The bicentenary of Emily Brontë this summer—she was born on July 30, 1818—has been marked by numerous tributes, including a month-long installation of a commemorative postbox near her birthplace and many essays discussing her life, work, and influence. It is as good an occasion as any to revisit her legacy, which consists chiefly of just one novel, Wuthering Heights, and to ask why it remains fascinating and perennially controversial.
The middle of the three Brontë sisters who lived to adulthood, Emily Jane Brontë died of tuberculosis at 30, just a year after her novel was published under the pen name “Ellis Bell.” Brontë mythology—partly created by older sister Charlotte—has depicted Emily as an unworldly and unschooled young woman, a country curate’s daughter who lived in rural isolation yet conjured a fictional world of shocking passions and disturbing violence. Revisionist biography, though, such as the recent Emily Brontë Reappraised by British academic Claire O’Callaghan, gives us a much worldlier Emily—one who spent nearly a year in Brussels with Charlotte teaching at a boarding school and studying music and French literature. Their instructor, Constantin Héger, was greatly impressed by Emily’s intellect: Her capacity for reasoning, he later recalled, was “unusual in a man and rarer indeed in a woman” but was impaired by her “stubborn tenacity of will.”
At home in the village of Haworth, Emily Brontë was a savvy financial investor, following railroad-industry news in the papers to manage the family’s holdings in railway stocks. She was also an expert markswoman; her father Patrick, who kept a pistol in case the parsonage needed to be defended from rioters but struggled with failing eyesight, did not trust the weapon to his only son, the troubled and often drunk Branwell, and chose Emily as his “right hand.”
But this picture of a liberated woman ahead of her time is probably no closer to the real Emily Brontë than the earlier image of the shy, weird recluse. British literary critic Clement K. Shorter’s 1896 observation that the author of Wuthering Heights is “a sphinx whose riddle no amount of research will enable us to read” still rings true.
The book itself remains just as enigmatic. It is often described as a great love story—the greatest of all time, according to a 2007 British poll; sometimes, it is also unfairly consigned to the forbidden-romance genre in which young women are irresistibly drawn to dark and dangerous bad boys. (In a 2012 review of the latest screen adaptation, Roger Ebert even compared the book to the Twilight series, which is a bit like comparing Hamlet and King Lear to soapy family dramas.) Yet some of the novel’s admirers consider it not a love story at all but an exploration of evil and abuse, with the iconic antihero Heathcliff as both victim and perpetrator; feminist critics, including O’Callaghan, argue that the love-story reading of Wuthering Heights not only romanticizes abusive men and toxic relationships but goes against Brontë’s clear intent.
Love story or not? There is no denying that the passionate, doomed, death-transcending relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw Linton forms the core of the novel, and animates it even when Catherine is gone except as Heathcliff’s obsession. It is certainly the stuff of tragic romance, from the early glimpse of Heathcliff desperately grieving for the long-dead Catherine (who may or may not be a wandering ghost) to the subsequent revelations about their past: The powerful attachment between the adopted foundling and the daughter of country gentlefolk, raised together and torn apart by a brutal reassertion of class barriers; Catherine’s decision to marry an upscale suitor despite her abiding love for Heathcliff; Heathcliff’s disappearance and return with mysteriously acquired wealth; and the ensuing turmoil that leads to Catherine’s violent illness and death and Heathcliff’s undying anguish.
It is equally true that Wuthering Heights consistently subverts the romantic narrative. Our first encounter with Heathcliff shows him to be a nasty bully. Later, Brontë puts in Heathcliff’s mouth an explicit warning not to turn him into a Byronic hero: After Catherine’s foolishly smitten sister-in-law Isabella makes the huge mistake of eloping with him, he sneers that she did so “under a delusion . . . picturing in me a hero of romance.”
