beggin4books's review
3.0
(3.5/5 stars) Wuthering Heights only not Jane Eyre
This is probably one of my least favorite reads of all time.
I hated every character, and I thought the "upbeat" ending was a little uncharacteristic considering how the rest of the novel before it.
That's all.
The writing though was alright. The story was like a soap opera that never should have aired in the first place.
This is probably one of my least favorite reads of all time.
I hated every character, and I thought the "upbeat" ending was a little uncharacteristic considering how the rest of the novel before it.
That's all.
The writing though was alright. The story was like a soap opera that never should have aired in the first place.
emmeline's review
challenging
dark
medium-paced
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
Jane Eyre: 3/5, I was not a fan of the ending
Wuthering Heights: Read from 5/11/2020-5/18/2020, 3.5/5/. Faster pace than Jane Eyre which I liked, it felt rushed in parts but never really dragged.
Wuthering Heights: Read from 5/11/2020-5/18/2020, 3.5/5/. Faster pace than Jane Eyre which I liked, it felt rushed in parts but never really dragged.
jaironside's review
5.0
This is one of those weird 5 star reviews where I can honestly say that I don't love the book.
This is not the first time I've read this book. Or the second. Or the fifth. It is the first time I've properly read it in fifteen years so it gave me new perspectives on the characters, which was refreshing. Personal back story - this was one of my favourite books when I was 14 (quite some time ago) up until I read it for A-level (also quite some time ago) which rather cooled me towards a reread. I hasten to add that I didn't love the book because I thought it was a grand romance, even as a teenager.
This is not a love story.
It irritated me no end that in the wake of the Twilight epidemic, it was repackaged and re-covered as a romance for the YA market.
Another reviewer rather aptly described it as a horror story which is pretty on the money. And not just in terms of the gothic setting.
Wuthering Heights is an in depth deconstruction of the destructive ability of selfish love. It's characters persue their own twisted approximations of happiness even at the expense of those they reputedly love. While some might argue that, yes, they are all pretty awful people, the fact that they can love means they are redeemable, I'm afraid that argument doesn't cut much ice with me. If you consider all the pairings in the book - Hindley and his wife, Cathy and Heathcliff, Cathy and Edgar, Isabella and Heathcliff, Catherine and Linton, Catherine and Hareton - only the latter is at all approaching what you might consider a healthy relationship. Since they start off quite abusive to each other, that's not saying much. And that gives us a direction to go in as regards theme, because at that juncture it appears to be a discussion on nature versus nurture. Emily Bronte isn't even subtle about it at one point. She has Heathcliff, having ruined Hindley and hounded him to his death, take charge of the child Hareton with the words:
'we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another with the same wind to twist it."
Heathcliff's revenge is not merely visited on his enemies but on his enemies' children. He deliberately neglects, degrades and brain washes Hareton to create a facsimile of himself at the same age out of his foster brother's child.
Heathcliff under the same treatment became vicious, scheming and cruel. Hareton, however, seems to have a better nature that is coarsened by his treatment not ruined by it. So is what Emily Bronte driving at here the fact that both nature and nurture play a role in who someone will become? Is she saying that while Heathcliff was naturally cruel he was made worse by Hindley's treatment and Cathy's desertion? If so, that would be very depressing, negating as it does much of free will. Personally, I think what she is saying is that bad treatment brings out the worst of someone's nature BUT the ability to recognise your nature and try to be superior to your circumstances, in short to choose to make the best of what you are and have been given, is what matters most. Certainly over an equal argument of straight forward nature vs nurture. It's a point revisted many times in various guises. Similar could be said for Cathy and her daughter Catherine, or Isabella and her son Linton. (Linton Heathcliff btw is a character I despise and hold in contempt over all the others, bad beginning and awful parents or not.)
