Wuthering Heights

“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

3.5/5⭐

A controversial book, to be sure (scroll through Goodreads for some heated debate).

If you start this book expecting romance, then I can understand why you might hate it.

This is not a book about love. This is a book about obsession.

Wuthering Heights fits the mold of the old (1847) classic with a plodding pace and difficult to understand language, but—and this happens to me often with classics—when I finally finished, I found I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine is a terrifying representation of merged identities.

Heathcliff is raised surrounded by violence and degradation, and the only light in his life is his manic love affair with the vengeful and selfish Catherine. When Heathcliff loses Catherine, he morphs into something grotesque and—as often described in the book—inhuman.

Brontë hauntingly illustrates the consequences of sustaining one’s sense of self only through devotion to another.

This is also not a book to read if you want to like the characters. Each one is despicable in some way. But it's a great book to read if you are looking for a disturbing and affecting portrayal of obsession.

I might complain that the story essentially loops, repeating the first half almost exactly in the second half, but others would argue—probably rightly so—that it was intentional as a representation of generational trauma.

Heathcliff attempts to reconstruct his childhood circumstances with his own children—and those of his nemesis—in some vain attempt at revenge, or to find solace in his miserable existence. He is often compared to the devil—seeking to drag others down to his own level of misery.

In the end, Wuthering Heights is a slow, sometimes boring, but always thought-provoking look into the lives of two wretched families.

Underline-worthy quotes:

“Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!...I can not live without my soul!”

“If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day."