Wuthering Heights
Classic Book Rewritten
By Prioleau Alexander
Wuthering Heights
By Emily Jane Brontë
Published in 1847
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is yet another “classic novel” that begs the question, “Are you trying to make me jump off a bridge?”
Despite the fact the title somehow hints the story revolves around heaving breasts and sinched corsets, nothing could be further from the truth. It is a tragedy at least the very least, while some describe it as gothic horror.
The good news is as a writer, Emily focused mostly on composing obscure poetry, which hasn’t been forced onto us non-poets. Unfortunately, she did write one depressing novel, thus torturing students for generations.
As Emily matured as a woman, she grew more reclusive and independent—known to dislike social interaction and authority. In other words, she was a writer, before publishers insisted authors do interviews with Mike and the Moose morning show on 94.3, The Zoo. Traffic and weather on the 9s.
Emily died at the tender age of 30, but is considered by academics as an utterly unique author who produced a single novel defining the mid-1800s era. One scholar claimed the book is, “so powerful, it permanently altered novel’s possibilities.”
I have a suspicion that quote utilizes the same method employed by motion pictures when putting review blurbs for their movie posters. The opinion actually came from the sentences “Brontë’s ability to depress readers to tears is so powerful, it permanently altered novel’s possibilities to move forward as something enjoyable to do. Fiction-for-fun might have died on the last page of Wuthering Heights.”
Despite my post-Wuthering need for a month in bed gobbling extra anti-depressants, I’m still tasked with telling you the story:
The novel opens with a description of Wuthering Heights, a farm on the wind-beaten moors of Yorkshire. Owned by the Earnshaw family, the farm’s name comes from the storms that continuously batter it. It’s cramped, dark, and as cozy as a fist fight.
One night after a trip to Liverpool, Papa Earnshaw returns home with a “dark skinned” orphan boy he discovered starving on the streets. It’s never made clear whether the lad is Black, Indian, or a Gypsy—but the port of Liverpool played a role in slave trade, so most scholar believe him to be of mixed races. Emily includes this detail because Brits of that time considered anyone without a pasty fish-scale complexion and horrifying teeth as inferior. Papa Earnshaw bestows upon the boy the name Heathcliff, and begins raising him as one of his own.
Papa’s son, Hindley, takes an immediate dislike to Heathcliff, and views Heathcliff as a potential rival name in Papa’s Last Will and Testament. Papa’s daughter Catherine, however, develops a fast friendship with Heathcliff, and—in a plot twist that will shock parents in the 21st Century—they go out of doors to actually explore and play.
Papa Earnshaw, disturbed by Hindley’s dickish behavior towards Heathcliff, sends his son off to college.
Papa wuthers away, and dies—about three years into his son’s time at college. It’s unknown if the older kids at college were God-knows-what-ing Hindley, but when he returns home to assume command of the farm, he’s an angry resentful bully who clearly needed his ass kicked. I hasten to add he brought with him his new wife, so getting married might’ve the cause of his bitterness—just a theory.
Hindley’s first action involves God-knows-what-ing Heathcliff—not in the literal sense, but through humiliation and beatings. Heathcliff, once a peer and schoolmate of Catherine, is summarily deprived of education, dressed as a servant, and made to work in the fields.
Now a couple increasing in maturity and love for each other, Heathcliff and Catherine slip away to spy on their neighbors at an estate named Thrushcross Grange, and while looking through the windows see the Linton family acting all hoity-toity. The two of the kids act like weak-kneed brats. They find this hilarious, as the gang at Wuthering Heights doesn’t do things like afternoon tea. They view themselves more like the boys from Lord of the Flies than the poofters dressing for dinner in Downton Abbey.
The spy games end when the Linton’s dog does his job, attacks the strangers, and tears up Catherine’s leg. (Who’s a good boy? Who wants a treat? You?) Heathcliff flees, but Catherine is carried into the home and treated with pampered respect—for the next five weeks. Pampered respect included baths, fine clothes, servants, proper-English lessons, hairdressing, and general refinement instruction.
When Catherine returns to Wuthering Heights, she’s changed, and in this writer’s mind commits one of the great sins of humanity: She forgets where she comes from.
The new-and-improved Catherine adopts a hip-hip-cheerio view of the world, and looks down on Heathcliff’s rough appearance and lack of manners. Instead of helping him improved himself, she decides that—though she loves him—love and social advancement might not be compatible. She believes she can live in a “higher sphere,” whereas Heathcliff cannot.
