Entertaining the Alien

2. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë#*

I first read Wuthering Heights sometime in high school. I was curious about it largely because several years earlier, I'd heard a Pat Benatar song by that name, and realized it was based on the book (I've since learned that Benatar was doing a Kate Bush cover, but I digress). Ended up writing a fairly decent paper on it my senior year about how Ellen Dean is an unreliable narrator, although I don't think I used that phrase.

In any case, reading it first for my Brontë class was an absolute joy, although now I'm worried that Emily's sisters will pale in comparison. I was ready to reread this book, because I noticed so many things I hadn't seen before. There's so much depth here. Once you get past the romantic Gothic trappings (and there's a pretty solid argument to be made that E.B. did a fair bit of mocking those genre conventions), you can find a lot of commentary on the nature of love, of character, of childhood. What draws me in every time is that Heathcliff and Catherine's love is not fairy-tale romance. It's hard, it's painful, it's as often a burden as a joy, but it's real. I love that E.B. realizes her lovers are not the type to ever live happily ever after; their personalities are too strong and too wild. So she tempers them just a touch in the next generation, giving Hareton and Cathy most of the good and only some of the bad qualities of their predecessors, giving them a love that may be less powerful, but one that gives them a greater chance of happiness. I'm left wondering if either Heathcliff or Catherine would think that worth the trade-off.