If you haven't read Wuthering Heights but plan to read it, don't read on. There are a lot of spoilers in here.
Admittedly, it took me until the age of 25 to read Wuthering Heights. I've always heard it chalked up as some big love story. All I heard was Heathcliff, Heathcliff, Heathcliff. Romantic hero. Passionate lover. Man of any woman's dreams. I specifically remember seeing pictures of the book on the internet captioned by dozens of lovesick cat ladies exclaiming that they wanted someone to love them like Heathcliff. So, I was intrigued. What made this guy so great? Not to mention, it's a classic, and I feel like it's one of those books so often mentioned that I should have read way before now. But, in all honesty, it was really the snazzy hardback cover that convinced me to buy it. I've had it sitting in my room for several months now, the little cloth bookmark lodged somewhere around chapter 5 and neglected afterward.
I've really been wanting to read lately though, and I have a thing about needing to finish books I've started before I move on. I remind myself that when I first started to read The Count of Monte Cristo (perhaps my favorite novel of all time), I hadn't been all that interested at first either. So I picked Wuthering Heights back up today and sat and read the whole thing.
And now I am considerably confused. People call Heathcliff the tormented romantic hero that destroys everyone that crosses his path because of his inability to be with his true love. But I'm not buying that. Why would anyone want to be with that psycho? I wouldn't call it love. I'd call it obsession. Because he couldn't have her, he wanted to ruin everyone. There was nothing romantic about what he did up to or after Catherine's death. Not that she was ever all that great to begin with either. I'm pretty sure she was unhinged from the start. That's something else: I don't understand any of the women in this book.
Throwing themselves into passionate tantrums that lead to their death because they didn't get their way, because someone questioned them in the slightest? What? Not to mention how quickly their affections come and go or how obsessively they can latch on to one thing. Stop crying about everything!
Anyway, that's a whole other rant. My point here is that Heathcliff is not romantic or a hero or a romantic hero. First off, he's "in love" with a very manipulative woman that is not above talking down to him as her lesser, and who clearly views him as her lesser counterpart, as she can't marry him, because he has nothing material to offer. He obsesses over the idea of her. And seemingly it's mostly because she's beautiful. Likewise with her daughter and Hareton. Then, when he can't have her, he decides to trick her sister-in-law into marrying him. Really? So he's just going to destroy her family if she won't be with him? That's not very romantic. Shouldn't he have at least started out with trying to convince her to leave her husband and be with him? Then she dies and he tries to dig her up = very alarming obsession. Red flags.
He takes over her childhood home, beats up on her family, makes her nephew into basically a slave. And to top it all off, he manages to manipulate her daughter into his possession where he keeps her as a prisoner in his house after forcing her to marry his son that he hates, right before said son dies. He beats her up, degrades her, etc. I mean, even though she is also the daughter of Edgar, she's still Catherine's daughter too, and she has her eyes, and you think some part of him would be like, hey, this is my last physical link to Catherine. I could treat her well, like her mother would want...
But you know, I'm really not even sure her mother would have cared about her (since she so clearly only cared about herself for the most part), so maybe that's an irrelevant point.
Their "love" was just messed up on both sides. It was a volatile relationship. Catherine was annoyingly dramatic and stupid. Heathcliff was every one of the things Nelly Dean called him: goblin, demon, vampire (Yes, he was not a romantic hero, he was a vampire. He sucked the life out of everyone). And Nelly, come to think of it, was also extremely irritating in that she always had to open her big mouth and stir the pot.
I think the only character I felt any sympathy at all towards was Hareton. At least he couldn't help the way that he was and wanted to change. And he did change. He became a better person, and, through being with him, Cathy became a much more tolerable character to me. Perhaps he's the real romantic hero in the book. He did try to stand up for Cathy on several occasions. And he did try to better himself for her. He was always doing things for her, being nice to her when she didn't deserve it. I still think he should have punched her in the nose instead of forgiving her when she tried to explain that she wasn't being mean by making fun of the fact that he couldn't read, because (though I really felt bad for her for what Heathcliff did to her and the fact that her father died and she genuinely did love him) she was a total snob that needed to be kicked down a peg or two. But, you know, he made her a better person and vice versa in the end, so that counts for something.
My conclusion is definitely that Hareton is the romantic hero. Mr. Heathcliff was a butthole and a vampire and most likely did end up with Catherine in the afterlife, because she was also a vampire. I really hope Edgar found some other happiness as a ghost, because he was clearly blind to the fact that his wife didn't love him. Not completely anyway. Catherine and Heathcliff are having a grand time being ghosts and creeping up the Heights with their weird freak ghost selves. Edgar should just go to the light.
And I thought there must be some movie version I haven't seen that really glorifies Heathcliff or has him portrayed by a handsome enough actor that girls think he's some kind of hero (They did this with The Count of Monte Cristo, my favorite novel of all time. Edmond does not go back to Mercedes, her son is not his, it is not all rainbows and butterflies. He has his revenge and doesn't want anything else to do with the past or the woman that jumped on someone else basically the second he was sent to prison. He doesn't make any excuses for the person he became). I IMDB'd it. Tom Hardy played Heathcliff in one version. I love Tom Hardy. But Heathcliff is still a jerk, and I'm convinced all the people in the book except Edgar Linton and Hareton Earnshaw were off their rocker in some form or fashion. I'm not sure how any movie could gloss over that, but maybe one has, or maybe people are just desperate to cling to the idea of such passionate love. But I still don't think it's love. I think Heathcliff and Catherine had serious mental issues.
I mean, now that I've ranted, I can't even just lay the blame solely at Heathcliff's feet. Most of those people were nuts, driven by some crazy fantasy or another. Did I like the book? I don't know. Yes. I think. I mean, I read it all in one sitting. It was interesting. I did want to know how things had come to be the way they were in the Heights when Mr. Lockwood first arrived there. I was intrigued, even if eternally irritated, by the characters. So yeah, I would tell people to read it and to see what I mean about Hareton and to really consider what good qualities they could possibly contribute to Heathcliff.
And now that that's done, I'll move on to the next book. It should be Allegiant, the final book of the Divergent series, but I've been avoiding it. I wasn't overly impressed with the second book or how much Tris started to remind me of Bella Swan. There is just something annoying and whiny when it comes to her and Four. And then the ending of that book seemed predictable. A lot of it seemed predictable. I mean, I am eventually going to read that book, because I just have to now that I started the trilogy. But it still may not be my immediate next choice. I just ordered Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and The Count of Monte Cristo in cool hardback covers. Yes, I already have the latter, but I needed this one for the cool cover and to entice me to reread the story for the third time. I'm pretty sure I've read Peter Pan before, but too long ago to remember, so I may wait for it and Alice to get here, since it should be three days max, and read them. I think I'd rather read them. The sappy romance/whiny, overemotional heroine thing is just really plucking at my nerves.
I'm just kind of to the point of, "Shut uuuup! Just do iiiiiit! You know you're going to anyway!"
So yeah, when I do read Allegiant, I'm sure I'll come back hear to vent my thoughts. If you have read it, don't tell me about it. Not one thing, not even how it made you feel. That's why I posted my review of Wuthering Heights on my blog and linked it to my Facebook rather than posting my thoughts on Facebook, because I don't want to spoil it to anyone that has read it.
Anyway, I am glad I have the opportunity to read what I want for the moment. It has been enjoyable, even though all of that probably just made it sound like I hated the book. I didn't. I just wanted to slap some of the characters is all. So, read if you haven't, or let me know what you think if you have and want to.
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