What does she do? Throw caution to the wind, follow her heart, and ultimately marry Heathcliff? Nah, she rejects her soulmate, and accepts a marriage proposal offered by the heir to Thrushcross Grange, Edgar Linton. She plans to gain status and respect from Edgar, while still hanging around with Heathcliff; he just can’t come to her cocktail parties, dinner parties, or holiday gatherings.
At this point, I began to ponder if Catherine is on the spectrum.
“Hey, new husband, I’m going to go pal around with my soulmate for the weekend.”
“Hey, soulmate, I had fun this weekend, but now I’ve got to head back home to have sex with my husband, and spend time around a better class of people.”
Heathcliff hears the news of her betrayal, and—Poof. Like Kaiser Soze, he vanishes.
Three years later Heathcliff returns, mysteriously wealthy, educated, and in a very foul mood. For those who treated him poorly, Hell has come to town.
Target One is his former tormentor, Hindley Earnshaw. Hindley’s wife died in childbirth, and he’s swirling with grief—so he acts the way every logical man would: He crawls into a bottle, and pursues a gambling addiction. As everyone knows, or should know, booze will kill you, but gambling can take everything. Drunken gambling leads to decisions like drawing to an inside straight, which is never a good idea when the pink slip for your horse is in the pot.
Heathcliff buddies up to Hindley, and encourages his boozing and gambling. Lost the horse in a poker game? No problem, I’ll loan you money to replace him. Lost the buggy by hitting on a seventeen in Blackjack? No sweat—I’ll loan you more. Oops. Lost all the silverware and dining room furniture by going all in on snake eyes at the Craps table? I got you covered.
Then… the trap snaps shut.
“Uh, hey, Hindley—you’re in pretty deep to me. We need to square all these loans… the amount you owe me is, well look at that! It adds up to… weird… the value of Wuthering Heights! Cash, check, or deed?”
Worry not, reader. It gets worse. While destroying Hindley’s life, Heathcliff’s also going after poor Edgar Linton.
Step one, Heathcliff shatters Edgar by convincing his sister Isabella to marry him. Unlike today when marrying a mixed-race man is a status symbol in England, allowing your sister to marry a mixed-race man wasn’t cricket. However, times then mirror today in one regard: Isabella knew Heathcliff was a slow-motion trainwreck, but… wait for it… thought she could “fix” him!
She didn’t, of course, and he treated her so cruelly she eventually flees to the south of England—damaged, disillusioned, and half nuts. As we discover hundreds of pages later, she experienced the easy way out.
As one might suspect, Edgar and Heathcliff failed to achieve BFF status, which drove Catherine three-quarter nuts. Edgar is a good guy, and Heathcliff is a maniac… but she’s oh-so-lost in the confusion of it all. Ever the good decision maker, she refuses food, isolates herself, and moves on the scale to four-fifths nuts. Part of that nuttiness includes abusing Edgar, and pining for Heathcliff.
Eventually, Edgar and Heathcliff erupt during a confrontation, and Catherine is there to witness it. Overcome by the vapors, she swoons and collapses.
A while later, Catherine gives birth to Edgar’s child Cathy, and then… croaks, of course. At this point the novel offers a grieving father, a child with no mother, and Heathcliff moving into the half-nuts category himself—begging for Catherine’s ghost to haunt him for his sins.
A classic novel ends here, right? Life’s achieved Black Hole suckage, and everyone is miserable. Or dead. Or insane.
Nah—more suffering to go. A lot more, but I won’t torture you with all of it.
The novel provides us with more years of death, suffering, betrayals, seduction, kidnapping, psychological destruction, shame, scorn, terror, obsession, and times worse than being stuck at a cocktail party discussing Anna Karenina.
Eventually, everyone is dead except Heathcliff, young Cathy, and Hareton Earnshaw, the son of the drunken gambler Linton. Cathy and Heathcliff eventually fall in love, and Heathcliff slips over to the four-fifths crazy status.
Heathcliff reaches full-blown nuttiness upon realizing he’s achieved his revenge, and then some, but all he can think about is self-hatred and being reunited with Catherine in death. One day, they find him dead.
Color me shocked.
Cathy and Hareton inherit both estates, and plan to marry. One analysis of the book said, “The violent cycle that began with one lost child brought home from Liverpool ended with forgiveness, education, and love.”
I suppose that’s true, if you think the Battle of Iwo Jima offered a happy ending for the Japanese, because one dude survived.
So, all this begs the question, why did Miss Emily write this ode to misery? I can’t say why she used this horror story as her platform, but she did use it to explore a number of issues that weren’t popular topics at the time, because people didn’t want to think about them, much less discuss them.
