WUTHERING HEIGHTS by EMILY BRONTË

"Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you--haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe--I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always--take any form--drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!"

PR: 9.2/10

First of all I would love to thank the person who actually forced me to try Brontë sisters because I was too reluctant to even bother myself with drama and romance, but alas I was wrong.

Wuthering Heights surely is drama and romance, but not just that. It is more about a love, a kind of love that burns the people who inflame it, and in doing so, burn everyone around them. Yes it is a tale of love, betrayal, envy, loath, jealousy and revenge... How better can a classic get?

It is the story about a girl, well bred, Catherine Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights and a gypsy lad, Heathcliff whom the Earnshaw family adopts. Now as these two grow up, with other kids in the family, Catherine and Heathcliff start brewing feelings for each other, unaccounted feelings, unwanted and unnecessary. Cathy even confesses to her chamber maid, Ellen Dean who also happens to be the narrator of the story that she cannot marry Heathcliff because he has no social or financial status. I shall quote the exact verse she used in the context:

“He shall never know I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made out of, his and mine are the same.”

So all given up, she ends up marrying a rich and fine young man of her status and equally well bred, Edgar Linton of the Grange.

Now a few years after her marriage, the gypsy lad, Heathcliff returns after his disappearance and that is when he starts acting up on his revenge. Revenge for every insult and abuse the Earnshaws have inflicted on him when he was young.

I shall give no spoiler, but this is one nasty tale that nobody can even imagine. This character, Heathcliff is filled with such abundant rage and thirst for revenge, that he not only destroys his own generation, but also the succeeding. He even uses his own son as a pawn to gain to his own advantage and all for what? - just revenge! What drew him was his madness and desire to destroy and avenge himself, more than the actual cause.

I felt like he didn't have sufficient reason to inflict such horrendous revenge on his targets.

One of his famous verse, when he succeeds in attaining an interview with Catherine is:

"I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine.”

And its true she did so - but, but that didn't justify the lives, the innocent new lives that he destroyed completely, it was madness and his soul was just so chaotic!

You can either love this piece of classic goth literature, or be irritated by its characters.

Such fools! But of course, that is how the author wanted the reader to feel towards the characters.

As Isabella Linton, the sister of Edgar Linton says: “Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies.”

- and that proved exactly right for Heathcliff! No matter how much he pretended to be happy or joyous, in the end, he was only a bitter and lonely devil, who pitied his own existence. And even young Mrs. Linton Heathcliff (Cathy: daughter of Edgar and Catherine) says the same thing when the time is nigh.

Heathcliff's revenge on Hindley was justifiable, but in doing so, he turned into a ruthless monster, a ghoul, a vampire.

Isolated and loveless, his end was pitiful and most deserving. Nobody loved him, for everyone who cared about him, were a victim of his own misdoings.

Thank you for reading!