Wuthering Heights: ultimate Gothic

Volume 10 Number 7 July 14 - August 10 2014

 

Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights was the latest instalment in the 10 Great Books series held by the Faculty of Arts. Professor Deirdre Coleman, Robert Wallace Chair of English, discussed this classic novel, famous for enchanting so many young readers with its heady gothic romance. By Laura Soderlind.

Inevitably the question arises in a series dedicated to Great Books: “What really makes a great book?” As a reader, you start wandering through the corridors of speculation and meandering definitions of the epithet “great”.

Who decides which books readers and students should immerse themselves in and discuss with breathlessly reverent tones? It goes much deeper and quieter than the authorial decisions of writers: whose fingerprints are on the catalogue of must-read-literature?

Professor Deirdre Coleman, a specialist in 18th and 19th-century literature at the University of Melbourne, considers Wuthering Heights a quintessential classic.

“It’s one of the greatest novels ever written. It’s incredibly gothic and thrilling to read,” she says. 

“There’s so much sadism and cruelty amongst the characters. It makes the reader wonder what kind of woman Emily Bronte was to have dreamed up this very unladylike story.” 

Indeed, Wuthering Heights is about a thwarted romance that sits unsettlingly close to incest, where an adoptive brother and sister fall wildly and darkly in love. The implications of this taboo love ripple through subsequent generations.

There are vampiric elements as well, a nod towards necrophilia, and all the darkest recesses of the human mind emerge. This is Gothic literature at its most graphic.

“It’s an extraordinarily violent novel for a woman to write. The earliest reviews were full of complaints about how coarse and shocking the novel was to read,” Professor Coleman says.

However, the novel has been embraced by the academy and is now seen as something of a teenage girl’s rite of passage. It’s an educational and literary milestone.

There is a lonely and fierce quality to the writing that fits the spirit and ardent sensibility of youthful romance. This vision can forgive and even adore Heathcliff’s brutish and vicious tendencies. 

“If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger,” are among the more memorable words of the book’s heroine.

Her love for Heathcliff, and his for her, has something primal and savage about it.

“Heathcliff exerts an unending fascination for the reader, precisely because he has no origins. He’s an orphan boy, rescued from the slums of Liverpool. He’s starving, he has no identity, no one owns him. Given the many references to his dark complexion, and the novel’s preoccupation with slavery, it is possible that he’s a West-Indian mulatto,” Professor Coleman says.

Although adopted by the wealthy Earnshaw family and thus catapaulted into a different life, he remains an interloper and outsider. His dark presence represents the threat of the stranger, and it is his aim to revenge himself on all those who have injured him. As a hero he is a very ambiguous figure, and this ambiguity makes Wuthering Heights a difficult novel to fathom. There’s nothing black or white, or straightforward in this fictional world.

Why does this dark and complex novel exert such a powerful hold over its readers? Why has the story been re-told and re-imagined in so many different ways, from television, plays, film and opera to Kate Bush’s ethereal song Wuthering Heights?

Professor Coleman suggests the enduring power of Wuthering Heights stems from its mythic qualities. It is an epic story of a divided kingdom, and the pain these divisions inflict across the generations. In the end the two warring houses are reconciled, but the resolution still feels uneasy, unsettling.

 

www.arts.unimelb.edu.au/masterclasses/10-great-books