My Ascent of Wuthering Heights
Happy Valentines Day!
Emily Bronte is largely an unknown name, but her fame will be revived once more with a new Hollywood adaptation of her classic novel, Wuthering Heights. Originally published in 1847 under the pseudonym, Ellis Bell, it had been released a year before her death at the age of thirty. And to help cement her place in English literary history, Emily’s older sister, Charlotte Bronte (who achieved greater fame as the author of Jane Eyre) was instrumental in promoting Emily’s talent and achievements.
Starring Margot Robbie as Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw and distributed by Warner Brothers Pictures, the movie’s release is scheduled for February 13th – the eve of Valentines Day. Yes, this is a love story, and an exceptional one, but to me, Wuthering Heights has earned its place in the canon of great Western literature for other significant reasons.
To be clear, I am new to this work and everything in this essay is sourced from one place: the Penguin Books edition of 1995. That includes a Preface and Introduction by other authors and a Biographical Notice and Introduction by Charlotte, aka Currer Bell. Selfishly, I am writing this in anticipation of the movie’s release because reading the original work before seeing the film adaptation is usually a good idea.
But if you have not read the novel and would like to see the movie, hopefully this rough sketch will help you enjoy the film even more and none of it will be considered a spoiler. But in a novel that is more characterization than plot, the few characterizations I highlight will give clues.
Emily Bronte
First, Emily Bronte’s skill with the English language is astonishing and capable of lifting the spirits of her readers with its depth of soul. Ironically, that is a fascinating counterpoint to the sociopathic behavior of some of her characters. About that eloquence, Charlotte Bronte wrote about the shared values of her sisters, including Anne (pseudonym Acton Bell): “I believe language to have been given us to make our meaning clear, and not wrap it in dishonest doubt.”
There was my first paradox - the dishonest doubt of the people and the culture of a Gothic novel that is vividly described with the precision and artistry of a master. But that is understandable if you consider the secluded, intellectual, stoic and reasoning life of Emily Bronte as described in the 1995 Introduction by Pauline Nestor:
The same sense of a self-enclosed, almost hermetically sealed world; the alertness to the natural world; and the passionate engagement with the dark, fiery world of the imagination.
Heathcliff
The original purpose of this essay was to identify the silver lining of capitalism in the character of Heathcliff, and with no preconceptions about this novel or its characters, I thought I was the right man for the job. But I found few such character traits. What I discovered was a marvelous exposition of English literature in my first Gothic novel, but the virtues of productiveness, honesty and trade for mutual profit were limited to the servants and incidental characters.
Especially Heathcliff, however, he did have principles, and Bronte cleverly integrated them with the physical location itself. About the Wuthering Heights estate: “Happily, the architect had the foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows were set deeply in the wall, and corners defended with jutting stones.”
As for Heathcliff himself when first greeting a prospective renter: “Thrushcross Grange is my own sir, he interrupted, wincing, I should not allow anyone to inconvenience me, if I could hinder it – walk in.” This was Heathcliff giving a nod to the trader principle.
In fact, one might think that an intrinsic love of money is what motivated Heathcliff’s cruelty or indifference toward everyone not named Catherine Earnshaw, but after studying this novel, I don’t believe that. He may have acquired his wealth through deception – it doesn’t really say, but he understood that money is a tool and only people who respect money deserve to possess it. Like a successful entrepreneur, he thought long term, took calculated risks, and had a vision.
Catherine
None of the other main characters who are not servants or narrators fit that description. To say more would give away some of the plot. But what is fascinating about the moral code of Heathcliff, albeit destructive, was illustrated brilliantly by Emily Bronte in this passage about losing Catherine’s devotion to him:
Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart – you have broken it – and in breaking it, you have broken mine . . . I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer - but yours! How can I?
With this passage and through Heathcliff and Catherine, Emily Bronte has examined the nature of evil in three ways:
It is impotent unless given sanction by its victims,
The ultimate sin is to disown one’s highest value - your life,
Love is supremely powerful when grounded in the deepest shared values.
At Wuthering Heights, Bronte has dramatized that genuine love is reserved for those who have truly earned it - and that is what makes this a most compelling love story. Which brings up one of the characters traits that attracted Heathcliff so desperately to Catherine - her independently exuberant sense of life:
Her spirits were always at high water mark, her tongue always going – singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same. A wild wick slip she was - but, she had the bonniest eye, and sweetest smile, and lightest foot in the parish.
Social Traditions
As readers and movie goers will notice, the cultural backdrop is mid 19th England. It may have been more liberated than the rest of the world, but the remnants of feudalism lingered. The social and political hierarchies of race, sex, and religious tradition had restricted the educational, employment and marriage choices available to women.
The Slavery Abolition Act was fresh, but women’s suffrage was in its infancy, marriage laws had teeth, and as Nestor explained in her Introduction, Emily Bronte was not explicitly concerned with much of that. But she did write about the behavioral consequences. Speaking for Heathcliff, Bronte writes:
Nelly, if I knocked him down twenty times, that wouldn’t make him less handsome or me more so. I wish I had light hair and fair skin, and was dressed, and behaved as well, and had a chance to be as rich as he will be.
What Heathcliff later proved was that earned wealth is possible to the largest number of people when free markets are protected and practiced. In the history of the world at the time, that was 17th century Holland, 18th century England, and 19th century America. But about Catherine, her psychosis may have been the consequence of her own self-deception and conformity to their rigid social structure:
Nelly, did it ever strike you that, if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars? If I marry Linton, I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my brother’s power?
Never discussed is the fact that these caste-system traditions existed, and were possibly worse, wherever Heathcliff was actually born. Possibly the Middle East. And as readers know well and moviegoers may realize, Nelly was a family servant, the novel’s narrator, and the most rationally principled character in the story.
In a larger sense, every one of the natural born Earnshaws and Lintons that are featured in the novel’s plot enjoyed a wealth of leisure time they had not earned. The relative opulence of the homes and the value creating enterprises of the estates had been built in the previous century by their grandparents and forebears.
Poetic Justice
Who were the forebears of Hindley and Catherine Earnshaw? Or of Edgar and Isabella Linton? More significant, who were the grandparents of the Bronte sisters? To be sure, their stories are not the stuff of a Gothic romance psycho horror tragedy, but their parents afforded them the education, time and environment to become three of the greatest literary artists of the century.
As objective investors, we know that time for our highest values is the ultimate payoff, and their leisure was only by means of production and free trade. However, there is another important economic lesson to learn - and one that I had heard when I was young but never took as seriously as it deserves. Most likely, you have heard this too: If you redistribute all the money in the world equally among everyone, it will return to the original pockets after a short period of time. Why? Creative minds and productive effort respect money and think long-term.
Heathcliff proved it. That is one benefit of his story, but not the value of Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte’s prose and the verse in the footnotes is the prize, and it is best served with the restoration to pride of the surviving generation in the novel, young Catherine and Hareton, also experienced by Nelly:
I had long been proud of one, and now, I was sure, the other would be a source of equal satisfaction. His honest, warm, and intelligent nature shook off rapidly the clouds of ignorance and degradation in which he had been bred; and Catherine’s sincere commendations acted as a spur to his industry.
Let’s see if this theme of reason and justice and makes it to the movie.