Book Reviews
- Thread starter Brick
- Start date
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte. A gothic novel written in 1847 but set around 1800 in the Yorkshire moors of England. It tells the tale of two small but well-off families which appear to be entirely made up of horrible people. The main antagonist, Heathcliff, was found as a homeless child and taken in by one of the families, but his mistreatment by them while growing up warps him into a serial schemer and abuser as an adult, and most of the book is him inflicting his vitriol on everyone around him. Undeniably beautifully written, but I had a bit of trouble relating to why everyone in the book was so utterly hateful. I thought it might be because naturally I would have trouble relating to rich English people living in the countryside two hundred years ago, but it looks like contemporary reviewers also struggled with the relentless bleakness. One example:
"How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors."
Seems a bit strong (suicide?) but you get the point.
"How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors."
Seems a bit strong (suicide?) but you get the point.
Bellatrix
Active member
The Brontës grew up reading Romantic literature--the novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron. This shaped their view of the world. Because this was their formative literary milieu, and especially for Emily, the sibling who ventured least from the family home, and spent the most time on their native moorlands, we see a novel almost untouched by the contemporary Victorian zeitgeist. Heathcliff and Cathy are figures of high Romance--not in the hearts and flowers sense, but in the Romantic Period sense--the celebration of nature, the belief in the supernatural, the privileging of emotion over reason. The term soulmate dates to this period. When Cathy says "I am Heathcliff," she is aserting that they two are one and the same.
It isn't surpising that the novel met with such a strong reaction. It was born into the Victorian Era, a time of restraint and decorum. Brontë's novel was simply too dark, too passionate, too wild for the times.