In its intense drama and disregard for orthodox morality, Wuthering Heights continues to surprise and challenge us today. To attempt to chart the web of relationships of blood, marriage, social strata, economic dependence, love, envy, hatred, and revenge that bind Catherine and Heathcliff to the book’s other characters would make Wuthering Heights sound like a story that somehow got drunk in Victorian England and ended up in the incestuous, jungly psychological precincts of Faulkner’s South. The plot is a tangle of primal feelings as palpable as the untamed landscape and tempestuous weather of the Yorkshire moors that Emily Brontë knew so well. As the couple’s destiny is derailed by prevailing ideas of convention and class, their intense desire drives them to punish each other as passionately as they long to love. Their ardor doesn’t prevail, but it does endure, with a grip on readers’ imaginations that is as baffling, buffeting, and transporting as only the most powerful emotions can be.
I agree this is a classic but I did not like the way this book made me feel. The main characters in this story were not sympathetic and I just wanted to be done with them.
I can't hear the title of this book without being transported back to the mild angst of my teen years, when I read this book several times. A tormented, passionate man, strong and soulful, wandering on the moors--what could be more dreamy, when you haven't had an actual experience with that type of broody, Byronic man? My tastes in men have changed drastically since then, but I still think this is a lovely book, perfect for winter reading with a howling wind as backdrop.
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