Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

'I wouldn't be you for a kingdom, then!' Catherine declared emphatically -- and she seemed to speak sincerely. 'Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is -- an unreclaimed creature, without refinement -- without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I'd have soon put that little canary into the park on a winter's day as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It's deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray don't imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior. He's not a rough diamond -- a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic; he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man.'

It's been fourteen long years since I last touched Wuthering Heights. I decided to reread it in advance of the new adaptation, whose trailer makes it look like a an upstairs-downstairs forbidden sex romp. Maybe it'll be good (I doubt it), but one thing it isn't is sexy. In fact, the stormy love between Heathcliff and Catherine seems to me, even moreso on this reading, to be entirely sexless. Cathy and Heathcliff both describe themselves, again and again, as the same soul occupying two different bodies, which is to say that embodiment is, in Wuthering Heights, a kind of challenge or trap. It's no wonder, perhaps, that people are always getting sick or injured and dying before their time, starting with Hindley's wife/Hareton's mother and continuing all the way to, spoiler alert, Heathcliff himself. The closest that Heathcliff gets to Catherine physically seems to me to be the moment that he digs up her grave to embrace her and accidentally, as he says, releases her ghost.

This disembodiment, perhaps, explains why Catherine is so willing to overlook, as no one else seems to be, Heathcliff's racial coloring and ambiguous heritage. You often hear people say that Heathcliff is supposed to be Black (making Jacob Elordi all wrong for the part), but it's clear to me that Heathcliff's background is meant to be much murkier than that; part of his tragedy is that he is racially ambiguous and thus there is no social place for him at Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange, or anywhere else. He's described as Romani or a "Lascar," but this ambivalence is underlined by the way in which the elder Earnshaw shows up with him in tow from a trip to London as if he's simply materialized; no explanation is given. Nature vs. nurture is an unsettled question in Wuthering Heights: is Heathcliff's savageness meant to be racially constituted? Or does the novel suggest that he is a nasty piece of work because he's othered by the vindictive Hindley? Heathcliff's viciousness is, I feel strongly, too overwhelming to be the product of socialization; I trust Catherine when she says there is no oyster inside the pearl. Then again, perhaps that viciousness is natural, and thus preferable to the viciousness of someone like Hindley, dolled up and justified by his greater social standing. And on top of that, Heathcliff's little experiment turning Hindley's son Hareton into a kind of carbon copy of himself--brutish and resentful--seems so successful, at least until the coda, that perhaps the book really does believe that one is primarily the product of their social environment.

I don't think this book was as pleasurable for me the second time around, mostly just because I knew what was coming--it is a book that thrives on melodrama and shock, of the best kind--but I remain in awe of it. It's really a book that pulls no punches; people say the most out of pocket shit to each other on every page. It's almost like watching a really pulpy reality TV show. What I did come away with on this re-read was an appreciation for the second half, which I expect to be more or less cut out of the movie. Heathcliff's desire for vengeance is so strong, like his love, that it survives even Hindley, his tormentor: what is the point, I wondered this time, of pursuing Hindley's heir and house after Hindley himself has been drinking himself to a miserable death for more than a decade? I found myself interested now in the story of Cathy, Hareton, and Linton, who are all trying desperately to escape the shape that the despot Heathcliff would pound them into. It seemed to me this time around that this is where the "real" story lies, despite the popular image of the novel as consisting mainly of Heathcliff and Catherine's romance. By the end, young Cathy and Hareton seem like true survivors of a kind of natural storm that killed just about everyone else, and it's their romance that seems like a normal human one.