A couple of days ago, I watched the new movie just to kill time with a bunch of friends. I barely remembered the plot of the book, which I had read a decade ago, but it felt quite different, if it was related at all. Then I picked up the book again.
Gotta say, I got hooked immediately. The story begins with a first-person perspective as someone—Mr. Lockwood—intrudes upon Wuthering Heights on a snowstorm day.
Well, if it’s not stormy, why call it Wuthering Heights?
Then the family dynamics between Heathcliff, Catherine Linton, and Hareton are exposed. Everyone hates each other, and they are so rude. This is new, I thought. It’s not every day that I encounter such rudeness in British novels. Normally, even if characters hate each other to death, they still try to remain calm and civilized—to be a gentleman or a lady—before writing a letter so angrily that one’s pen nearly slashes the paper. (I could be wrong; I’m not an expert in British literature.)
Heathcliff must be someone, I dared say. So I kept reading.
Whoa, it gets more awkward! Mr. Lockwood, apparently a nosy and gossipy fellow, thinks Hareton is Heathcliff’s son. (Well, watch out, Mr. Lockwood! Hareton is actually the son of Heathcliff’s most hated enemy.) There are also some less-than-civil exchanges between Mrs. Heathcliff and Heathcliff. Oh well, Mr. Lockwood has to spend the night now! Look what you’ve brought upon yourself—and upon Wuthering Heights. The residents here are in no good state to take care of themselves, let alone receive guests.
But Mr. Lockwood stays anyway; he has to. He picks up a book that the late Catherine Earnshaw used to write in as a diary. Then he has a dream of Catherine’s specter demanding entrance—she has been waiting for twenty years, the specter shouts. Heathcliff hears Mr. Lockwood’s scream, comes over, and then desperately calls Catherine’s name repeatedly.
This is where I’m going to stop spoiling.
The beginning is set up so well that I not only become really curious about what happened twenty years earlier, but I also feel deeply immersed in the atmosphere: cold, everyone unhappy, and cut off from the outside world. When I read, I picture myself there, just like in the movie.
The British shows I’ve watched, such as Clarkson's Farm, All Creatures Great and Small, and Lark Rise to Candleford, depict plateaus that are vast, bright green, lush with grass, and full of life. Yet in the movie, it feels as though, apart from grass and stone, nothing grows there—life withers.
I also remembered that the author of Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë, was the sister of the author of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë. In Charlotte’s book, there is so much description of abuse among cousins and schoolmates. What prompted the sisters to both write about such dark themes?
by dongludi
1 Comment
To be honest, there is sooooo much overt conflict, unlike any other British novels I’ve read. It almost feels more like a Dostoevsky novel, in which, at a dinner party, people shout, yell, and make dramatic, unreasonable decisions (as in The Idiot).