Heathcliff’s abusive marriage to Isabella is just one of his many vendetta-driven cruelties. He encourages Catherine’s brother and his erstwhile persecutor Hindley Earnshaw in his drinking and gambling habits, taking over his estate and hastening (or perhaps directly causing) his demise; he has Hindley’s orphaned son Hareton raised as an illiterate farm boy to repay his own degradation at Hindley’s hands. Years later, he uses deceit and coercion to force Catherine’s teenage daughter into marriage to his own sickly (and soon dead) son, then keeps the girl a virtual prisoner, steals her inheritance, batters her, and even destroys her books. (Hollywood’s 1939 grand-romance version with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon understandably lops off the second-generation storyline, in which Heathcliff is thoroughly unromanticizable.) Never mind dark and dangerous; we’re talking dark and psychopathically sadistic. And we didn’t even get to the animal abuse.
If this sounds like an invitation to a feminist analysis of male brutality, it is worth noting that Catherine is a pretty terrible human being in her own right. She is a thorough narcissist, even if it’s a narcissism a deux that includes Heathcliff as her alter ego (“I am Heathcliff!” she says to housekeeper/narrator Nelly Dean in one of the novel’s most famous lines). Her initial plan for marriage to Edgar Linton is to use his wealth and status to raise up Heathcliff; later, she bristles at her meek husband for being less than overjoyed about her and Heathcliff’s renewed intimacy. She cruelly taunts Isabella over the latter’s infatuation with Heathcliff, with disastrous consequences. As a teenager, she lashes out violently at Nelly and at her own toddler nephew in a fit of temper, and at her then-fiancé when he tries to intervene (poor Edgar lacks the sense to get away while he still can). It is not wrong to sum up the Catherine/Heathcliff story as awful people being awful to each other and to more or less innocent bystanders.
And yet—and yet. Somehow, we are still moved by their larger-than-life passion and longing; somehow, we are still riveted when Heathcliff and the dying Catherine see each other one last time, in a rollercoaster of anger, despair, and unbearable tenderness, and cling to each other in near-madness; somehow, the loathsome Heathcliff of the later chapters can still strike us as poignant when he laments that the entire world reminds him of Catherine and of her absence. As one of the more sympathetic early reviewers put it, “In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love—even over demons in the human form.”
Is this a sexual and/or romantic love? Is it, as some argue, more like a hyper-intense twinship, or even an impossible yearning to transcend human separateness and merge completely in spirit? Whatever it is, it is a force of nature, awful in the modern meaning of the word but also in the older one of “awe-inspiring.”
Nor do we finally know whether there is anything redemptive in Heathcliff’s story. One can make a strong case that there is not; and yet at the end, he gives up his revenge and declines to thwart the budding love between Hareton and young Cathy—at least in part because they are an image of his and Catherine’s once-thwarted love. (Soon after that, he apparently finds either real or imagined, blissful and agonizing and ultimately fatal communion with Catherine’s ghost.)
And what to make of the happy ending in which Hareton and Cathy are about to be married and regain possession of the Earnshaw and Linton estates? Does it restore the traditional order, with Heathcliff the lower-class usurper gone, or offer an ironic parody of rightful restoration? Are Cathy and Hareton the new and improved Catherine and Heathcliff—the free-spirited couple that got it right—or a pale and dull copy? (I, for one, find their progression from hostility to affection interesting and appealing, even without the Heathcliff/Catherine magnetism.)
Of course, if Wuthering Heights is a love story—however dark and strange—it is also much more. It is a story of power struggles and class conflict in which the oppressed strikes back at the oppressors and himself becomes the oppressor. (The conflict can be interpreted as partly racial as well, since Heathcliff is almost certainly, in modern parlance, a “person of color”: he is described as dark-skinned and repeatedly called a gypsy, and there are clues that he may look Arab or Indian.) It is a story of wild freedom versus restraint, and wild nature versus civilization. It is a masterful portrayal of a world out of joint where disorder and degradation rule; in particular, Isabella’s harrowing accounts of life at Wuthering Heights with Heathcliff, the drunk and raving Hindley, and the surly self-righteous manservant Joseph paint an almost Dostoyevskyan picture of a house of horrors.