So that's one thread. Another is how your choices in adversity especially grief or rejection define what sort of person you are. Hindley becomes a wastrel and useless, violent drunk on his wife's death, more or less comitting slow suicide and neglecting his son. By contrast Edgar, a very weak character in many respects, is moderate and kind, rearing his daughter, Catherine, with love and principle. Heathcliff loses Cathy twice - once to marriage with Edgar, then again to death. That second loss only hardens his resolution to revenge himself upon anyone connected to his misfortune. Reversed, Cathy loses Heathcliff twice, also primarily through her own pragmatic avarice and egocentricity, but her recourse is spite rather than calculated cruelty. What exactly are we meant to infer from this? That love is a vicious master and we are its servant? Or that if we love moderately it's hardly any better because it's an insipid thing, scarcely worth the bother? Or is there in fact a balancing point somewhere between the two? Hareton and Catherine, for instance, would seem set to be happy in that regard after a very rough start. What makes them better than their forebears? Possibly the fact that each wants the best for the other rather than just for themselves. By Wuthering Heights doctrine love without unselfishness is scarcely better than hate and will destroy you.
What interested me in this reread, was how much Heathcliff and Cathy struck me as being inherently weak. Yes, their love story is glorious and terrible and savage not to mention twisted. (I am being somewhat sarcastic here but we're meant to believe that it's a step beyond normal human love, I think) But neither of them is capable of sincere change in themselves. Perhaps adherence to a point to the brink of death and madness is not strength. Perhaps the inability to adapt and change as survival demands is the true weakness.
Final point - (and I am keeping this short because a) people have written books on this and b) I know for a fact I already wrote essays on it myself)
It is interesting that we never watch any of the story unfold directly. First it's through Lockwood's eyes, who is uncalculatedly unreliable due to his affected and somewhat weak and silly mindset. Then Nelly who is chillingly wed to her own agenda and if she does relate things honestly, skews facts by simple dint of believing herself always in the right of any situation. And then Zillah - an unreliable narrator related by an unreliable narrator to an unreliable narrator. Why so many layers between the audience and the story? It doesn't seem likely it was in anyway to protect the reader since we're hardly spared the violence or horror. (In it's day, WH was slammed for being coarse and violent and unseemly!) Could it possibly be to prevent us sympathising with the characters too much, leaving us free to watch and take heed? Or perhaps it is to make us question the events? We know the narrators lie or at least are biased. Is this a way of saying 'distrust what what you see both here and elsewhere' in matters of the heart?
There are times when it feels that Emily Bronte is deliberately sneering at traditional notions of love - familial, romantic, childish. Little wonder too if you consider her home life - seeing her father go through a bereavement that seems to have fundamentally altered him. Or Charlotte engaged in fantasies about her professor, Monsieur Heger - a married man - and making a quiet fool of herself over it. Or Branwell not being quiet at all as he destroyed himself over his alleged (but probably fantasised) affair with a married woman. Well might Emily have thought this love business was a bad affliction with the taker running presently mad.
I still get a lot from this book. It's a great piece of writing even if it's a love-hate relationship for me these days. At present Wuthering Heights and I just aren't ready to quit each other yet.
This is not the first time I've read this book. Or the second. Or the fifth. It is the first time I've properly read it in fifteen years so it gave me new perspectives on the characters, which was refreshing. Personal back story - this was one of my favourite books when I was 14 (quite some time ago) up until I read it for A-level (also quite some time ago) which rather cooled me towards a reread. I hasten to add that I didn't love the book because I thought it was a grand romance, even as a teenager.
This is not a love story.
It irritated me no end that in the wake of the Twilight epidemic, it was repackaged and re-covered as a romance for the YA market.
Another reviewer rather aptly described it as a horror story which is pretty on the money. And not just in terms of the gothic setting.
Wuthering Heights is an in depth deconstruction of the destructive ability of selfish love. It's characters persue their own twisted approximations of happiness even at the expense of those they reputedly love. While some might argue that, yes, they are all pretty awful people, the fact that they can love means they are redeemable, I'm afraid that argument doesn't cut much ice with me. If you consider all the pairings in the book - Hindley and his wife, Cathy and Heathcliff, Cathy and Edgar, Isabella and Heathcliff, Catherine and Linton, Catherine and Hareton - only the latter is at all approaching what you might consider a healthy relationship. Since they start off quite abusive to each other, that's not saying much. And that gives us a direction to go in as regards theme, because at that juncture it appears to be a discussion on nature versus nurture. Emily Bronte isn't even subtle about it at one point. She has Heathcliff, having ruined Hindley and hounded him to his death, take charge of the child Hareton with the words:
'we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another with the same wind to twist it."
