Another re-read after my secondary perusal of The Idiot, Wuthering Heights is another novel which exceeded my expectations on a second view. The “Gothic” is an obscure classification of literature, dark and undefined, like a dark shadow wobbling in pale candlelight. If one were to attempt a solid definition of Gothic literature, and thereby be able to classify Wuthering Heights more certainly as such, perhaps the best textbook, taxonomic description would lie in renaming it “Dark Romanticism.” Romanticism, of course, is more easily defined. Romantic literature emphasizes the individual, the psychological, the subjective, and, which is key, the passionate. But if the Romantics’ aspirations were to emulate Burke’s beautiful, much like the sensation of a rainbow, Gothic writers aspired to the sublime, like the charnel crackling of a thunderstorm. Not that beauty and the sublime are so easily inseparable, as they both blend together to paint the colors of human passion and heightened feeling. But, perhaps too simplistically, we can rest on the Gothic being defined as the darker, psychologically brooding sublimity of the passionate human psyche. 

     My overuse of the word “passion” was not due to laziness, nor because I do not have an editor or enough time senior year to write each lepidum novum libellum carefully (although both are true). Rather, when at last coming to Wuthering Heights, emphasizing its substance as being “passion” is of the highest importance. 

     The critic F.R. Leavis in his laughably brazen book The Great Tradition, cited Wuthering Heights as an anomaly—a work that had little bearing on the English novelistic tradition of Austen or Fielding and little effect on the works immediately after. Left alone in the canon, Wuthering Heights is a bit like the ruggish moorland it describes; isolated, tempestuous, and powerful beyond all human emotion and anguish. 

     With this hellish landscape, Emily Brontë congregates her cast of characters, very reminiscent of a line in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Sunken City:”

“Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best

Have gone to their eternal rest.”

     Although, more truthfully, there is little good or best at the Heights. 

     The novel opens in 1801 and is told through the first person narrator Mr. Lockwood. Perhaps one of the highest merits of Ms. Brontë’s book is her capacity to construct every character with intense and tangible character. That statement becomes apparent in chapter one, where, unlike inferior books like Dracula which have the blandest POV characters, wooden and hollow as a tree trunk, Lockwood is very much his own person, and the story is tinted with his perception. After his first foray at Wuthering Heights, he falls ill, and is nursed by one Nelly Dean, who tells him the history of Wuthering Heights and its inhabitants. Nell’s quotations and memories of her experiences which are told to Lockwood which are told to you, the reader, makes Wuthering Heights a masterpiece in both character study, unreliable narration, and careful structure. 

     Brontë’s anguished, poisonous, and deeply troubled characters are what make the novel forever timeless. Through two volumes, the novel works its way through two generations of characters, and seeing them grow up slowly and have their differences or problems grow more and more grotesque over time is breathtaking, like placing an apple on a jungle floor which you had already spotted some bruising on, and watching all the rotten edges decay to utter putrescence. Most notable, of course, is Heathcliff, a character whose upbringing was so rough, whose character is so cruel, demonic, and devilish, and who acts both as full antagonist and galling anti-hero, that he cannot be called anything but mesmerizing. Ms. Brontë’s ability to upend our own judgements on morality and be unable to decide whether to despise Heathcliff or share in his passions is incredible. In a way, that monster of a man unfolds into someone impossible to despise. His human passion, his anger, and his horrid schemes are like watching Ragnarök, the end of all days, fall out across the rainbow-beamed Heaven, with gods and demons howling into fire and wind. The sight is dreadful, horrible even, but impossible to look away from, and equally impossible to escape entrancement. 

     There is so much more I would say about the masterpiece that is Wuthering Heights, from my dubious stance on Nelly’s character, the importance of Catherine’s hauntings, and even about young, Linton Heathcliff, frail as if fed on “milk and snails” per Heathcliff. But, I shall end my rambling here. I implore you to find the beating, wounded heart that is Wuthering Heights and read it, and if you have already read it, to re-read it. I promise the story will linger with you long after, like the trails of a forlorn and howling ghost, or perhaps but the winds of the moor.