Wuthering Heights

Am I ever glad to be finished with this classic! If anyone is reading my blog, I posted awhile back about feeling a "lack" of grounding in the classics so I am working my way through a "must read" list of same. I have had a copy of Wuthering Heights languishing on my bookshelf for years, so decided to have a go.

The beginning of this gothic novel is very good. The setting is perfect...the dank, dark bogs and moors, blinding snowstorms, a menacing house, sinister landlord, skulking servants. The characters are all demoralized. The plot unfolds around a theme of hatred, violence, and revenge. Pretty grim stuff, but kind of expected. One scene in particular gave me high hopes that this was going to be a good read, given the genre (I usually avoid "horror" stories). This was a dream sequence where our narrator has a nightmare involving a ghostly child.

After the dream, the story is told by Nellie, a servant. She uses flashbacks and time shifts to describe how the residents of Wuthering Heights and its surrounds came to be such a woeful bunch. Hundreds of pages of grim. I am still not sure why this book is considered such a classic. It was not the first gothic novel after all. So, I consulted the Oxford Companion to English Literature. Here is what it says:

"Early reviewers tended to dwell on the novel's morbid and painful aspects, but their neglect has been overtaken by what is now a general recognition of the mastery of an extremely complex structure, acute evocation of place, poetic grandeur of vision, and a highly original handling of Gothic and Romantic elements inherited from lesser works."

OK, now I get it. That said, I admit to a big sigh of relief as I placed Wuthering Heights back onto the bookshelf. Been there, done that.