Harkthebookworms - Lil Blogger

The difficulties of interpreting Wuthering Heights and the superabundance of possible (and actual) interpretations do not mean that the reader is free to make the novel mean anything he wants to make it mean. The fact that no demonstrable definitive meaning or principle of meaningfulness can be identified does not make it a free-for-all. Each good reader of Wuthering Heights is subject to the text, coerced by it. The best readings are those, like Charlotte Bronte’s, which, in spite of themselves, repeat the text’s failure to satisfy the mind’s desire for logical order with a demonstrable base. The oscillation, bewilderment, or experience of an alogical richness which cannot be mastered is the fundamental bearer of meaning in this work - fundamental, that is, in its lack of fundament.

Wuthering Heights and the Ellipses of Interpretation by J. Hillis Miller

me knowing i need to read wuthering heights again but never being able to find the time to do it

even netflix itself seems to think wuthering heights and bridgerton are related

i think it’s fair to say that cathy sacrificed her love for heathcliff in order to appease her family obligation. falling in love with edgar was a choice but falling in love with heathcliff was fate. i believe she struggled internally with the expectations of her family and her real desires. she was the black sheep of her family and wanted to make sure she didn’t lose them. cathy was incredibly loyal but she was quite ignornant - most especially with her family’s mistreatment of heathcliff while she was the only one who was kind and she’d also failed to see heathcliff would sacrifice the world to be with her but she only saw a dire financial situation. marrying edgar was the only way to ensure she was well cared for.

More thoughts on “Wuthering Heights”

Recent discussions about the nature of Heathcliff and Catherine’s love, especially in @astrangechoiceoffavourites’s posts, have made me think about a topic that I’ve seen a few critics discuss in the past, but not many. Namely that they don’t love each other in precisely the same way. Without denying the soul connection they do share, each one’s individual love has distinctly different nuances.

Cathy is the one who describes her love for Heathcliff in the unique terms that are so often quoted and as the description of “their” love: “…he’s more myself than I am,” “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” “I am Heathcliff!” etc. She’s the one who emphasizes their twin souls and insists that Heathcliff is her “own being.” Her love doesn’t care about his looks (she acknowledges that he’s handsome, but only to say that it’s not why she loves him), or whether or not he’s “pleasant to be with,” or the presence of other romantic partners in either of their lives. She feels free to fall in love with Edgar, without it diminishing her deeper love for Heathcliff, and doesn’t think her marriage will change her relationship with Heathcliff at all, because she assumes he understands her perfectly. (She’s sadly wrong in that last regard.) And the same is true in reverse. This might be an unpopular, debatable opinion, but she arguably shows no real jealousy when Isabella falls in love with Heathcliff: she objects to their match because she knows it will drive Edgar to banish Heathcliff from their lives, and because she knows Heathcliff doesn’t love Isabella and will mistreat her, but she says that if Heathcliff had really cared for Isabella, then she would have been willing to let them marry. While each of them straddles the line between lover and sibling for the other, Cathy’s love is the easier of the two to interpret as an intense, codependent platonic love rather than romantic love.

Heathcliff’s love definitely seems more conventionally romantic. At age thirteen he speaks of Catherine’s “beautiful hair” and “enchanting face” and describes her as “immeasurably superior to everybody on earth.” To the end of his life, Nelly’s narration refers to Cathy as his “idol,” and he describes himself as her “slave” – Cathy, on the other hand, sees him as her twin soul, but never idolizes him the way he does her. Nor does he ever have romantic feelings for any other woman, and he’s jealous of Edgar’s presence in her life and sees her as despising and rejecting him when she accepts Edgar’s proposal, even though she doesn’t view it as such herself. By marrying Edgar, he describes her as having “levelled my palace” and erected a “hovel” in its place by expecting him to be content as her friend. At the same time, while he does her call his “life” and “soul,” he never claims to be her, or describes her as “more myself than I am,” or assumes that perfect understanding exists between them. She presumes that they share a deeper degree of sameness and mutual understanding than he ever mentions, while his love has layers of both worship and possessiveness that her’s lacks.

This extends into the notorious love-hate aspect of their bond. The inherent ambivalence that critics often attribute to both of them (e.g. “They love each other, but they don’t like each other”) is really more inherent to Catherine than to Heathcliff. She’s the one who describes him as not being a pleasure to her any more than she’s always a pleasure to herself, and who describes her love for him as “a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” She’s the one who freely describes him as “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation” and “a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man,” even when they’re not at odds with each other. Heathcliff’s feelings for her seem less inherently complex; he seems to view her with pure adoration until she befriends the Lintons and his later anger toward her is the more conventional anger of a scorned lover.

Of course part of these differences lie in the class and racial difference between them. She was the privileged daughter of a genteel white family, while he was their poor foundling of a despised race, later reduced to a servant – given the time and place they live in, it makes all too much sense that he should idolize her while she views him as a brute even as she loves him. Although of course it’s complicated, since her father favored Heathcliff above her while he was alive and her wild, unladylike temperament made her a misfit in a different way. Part of Heathcliff’s anger clearly stems from the fact that he and Cathy were once “two outcasts against the world,” so to speak, but then she switched her allegiance to “the world.”

The differences in their loves are interesting, and just as interesting are the different interpretations from the critics I’ve read so far who acknowledge those differences. Some take a more positive view of Heathcliff’s love and a more negative view of Cathy’s, claiming that his more traditional, relatable romantic love is “real” love, while she, textbook narcissist that she is, only loves him as a perceived extension of herself and is so convinced of their inner “sameness” (yet at the same time looking down on him) that she fails to consider his needs as a separate individual. Others take a more positive view of Cathy’s love, seeing the idealism in her vision of a love that features complete mutual understanding and identification with the other, that involves no unrealistic idolizing but sees the other’s flaws yet loves them anyway, and that transcends social convention and any need to possess; Heathcliff, in this view, is the one who falls short by failing to love her without possessiveness. I think both of those interpretations are valid… I might even agree with both at once.

(Note: This is one of the main reasons why I have no patience for claims that Emily Brontë must have had a secret lover, and even less patience for claims that she must have loved someone who rejected her and used Heathcliff as a mouthpiece for her pain and anger. That hypothesis ignores the fact that some of the book’s most unique expressions of love, most different from any portrayal of love she would have found in books and poems, are Cathy’s descriptions of her love for Heathcliff, not so much vice-versa. And Cathy’s love makes perfect sense as the creation of an author whose main experience of love was familial. A sexless love that has nothing to do with looks, where you don’t always “like” the other and sometimes even “hate” them but always love them, where no one understands you the way they do, nor does anyone understand them the way you do, and where you can both be more authentic with each other than with anyone else… Doesn’t that sound more like sibling love than conventional romantic love and make sense as having been written by an author with three close siblings but no romantic partner?)