Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
I am so upset it took me so long to “read" this book (I listened to the audio cd). I had read a few of Jane Austen's books and since I had been so disappointed with those, I was even more skeptical when I first started reading Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights. I thought the over descriptiveness was going to happen all over again since the first few chapters in that were full of descriptions that made me a bit lost. But I was SO wrong! Emily Brontë (and her sister) uses this descriptive style of writing to truly set the scene of this darker tale and severely flawed characters. The descriptions bring you into the turbulent emotions of these characters and I loved the way the descriptions of the landscape, rooms or weather truly set the mood of the storyline, adding to each scene and setting.
I have to warn you, the characters are terrible, perfectly written and developed, but pretty much all of them are pretty horrendous people. They are a range of disrespectful, rude, selfish, vindictive, just all around screwed-up. At first I was a bit frustrated by these characters, but after I accepted the fact I wasn't going to really like these characters, then I truly appreciated how Brontë created these characters and their story.
Wuthering Heights is a story of two families who are far removed from larger villages and towns in the Yorkshire moors. Both houses, Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights, are in a dark and physically harsh landscape. The residents are isolated, lonely, they've grown up too far away from society and thus aren't really socially acceptable or proper. These circumstances start to create a domino effect on these two families and each individual is shaped in a bit of an off way.
Brontë doesn't try to make you like or forgive these characters, in fact she simply tells Heathcliff's story by giving the facts of the different elements in his life that shaped him. His abusive and unloved childhood, his obsession with the only person who was kind to him, what he saw as a betrayal by this person, then as an adult who is angry and bitter and takes out his frustrations on those around him. She also gives you Cathy's story, she is not charming or sympathetic, she's really a bit selfish but also understanding of what society expects of her and how deviating from that may actually ruin her and her loved ones.
Synopsis: Lockwood, the new tenant of Thrushcross Grange on the bleak Yorkshire moors, is forced to seek shelter one night at Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord. There he discovers the history of the tempestuous events that took place years before: of the intense passion between the foundling Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, and her betrayal. As Heathcliff's bitterness and vengeance is visited upon the next generation, their innocent heirs must struggle to escape the legacy of the past.