Wuthering Heights

This was a Hard read.

It's difficult to watch the transformation—undergone by /several/ characters in the novel—of spoiled, brutalizing, and/or brutalized children into petulant adolescents, before finally hatching into cruel and malevolent adults, hard of heart and wrapped in layers of inimical misery.

Sincerely: for about fifty of the last, oh, seventy pages (of this 350ish-page edition), i was longing for release from the agony this book caused me.

But, in the end: i think i Get It, at least to some extent.

I recently picked up 1Q84 again, and in it one of the main characters, Tengo, has a mentor, Komatsu, who works in the publishing industry. During lunch toward the beginning of the book, Tengo and Komatsu are discussing a book-within-the-book, called Air Chrysalis. Both agree that the writing is horrendous; but both are also in complete agreement that it has /something/ to it, something that sticks with the reader, that makes the novella stand out. Komatsu muses that the works he likes best are those which are just beyond his understanding, books he doesn't /quite/ get, and this latter observation has been on my mind a lot recently.

Wuthering Heights has the latter quality, for me. On the surface, it's endless cruelty from start to finish, a book about cursed lives and crushed dreams (which, side note, is quite an appropriate topic for a young woman whose siblings mostly passed too young, many from tuberculosis—a theme which also appears in the novel). It is a study in carefully-nursed contempt and cruelty; on revenge; on the inadequacy of love to deliver us from trials concocted by those bent on our torture, our destruction, our corruption; on hard, unfeeling hearts; on selfishness—goodness, on boundless selfishness!

But… it was—for me, at least—a compelling read, one i had a hard time putting down, and have a hard time setting aside now.

I think what's most interesting for me is that there are so many things one could draw from this work. I think what spoke to me at present (in one 2026 world inundated with cruelty) is this meditation on confronting an unfeeling opponent. Heathcliff is more force than person in his actions: he has decided upon a cruel course, and he /will/ see it through. For most of my life, i have striven to maintain a soft heart; and i continue to nurse the naïve hope that in kindness, in patience, in gentleness, in compassion, in empathy, other hearts will respond and resonate. I hold on to the hope that those who do wicked things now may yet recover their souls. Heathcliff challenges this, thoroughly.

How will /i/ meet the Heathcliffs of our time? In Brontë's novel, Heathcliff succeeds, time and time again; and his reign of terror only ends when /something/—within or without him—finally consumes him and he meets his end. No appeals to his humanity find his heart to turn him; he will not be saved, determinedly so. He feels Wronged for not having got what he Wanted, what he felt was His, and so he has determined to exercise his cruelty, wholly irrationally, until his dying breath. He destroys /several/ lives, ruins several people—or at the very least leaves them shattered in his wake, to pick up their own pieces and live as best they can.

This is an unflinching challenge to us all, i think, to wonder how to meet such an archetype: what do we do when the better angels of our nature fail to deliver us from unrepentant evil? (For me, it is noteworthy that while love, while communion do not succeed in delivering every character who is offered these; it is the only thing that /does/ deliver /any/ of the characters, in the end)

But this is merely the idea that most stands out to me upon reflection at present; the text is rich with other questions, other observations, other meditations, other themes: property, patriarchy, religion, class, social upheaval, morality, feminism, love, race: all these (and surely others) are reflected in their own way in the story. I don't know that it really has many answers to give, but it is nonetheless a sort of… parable, a prismatic window i expect i shall peer through again.

But perhaps not for a while.