Emily Bronte's, The Wuthering Heights

The average life expectancy in the mid-1800s, in North Yorkshire, was about 25.6 years.?By the time the novel opens, sure enough, most of the characters have gone to their graves, and only the dark, brooding, heathen-ish Heathcliff remains.?He’s been made much of (as a hero) over the centuries since Wuthering Heights was first published, but really, he’s not a man you want around.?Anytime.?

Wuthering Heights is still breathtakingly beautiful.?It’s Emily Bront?’s only novel, and her first book, and much like the novel’s characters, she too, died young.

It’s a tightly woven world, mostly set in the eponymous Heights, or at Thrushcross Grange, four miles from the Heights.

At its core, the novel is the story of love between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw, or rather, as you will come to realize, the introduction of Heathcliff into the narrative, sets the plot into progress.

Emily Bronte’s classic novel would be more accurately described as a study of obsessive revenge, in which Heathcliff inflicts suffering for a past slight that saw him miss out on marrying his beloved Catherine.

The two had grown up together after Catherine and her brother, Hindley’s, father had found Heathcliff destitute on the streets of the nearby city. The father had nurtured Heathcliff as his own, even at times preferring him to his son.

As a result, Hindley hated Heathcliff and when his father died, he forced his adopted brother to work on the property, a rung or two below the station of himself and Catherine.

Instead of marrying Heathcliff, who Catherine adored, Hindley encouraged her to marry the neighbour, igniting Heathcliff’s terrible desire for revenge.

And so begins the bulk of the story, where each character is unrelentingly abused by Heathcliff. And unrelenting it is. Sometimes it is almost unbearable to read about the cruelty that Bronte’s characters endure.

Would Heathcliff finally satisfy himself that he had caused enough suffering? Would he spare at least one character?

Heathcliff wasn’t the only character in the book that it was hard to like. Many who passed through Wuthering Heights and the nearby property were mean-spirited and unlikable. There was Catherine herself, who was sometimes shockingly cruel to her husband and her sister-in-law. There was the narrator, who even tended to judge children harshly and failed to give help at times when it was needed most, and there was Hindley, who was envious as a child and weak and careless as an adult.

I’m not sure I’ve ever encountered such an unlikeable bunch in any other book I have read.

By- Ayushi Tiwari