Heathcliff's revenge is not merely visited on his enemies but on his enemies' children. He deliberately neglects, degrades and brain washes Hareton to create a facsimile of himself at the same age out of his foster brother's child.
Heathcliff under the same treatment became vicious, scheming and cruel. Hareton, however, seems to have a better nature that is coarsened by his treatment not ruined by it. So is what Emily Bronte driving at here the fact that both nature and nurture play a role in who someone will become? Is she saying that while Heathcliff was naturally cruel he was made worse by Hindley's treatment and Cathy's desertion? If so, that would be very depressing, negating as it does much of free will. Personally, I think what she is saying is that bad treatment brings out the worst of someone's nature BUT the ability to recognise your nature and try to be superior to your circumstances, in short to choose to make the best of what you are and have been given, is what matters most. Certainly over an equal argument of straight forward nature vs nurture. It's a point revisted many times in various guises. Similar could be said for Cathy and her daughter Catherine, or Isabella and her son Linton. (Linton Heathcliff btw is a character I despise and hold in contempt over all the others, bad beginning and awful parents or not.)
So that's one thread. Another is how your choices in adversity especially grief or rejection define what sort of person you are. Hindley becomes a wastrel and useless, violent drunk on his wife's death, more or less comitting slow suicide and neglecting his son. By contrast Edgar, a very weak character in many respects, is moderate and kind, rearing his daughter, Catherine, with love and principle. Heathcliff loses Cathy twice - once to marriage with Edgar, then again to death. That second loss only hardens his resolution to revenge himself upon anyone connected to his misfortune. Reversed, Cathy loses Heathcliff twice, also primarily through her own pragmatic avarice and egocentricity, but her recourse is spite rather than calculated cruelty. What exactly are we meant to infer from this? That love is a vicious master and we are its servant? Or that if we love moderately it's hardly any better because it's an insipid thing, scarcely worth the bother? Or is there in fact a balancing point somewhere between the two? Hareton and Catherine, for instance, would seem set to be happy in that regard after a very rough start. What makes them better than their forebears? Possibly the fact that each wants the best for the other rather than just for themselves. By Wuthering Heights doctrine love without unselfishness is scarcely better than hate and will destroy you.
What interested me in this reread, was how much Heathcliff and Cathy struck me as being inherently weak. Yes, their love story is glorious and terrible and savage not to mention twisted. (I am being somewhat sarcastic here but we're meant to believe that it's a step beyond normal human love, I think) But neither of them is capable of sincere change in themselves. Perhaps adherence to a point to the brink of death and madness is not strength. Perhaps the inability to adapt and change as survival demands is the true weakness.
Final point - (and I am keeping this short because a) people have written books on this and b) I know for a fact I already wrote essays on it myself)
It is interesting that we never watch any of the story unfold directly. First it's through Lockwood's eyes, who is uncalculatedly unreliable due to his affected and somewhat weak and silly mindset. Then Nelly who is chillingly wed to her own agenda and if she does relate things honestly, skews facts by simple dint of believing herself always in the right of any situation. And then Zillah - an unreliable narrator related by an unreliable narrator to an unreliable narrator. Why so many layers between the audience and the story? It doesn't seem likely it was in anyway to protect the reader since we're hardly spared the violence or horror. (In it's day, WH was slammed for being coarse and violent and unseemly!) Could it possibly be to prevent us sympathising with the characters too much, leaving us free to watch and take heed? Or perhaps it is to make us question the events? We know the narrators lie or at least are biased. Is this a way of saying 'distrust what what you see both here and elsewhere' in matters of the heart?
There are times when it feels that Emily Bronte is deliberately sneering at traditional notions of love - familial, romantic, childish. Little wonder too if you consider her home life - seeing her father go through a bereavement that seems to have fundamentally altered him. Or Charlotte engaged in fantasies about her professor, Monsieur Heger - a married man - and making a quiet fool of herself over it. Or Branwell not being quiet at all as he destroyed himself over his alleged (but probably fantasised) affair with a married woman. Well might Emily have thought this love business was a bad affliction with the taker running presently mad.
