Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

I read something that said, "Wuthering Heights is a love story if you hate love." And I said, "You know what, you're absolutely correct."

Having not read this book since high school (or early college? I can't remember), I decided to read it again with fresh, grownup eyes. Though I never believed it to be a true love story, I did not remember it being quite so... bleak.

Rating: 4.5 stars

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR A 178-YEAR-OLD BOOK. HEED MY WARNING BEFORE READING FURTHER.

Unhealthy obsession, child abuse, death, necrophilia (don't @ me), etc, etc.

Brontë is marvelous as always. The book is a masterpiece. But I worry about anyone who shelves this story under "love story" or "romance". It is not either.

To call something love just because two people insist they cannot live without each other is a statement to a cultural failing. Heathcliff and Catherine don't model love; they model obsession, possession, and mutually assured destruction. The novel only looks like romance if you ignore the actual behavior of our two antagonists protagonists. The book begins with a stereotypically romantic premise: a mysterious outsider, a wild moorland setting, childhood soulmates. But then relentlessly dismantles the fantasy, showing Heathcliff not as a brooding hero to be saved, but as innately sadistic and even sociopathic.

The whole "great love story" label says more about readers than it does Brontë. We want a familiar romantic arc and instead we are handed cruelty, class anxiety, and spiritual rot. Brontë refuses to give us a morally acceptable way to root for Catherine and Heathcliff together and yet, we keep trying. Which is part of its sting.

It's a case study in intergenerational abuse. Men, women, children, and even animals are beaten, degraded, or terrorized. Heathcliff, abused as a child because of his race and class, grows into an adult who systematically abuses his wife, his son, and his dependents, recycling the harm done to him instead of transforming it. His childhood trauma metastasizes into a lifelong campaign of cruelty that warps every relationship in his path. That's not exactly swoon worthy.

It's no wonder Wuthering Heights is Bella Swan's favorite book. She ignored every red flag Edward Cullen openly waved in her face.

Also: I wouldn't be me if I didn't bring a Marxist reading into this review. Brontë is just as interested in property, labor, and social hierarchy as she is in feelings. The novel is about the conflict between nature and culture, labor and gentility, struggles over property, and inheritance. Heathcliff's fixation on the two houses and their bloodlines is as central as any fixation on Catherine. Love, if it exists here at all, is tangled up with ownership and class aspiration.

And then there's the Gothic of it all. Heathcliff isn't a dark-hearted valentine; he's a walking horror trope, a monster produced by systems of cruelty (gender inequality, classism, madness). The ghostly visitations, the graveyard fantasies (necrophilia), and the sadomasochistic edge to Catherine and Heathcliff's bond all belong more to nightmare than to harlequin.

So no: I will not be filing this under "romance." Let the marketing department in charge of the soon-to-come TikTok thirst trap abomination of a film keep their tragic lovers if they must. I'm much more interested in Wuthering Heights as a novel about what happens when we mistake possession, class resentment, and unprocessed trauma for destiny. It's a masterpiece precisely because it refuses to give us a healthy love story, and instead forces us to sit with the fact that, for a long time, we tried to pretend it did.

***

This book is part of a series in which I read Every Book Mentioned in Gilmore Girls in no particular order. (47/339)