Stuffy arrogant people with inherited title and money purchased and read most books in the era of Wuthering Heights. They looked down on “the help” as a necessary evil, and when speaking publicly chose their words very carefully, lest they utter a single offensive sentence to any other stuffed shirt yo-yo. Marriages were largely arranged, or involved two or three courtship sessions, sitting in the parlor ten feet apart. The British aristocracy shined as the very definition of “putting on heirs,” but they bought the books… and wanted books to praise all of their grinding attributes. Women wanted heaving breasts and romance, because there was none at home. Men wanted tales of men in tails, courageously making their way to the dining room, pondering how difficult it would be at next week’s meeting with the Duke of ButtMunch.
That said, Emily Brontë’s creative brief to her publisher might well have read:
TITLE: You Know What I Hate?
Chapter One: I hate people who inherit title and money, and act like they did something more than be born.
Chapter Two: I hate men who are who are bullies or pussies, since both suck in a marriage.
Chapter Three: I hate unfulfilling marriages devoid of court and spark.
Chapter Four: I hate people who forget where they come from.
Chapter Five: I hate aristocrats—every last miserable one of them.
Can’t you see the response from the publisher?
Dear Emily, this is exactly what we’re looking for. Mocking and insulting everything the book buyer believes is a sure-fire way to get books moving by the wagonload. Can you add a chapter specifically about the royal family, and the fact their blood is more German than British?
Here are a few concepts Brontë explored, done so at the peril of never selling the book:
First and foremost, she wanted readers to know that aristocrats are bigger phonies that Holden Caufield’s classmates. They’re not “above” anything—suffering, physical and mental abuse, betrayal, abandonment, and total destruction. Their faux-morals are pointless. In short, “You people are no different than Don Quixote, except he at least tried to strive mightily for something good. Y’all are just adding to climate change when you exhale.”
Obviously Emily disliked the romance novels of her time, as they were unrealistically mushy. She wanted it known most British marriages among aristocrats were a loveless train wreck. Emily, on behalf of all your readers, I say you may consider that spot sufficiently stirred.
She also explored the kind of love that involves obsession, a worthy topic because most people engage in one of these relationships in their life—wild, irrational, and bordering on madness. This kind of love can involve:
Two people, but only one is obsessed (resulting in crazy-x’s).
Unrequited love obsession (resulting stalkers and text messages blowing up at 3:00am).
This is shown via the two-way obsession of Heathcliff and Cathy, which tends to result in jealousy, and tracking your lovers whereabouts on your smart phone… even if they’re in the hospital, recovering from the concussion you gave them with the Sterling silver water pitcher.
It’s worth adding that Cathy’s decision to marry Edgar for status and a more luxurious lifestyle leads us smack into the old Irish saying, “Don’t marry for money… you’ll borrow it cheaper.”
Then there’s the concept of generational sin. If you’re an absentee father, your sons will likely be the same. If you’re an abusive father, your sons will either become bullies themselves, or spend their lives feeling unworthy. If you’re a serial adulterer, same-same for Sonny Boy. If you act like a parent instead of trying to be your kids’ bestie, you might raise functioning children. Cleary, this message needs to be readdressed to parents in 21st Century America… maybe using the same technique they dreamed up for Malcom McDowell in A Clockwork Orange.
Emily includes one of the classic themes—man-vs-man—but does so with a unique sleight of hand: Via nature-vs-nature symbolism, with a nature-vs-civilization twist. She worked it quite brilliantly in my opinion: Wuthering Heights is far closer to the rough-hewn world of nature, while Thrushcross Grange is like the fine China used in civilized homes. Nature is wild, free, dangerous, and by definition completely honest. Civilization provides comfort, restrain, and specific rules. Is one better than other? Hard to say—but Ms. Brontë agrees with me that failing to remember where you came from is bad magic, and leads to a nether-world where things fall apart.
In terms of approaching Wuthering Heights at a cocktail party, hit your listeners with, “It’s incredible how Emily Brontë inserted so much of her short tragic life in the novel—down to its very setting… as did Melville. And like Melville, she never saw her masterpiece become known as a masterpiece.”
With your fans sufficiently rocked back on their heels, wade in with the themes—go ugly early, because there’s a chance a couple people actually read the book in school.
“The way she explored the man vs man issue was fascinating… tying in nature vs nature and nature vs civilization? Wow. What’s your analysis of that?”
“The exploration of generational sin was obvious, but her take on obsession and love was sublime. I’ve never had my heart shattered because I’m too smart, but I’m sure one of you have… tell us in detail about the time you had your heart ripped from your chest, then stomped on in front of you.”
“Emily obviously offered a stern warning about marrying for money. Hey, (Insert friend’s name here)! Everyone knows you married for money. What say you?”
You’re ready, reader. Go forth, and wuther some egos.