Edited by :Kartika Puri (UG 2019)
Last week, I finally finished The Wuthering Heights. It is a canonical text and had thus been on my reading list for a long time. Some call the book a great love story. In fact, the editor of my copy describes it as “one of the greatest love stories ever told”. On reading it, however, I found it to be the very opposite. For instead of love, The Wuthering Heights is about a toxic relationship between two characters who have no redeeming qualities. Here is the thing, in the book, there is an all-consuming, passionate love between the main characters all right. It is a love unhindered by any societal and familial barriers. Often, with most stories of such nature, this fact of love is glorified. The author ropes you in, to root for the couple until the end. But here, it is only the main characters who glorify their love. There is no one else who shares his or her opinion. And rightly so, for the following reasons:
UNLIKEABILITY
There are two Catherines in the story, so to avoid confusion; I will refer to the mother and the main character as Cathy and to her daughter as Catherine. The two main characters, Heathcliff and Cathy, are arguably the worst characters in the story. Not only do they make each other miserable but also they make literally everybody else around, and I mean everybody, miserable. And it’s all in the name of their love. MISTREATMENT OF THE SPOUSE
Cathy and Heathcliff marry the Linton siblings, Edgar and Isabella respectively. They belong to a rich upper-class family, who are neighbours to the Earnshaws. Since her childhood, Cathy has been wild and has a bad temper. She has a habit of doing whatever she wishes to, whenever she wishes to. Her kindness and concern are limited to Heathcliff and Heathcliff only. She marries Edgar, seemingly for Heathcliff’s sake and then goes on to resent Edgar for it. Heathcliff runs away before Cathy’s marriage. Yet, when he returns he starts paying continual visits to her. Then there is an inevitable showdown between Heathcliff and Edgar after which she calls Edgar a coward and tells him that Heathcliff would be able to defeat him whenever he so desires. After being demeaned by both his wife and Heathcliff, Edgar banishes Heathcliff from entering his house. Cathy takes offence at this and decides that both men have been unfair to her. In consequence, she shuts herself up in a room and refuses to take any food or company. Knowing that she has the tendency to be manipulative, Nelly, Cathy’s lady-in-waiting, does not tell Edgar about this, who, in turn, retreats to his library and spends all his time there. Cathy keeps on telling Nelly about how miserable she is, both mentally and physically, hoping that the news would be passed on to Edgar. She hopes for him to get worried and be overcome by guilt looking at the state that she has been in, all owing to his actions. She wants him to suffer from guilt as a punishment. But Nelly refuses to tell Edgar, who too remains in wait for Cathy to apologise to him. Heathcliff’s treatment of Isabella is similarly woeful. In the beginning, Isabella has a simple crush on him but on finding out about it, Heathcliff, disregarding the fact that he has no love for her, pursues her. They elope to get married. After that, however, he mistreats her to the point that she runs away from their home. Heathcliff justifies his actions as taking revenge upon Cathy.
THE TOXIC LOVE’S EFFECTS ON THE NEXT GENERATION
Cathy and Heathcliff’s love is so limited to themselves that even children have to withstand the worst of their selfishness. For example, his father and Cathy’s older brother, Hindley after his wife dies in childbirth, treat Hareton Earnshaw, Cathy’s nephew, with complete disregard. Later, Hareton comes under the wing of Heathcliff, who mistreats him. He is never given any schooling, is made to do menial jobs around the household. He even adopts the demeanour and talking style of a servant and is often rebuked by almost every character in the story. Same goes for Cathy’s daughter, Catherine. When Cathy shuts herself up to punish the Heathcliff and Edgar, she does not eat anything, does not sleep and works herself into a delirium. During all this while, she is pregnant. After a week or so, Cathy opens the door and Nelly finds her on the verge of death. She dies soon after giving birth to her daughter. Cathy hardly acknowledges her. Even at the moment of her death, she is in Heathcliff’s arms and the entire scene is about their love. Neither Edgar, whom she basically tricked into marrying him and who nonetheless remains devoted to her till his own last breath nor her own daughter whom she is about to leave motherless as a result of her actions, is given any consideration. Heathcliff’s treatment of his and Isabella’s son, Linton, is likewise of complete disregard and hatred. His mother runs away when she is pregnant with him. A few years after he is born, she dies of sickness and his uncle, Edgar, brings him home. After Heathcliff is informed of this, he lays a paternal claim on Linton to get him to the Wuthering Heights. Yet, he hates his son from the beginning because he reminds him of Edgar. He mistreats him, and Linton, lacking in strength and health, becomes very sick. Heathcliff keeps him alive until he gets him married to Catherine after which, his disregard for Linton knows no bounds. He even stops calling the doctor and wishes for his son to die soon so that the property he inherited from his wife would be passed to him. Heathcliff’s treatment of Catherine, who is the daughter of the woman whom he loved with utmost passion and devotion, is unsurprisingly again terrible. He lures her into his household with the proposal of marriage to Linton, to eventually kidnap her and keep her prisoner in his house, all the while her father Edgar is dying. After Linton’s death, Catherine has to live with Heathcliff and is constantly on the receiving end of his abuse, both physical and verbal. He calls her nothing short of a slut and witch. And in his eyes, she deserves all this because she is the daughter of Edgar.
DELUSION OF THE LOVERS
Both Cathy and Heathcliff, never see their actions as wrong or unjustified. From the very beginning, they look at themselves as victims. This misery that began with them seems to continue into the next generation, namely, Linton, Hareton and Catherine, who are by then, filled with malevolence towards each other. But fortunately, this spell is broken when Catherine and Hareton get married by keeping their differences aside and choosing kindness over the hatred and destruction that were passed on to them by Cathy and Heathcliff. Theirs is what I would not mind calling “love”. Now again, this is just my interpretation. There exist several. Unfortunately, nobody knows which interpretation is in line with the author’s own since Emily Bronte died within a year of its initial publication, was sick during most of that time, and lived a secluded life. In fact, when the book did come out, it received mixed reviews with several people finding it too wild; lacking civility in its depiction of what would generally be respectable characters. It got to a point that Charlotte Bronte had to defend her sister by blaming the book’s content on Emily’s sickness. Nevertheless, The Wuthering Heights remains one of the best books I have ever read. It is hard to put down the book once you start it, despite raising several questions about the theory and practice of love.