Recently I finished Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and it may have been the most emotionally powerful read I've ever experienced…
It's like a really strong, gripping cautionary tale on the consequences of childhood trauma and abuse and how it can result in an unhealthy desire for revenge uncontrolled love, obsession, and both emotional and physical violence in a cycle that can last generations.
It's a tempest of conflicting emotions and themes: of hate but also love, of pain but also pleasure, of sickness and death but also of healing and life. It's tragic and intense and insane and crazy but I really enjoyed my time with it, somehow.
And, despite all the tragedy and all the pain it ends somewhat bittersweet. I believe Catherine and Hareton were able to break the cycle of trauma and abuse, and Heathcliff was finally able to reunite with his Cathy after almost 20 years, whose absence was the driving force behind most of his antagonistic actions against the new generation in Act 2 (I think?)
I think it felt a bit fast paced, but I was also reading it pretty quickly (faster than I usually do). Some of Joseph's lines were just impossible for me to decipher, there needed to be a lot more footnotes than there already were for me to understand him enough, lol. I think I unfortunately missed a lot of nuances because of my reading pace and the old, fancy English words and accents that I couldn't understand and had to spend time looking up also didn't help 😭
8/10, did not think I would like it that much.
by Equivalent_Bank_5845