person who can love so very supremely has not an iota of guilt or pricking conscience when it comes to destroying someone else’s love by constant manipulations (which he does when his own child from a different marriage falls in love with his beloved Catherine’s child from her marriage to Edgar)!

 

I am not going to get into further details on the book or introduce you to any more characters in the book as I can’t do it without explaining the entire plot, and I don’t intend to do so for the simple reason that though I found the book very gloomy & depressing, it still is an excellent piece of commendable imagination by an author who hardly ever was exposed to the outside world for most part of her life!! The way in which few intrinsic thoughts of the significant characters are put across, is really strong & definitely praiseworthy.

 

Having read most of the books by Jane Austen, which are almost from the same era, this book came across to be very startlingly different & at the same time, I must agree, interesting enough to not stop, but go on reading till the end! Personally, I felt very much drained by the time I completed the book and this is something I have never felt with any book (believe me, I have read my share of not-so-happily-ever-after endings)… I also had mixed feelings about each character as I couldn’t relate to anyone & I couldn’t feel entirely happy, sad or bad for anyone! I just had this one constant lingering thought for some time, that if Catherine’s father had not gotten Heathcliff to his home, all the pain & suffering for generations to come, could have been avoided!!

 

For those of you who are looking for a fairy tale saga and a seemingly hopeful plot with a happily-ever-after ending – this book is definitely not meant for you! However, if you are one of those, who do not mind a different kind of a read (just once in a blue moon) and you have the perseverance to stick to reading a massive masterpiece, through to the end, even if it’s not what you had expected in the beginning, then, yes, you can give this a try. To be true to the book, there is a happy ending after all, but the portrayal of the extreme emotions of possessive love, the individual sufferings due to that extreme passion, the hatred & revenge that it gives birth to, the hostility that it inflicts on self and others throughout the course of the book is so upsetting & saddening, that the happily ever after ending just doesn’t seem to matter anymore at the end..