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BOOKS
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Wuthering Heights
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By Emily Bronte, review by Bruce Meyer
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Wuthering Heights
By Emily Bronte, review by Bruce Meyer
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Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at Haworth Parsonage, the family home of Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Stories of desperate desires, of dark heroes and heroines attempting to overcome class barriers would have been part of the everyday life in that windswept house at the edge of the Yorkshire moors. What one would have learned was that each of the girls (Anne Bronte included) possessed a unique personality and an individual way of looking at the world.
Differences between Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is a very different novel from her sister Charlotte's Jane Eyre. Wuthering Heights is very much a novel of dialogue, where what one says is often a mask for what one feels. Wuthering Heights is a novel of external psychology rather than an inward narration of the world from the perspective of a single psyche, as was the case in Jane Eyre. The effect is Emily Bronte's novel may seem far more melodramatic, but it is also intensely gripping.
In Wuthering Heights the psychology of the work is charted not in thought but in words and actions, and it is somewhat easier to read than Jane Eyre. Where Jane Eyre offers us the possibility that class barriers can be overcome through the power of the intellect and the ability to imaginatively think one's way through a labyrinth of dilemmas, Wuthering Heights tells us that we must feel our way through life's emotional crises.
What is love?
Love, asserts Emily Bronte, is not so much a meeting of minds, but the inability of personalities to be separated from each other by the circumstances of life. Bronte paints one of literature's great love affairs in the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and the dark, foundling hero, Heathcliff. As the plot develops, the last become first, but with terrible ramifications to our expectations of poetic justice. Both Bronte sisters wanted their heroines to overcome the snares of the world; and while Jane Eyre presents us with a happy ending, prepare yourselves for a heavy dose of tragedy at the hands of Emily Bronte.
Must-see Web links:
This is an online text version of Wuthering Heights:
http://www.literature.org
For those who would like some crib notes, Spark Notes outlines Wuthering Heights in a chapter-by-chapter format:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/wuthering/
This link is for Haworth Parsonage, and can also connect you to the Bronte Society.
http://www.haworth.yorks.com/parsonage.html
This link, from the Victorian Web, offers some useful background information on Emily Bronte.
http://www.victorianweb.org
Visit the Reading Room forum for book club discussions.
Click here to read Bruce Meyer's review on Jane Eyre.
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