I still get a lot from this book. It's a great piece of writing even if it's a love-hate relationship for me these days. At present Wuthering Heights and I just aren't ready to quit each other yet.
lindaunconventionalbookworms's review
3.0
Yet another book for my MA class : Air as a Literary Elelment
theodrred's review
5.0
In high school, a friend of mine read Jane Eyre and, assuming that I would not get around to reading, I said I was fine with spoilers. When I read the book two years later, I felt that I had missed out on a vital part of the book -- I knew the truth about Rochester's past and the happenings inside Thornfield Hall. So since then, I have tended to avoid details of books I have the slightest interest in. All this is just to say that the only thing I knew about Wuthering Heights was that it was about two teenagers who were bratty and unbearable and couldn't make their relationship work. And I knew about the Kate Bush song (although I didn't even let myself listen to it, even after I started getting into her work).
But that didn't even scratch the surface of this book. Emily Brontë totally delivered on the batshit dynamic between Heathcliff and Cathy and I was in love with them & their awful unhealthy dynamic (not to mention the incest?), but there was so much else going on. This is also a sophisticated narrative about domestic abuse and intergenerational trauma spanning nearly forty years, and through multiple perspectives. It's a lot, but it's really good.
Not to mention that this went so much further than I thought a Victorian author was willing to go. The levels of blasphemy and violence were so much more than I was expecting. This is more Gothic than I could have imagined.
This is all just my impressions from my first readthrough I can't wait to revisit this in the future, I'm going to get so much more out of it. (And yeah... we're in a 48 hour Kate Bush lockdown.)
But that didn't even scratch the surface of this book. Emily Brontë totally delivered on the batshit dynamic between Heathcliff and Cathy and I was in love with them & their awful unhealthy dynamic (not to mention the incest?), but there was so much else going on. This is also a sophisticated narrative about domestic abuse and intergenerational trauma spanning nearly forty years, and through multiple perspectives. It's a lot, but it's really good.
Not to mention that this went so much further than I thought a Victorian author was willing to go. The levels of blasphemy and violence were so much more than I was expecting. This is more Gothic than I could have imagined.
This is all just my impressions from my first readthrough I can't wait to revisit this in the future, I'm going to get so much more out of it. (And yeah... we're in a 48 hour Kate Bush lockdown.)
evergleaming's review
1.0
Possibly my least favorite book of all time. I don't know if I hated Bleak House more.
mrogows's review
4.0
Well now I know where Genesis got their inspiration from for their 'Wind and Wuthering' album.
kellyk's review
3.0
I read this book knowing very little about the story ahead of time. I had some impression that there was a grand romance between Heathcliff and a woman, but I wasn't sure who that was. After reading it, I'm very surprised by what a dark story it was. Heathcliff was such an unlikable character. I understood that he was acting out of vengeance, and that the ill treatment he received as a child was the cause, but I had absolutely no sympathy for him. He was so cruel to everyone around him, even those in the next generation who had no part in the horrible treatment he received as a child.
I did find this to be a very compelling story, holding my interest with all of its twists and turns, and interconnections.
I did find this to be a very compelling story, holding my interest with all of its twists and turns, and interconnections.
kristin's review
4.0
I read this as part if the the Bronte book club (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srzqLIdA7wI) celebrating the 20th anniversary of Emily's death.
All I can say, is that they are all terrible people.
All I can say, is that they are all terrible people.
marneechua's review
2.0
Gothic? Yes. Historical and gloomy? Yes. You want a tale of two people who are introverted, nasty, and selfish? You can find it here. I was looking forward to finally reading Wuthering Heights, but now I can't tell you why. I have a reader group that adamantly defended it when I questioned why this is even considered classical literature. You want gothic with a statement about sweeping period injustice, retribution, redemption, and love? I recommend Dickens. I am definitely biased in that I have to be able to find something redeeming in at least one character, and I didn't find it here. Not even the narrator, to me, has any redeeming qualities. Although I guess some of this has more to do with the sheer stubborn selfish nature of every other character in the book. Not on my favorite list.