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Boy meets girl: they fall in love, obstacles are overcome, they marry and live happily ever after. So dictates the traditional Victorian marriage plot, prescribing the rules of love in the nineteenth century. However, Emily Brontë’s 1847 masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, subverts the age-old cliché of love as patient and kind, and paints a picture of love as wild as the Yorkshire moors on which it is based.
When philanthropic Mr Earnshaw brings home an orphaned gypsy boy found wandering the streets of Liverpool, he has little idea of the turmoil into which it would throw his family. The boy Heathcliff steals Earnshaw’s affection from his son, Hindley, and falls deeply in love with his daughter Catherine. The feeling between Heathcliff and Cathy is so intense that their characters blur into each other, as Cathy claims “I am Heathcliff,” and when she dies Heathcliff cries “I cannot live without my soul!” Despite this love, Cathy chooses to succumb to conventional expectations by marrying Edgar Linton, the wealthy and cultured neighbour. This choice resonates on all the characters throughout the novel, and brings devastation to the Earnshaw and Linton families.
Wuthering Heights is far from a typical love story: rather, it is a tale about the destructive power of love, as the relationship between the protagonists brings them anguish rather than solace. The novel bears all the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy, although Heathcliff is more of a villain than a tragic hero. Rather than being a noble character with one fatal defect, he is a misanthropic anti-hero with one redeeming feature: his all-consuming passion for Cathy. That the characters are flawed makes them all the more believable, so the reader identifies closely with them, and sympathises despite their unattractive qualities. Nobody in the book is entirely good or irredeemably evil, which results in a multi-layered and intriguing plot.
The love between Heathcliff and Cathy defies convention, as he is both her adopted brother and social inferior. Their bond is not even broken by death, as Heathcliff is haunted by Cathy’s ghost, and is only at peace when he is at last laid beside her in the ground. Brontë’s powerful depiction of hopeless love is one of the most moving in all literature, which is heightened by the beautiful use of the pathetic fallacy in relation to the surrounding landscape. Cathy compares her love for Heathcliff to the unchanging rocks, and her feelings for Linton as “like the foliage in the woods,” susceptible to the passage of time. This rich and lyrical use of language makes Wuthering Heights an intense and thrilling read, and has ensured its endurance as a classic in English literature.
It is difficult to compare Wuthering Heights to any other book, even of the same period, since it does not fit neatly either into the category of romance or of gothic fiction. It is a work that stands alone, drawing the reader into a dark and demonic world of brutality, revenge, and a love which is stronger than death.
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