Written by a reclusive woman living with her two fellow authors and sisters in a remote part of in the North of England, Wuthering Heights is a truly beautiful and troubling novel. The language is simple, rather bare from ornamental phrasing, and quite dignified, especially when considering the speaker of the story for most of the book. The choice of narrator is also very apt, for nearly the entire story is told from the perspective of a housemaid named Ellen or “Nelly,” and then relayed to the reader by a nondescript and nearly anonymous newcomer to the scene.
Emily Bronte, before writing Wuthering Heights, wrote mainly poetry, but had always aspired to be a writer since she was very young, along with her sisters. It was not until later in life when they all found themselves living together, and with very little company besides, that the Bronte sisters took seriously to novel writing. Two of them died, shortly after publishing their books, and it is interesting to note that had they not lived together as they did, giving each other advice and inspiration, none of them may have published anything at all before they passed away. Emily Bronte’s death also adds a certain eery validity to her tale, as the plot is based heavily on the deaths of the characters in it, and it could even be said that death, sometimes symbolic death, but much more often a literal death, is the primary component. Indeed, Heathcliff, in a sense the most important person in the book, wishes death for almost all of the people who do die, even going so far as to kill his young, sickly son through neglect emotional, and perhaps physical, abuse. Around this point in the story, I could not help feel somewhat sick and confused as to what Emily Bronte’s motives for painting Heathcliff as such an awfully inhuman creature were, although this feeling certainly melted away by the end.
Emily Bronte must have spent a great deal of time working beforehand on the structure of Wuthering Heights, as at some times during my reading the words were like a puzzle being fitted together with each paragraph another piece put in place. This intense focus on structure also attributed to the simple and sometimes concise style of writing, with all foreshadowing being explained either directly upon its issue or beforehand through the eyes of the man Ellen is telling her tale to. This is not to say that it is in anyway formulaic, as the story itself is very original, imaginative, and poetic in its grief.
As to the believability of Wuthering Heights, I am on the fence. The dialogue leans most often to melodrama, as do the motives of Heathcliff, but everything else appears so natural and mundane that it was hard to completely remove myself from what was happening, even if the motives and reasonings felt oftentimes alien to my own thoughts and feelings.
All together, I enjoyed the winding yet solid story immensely, and feel that that is its strong point, as opposed to style or concept. I would recommend it to anyone who wouldn’t find the writing drab or boring or too slow, which I fear might be too many people in this age of glitz, sex, fire, and Internet.
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