📚 Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)

I vaguely remember reading Wuthering Heights in university, but could not remember everything. I was also intrigued to re-read it again after listening to Kirk Hamilton’s episode on Kate Bush’s song of the same name. I cannot put my finger on what grips me about this novel, however I think it is the desire to position the characters. For example, the reader knows Heathcliff does not get the full picture of how Cathy feels about him and therefore no matter how horrible he is throughout the rest of the novel, there is something about the way in which he is constantly in the grasps of Cathy’s ghost.

The love between Heathcliff and Catherine exists now as a myth operative outside any substantial relationship to the novel from which the lovers spring. It is shorthand in popular culture for doomed passion. Much of this hyper-romance gathers around Catherine’s declaration of Platonic unity with her would-be lover: “I am Heathcliff – he’s always, always in my mind.” Yet their relationship is never less than brutal.

What is it about their unearthly union, with its overtones of necrophilia and incestuous desire, that so captivates us, and why does Emily Brontë privilege this form of explicitly masochistic, irrevocable and unattainable love?

I also like the way in which the setting is a world both attached but also separate from the a wider world.

I also listened to a few podcasts talking about the book:

In Our Time

Overdue