The novel’s intricate, multilayer, multi-perspective structure must also count as a remarkable Brontë achievement. The framing narrative by Lockwood, the lodger who rents the former Linton manor from Heathcliff and blunders into an ill-fated visit to Wuthering Heights, leads to an excerpt from Catherine’s old diary and then to Nelly’s narration of the family history; within it, there are mini-narrations by Heathcliff, Isabella, and even another servant. And then there’s the question of Brontë’s attitude toward her narrators, from her unmistakable sarcasm toward Lockwood—who fancies himself a world-weary romantic but comes across as an effete snob—to subtler hints that Nelly’s perspective is influenced by her own biases. (One critical view, admittedly farfetched, holds that Nelly is a villain whose machinations are behind most of her masters’ woes.)
In our gender-conscious time, the question of whether Wuthering Heights is a feminist novel inevitably comes up. Women’s legal disempowerment is certainly a factor in the story: Cathy’s marriage to Heathcliff’s son Linton gives him control of her property and allows him to will it all to his father. (It should be noted that, even in those days, wives’ property rights were often protected by prenuptial agreements, and that some of Heathcliff’s actions are almost certainly illegal but Cathy has no resources to contest them.) And yet the female predicament as such is not really Emily Brontë’s focus, the way it often was for her sisters Charlotte and Anne; Hareton is just as dispossessed as Cathy, and the novel’s women generally hold their own quite well against the men. Catherine easily dominates the mild-mannered Edgar by sheer force of her personality; Cathy’s relationship with Hareton at the end is one of full equals, and if anything he follows her lead. If Wuthering Heights is feminist, it is not so in the sense of chronicling women’s oppression but of creating female characters with as much depth, agency, and capacity for both good and evil as the men.
Ironically, the book’s unidealized women were one aspect that shocked Victorian-era critics: Noting that the novel featured too many people who were either hateful or despicable, one reviewer rued that “even the female characters excite something of loathing and much of contempt.” Yet while Wuthering Heights certainly scandalized the press with its “vulgar depravity” and “diabolical” brutality, its reception was not entirely negative. Even a number of reviews that voiced shock at the subject matter praised the book’s power and the author’s talent. Several expressed the hope that “he” would write a second novel with a more balanced view of human affairs.
That was not to be. It appears that Brontë did, in fact, start working a new novel in the final months of her life, though its subject remains unknown; presumably it was burned by Charlotte Brontë, with other papers, after Emily’s death in late 1848. All that remains of her writing, aside from Wuthering Heights, is a handful of poems, some letters and diary pages, and the essays she wrote in Brussels as part of her French literature homework. (Also lost: Emily’s Games of Thrones-ish juvenilia set in a fantasy realm called Gondal.)
We’ll never know whether Emily Brontë could have written something to surpass Wuthering Heights. But her only novel has secured her place in the canon. It has inspired several derivative works, among them the reasonably well-received 1992 novel H.: The Story of Heathcliff’s Journey Back to Wuthering Heights by English professor Lin Haire-Sargeant, a skillfully written and inventive “missing years” story marred by a too-obvious, fanfiction-like effort to exculpate its protagonist. There are also countless film and television adaptations, though none comes close to capturing the spirit of the novel. The 1992 TV movie is watchable for Ralph Fiennes’s superb turn as Heathcliff, despite a miscast Juliette Binoche as both of the Catherines and a ludicrous, pastel-filtered ghostly reunion of the lovers at the end. Yet another movie version is scheduled to come out later this year. (Also worth a mention: The excellent if bleak 2016 BBC two-parter about the Brontës, To Walk Invisible, featuring Chloe Pirrie as a fine, formidable Emily.)
Of all the original reviewers, perhaps the one who came closest to the truth was the anonymous critic who described Wuthering Heights as “a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it.” All these years later and it’s still worth talking about.
