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| Not quite Cathy, but I was good at pretending. Also, not even Yorkshire. |
Wuthering Heights is my all time favourite novel, one I've loved since I first read it in my very early teens, a novel I reread roughly every year. It invariably moves me to tears.
My mother was a Brontë fan, hence my name. Although we lived in smoky central Leeds at that time, my parents took me to Haworth when I was a small girl. We walked over the moors to Top Withens, the ruined farmhouse that is supposed to be the site of Wuthering Heights itself, albeit the house in the novel is bigger, a reasonably prosperous Yorkshire farmhouse with a blazing fire at the heart of the place. The main room Emily describes through the voice and vision of Mr Lockwood, is a typical farmhouse 'living kitchen' as we used to call our urban equivalent, when I was young. But this room, at the heart of Wuthering Heights, and at the heart of the novel, also resembles a much older 'Great Hall', a big communal living space.
Not a single dramatised version of the novel ever gets it right. Back when I was still writing radio drama for BBC R4, I begged and pleaded to be allowed to dramatise it, and occasionally my producer would put in a proposal, but London always said no. I may not have got it right either, but I would have made a better job of it.
The recent travesty sounds so bad that you'd wonder Emily didn't come back and haunt them. I like Margo Robbie. She's a fine actor and a beautiful woman. But she's a thirty five year old statuesque blonde, and Cathy is a young Yorkshire lass, a 'wild wick (i.e. lively) slip' of a girl with dark hair and dark eyes that mirror Heathcliff's own, because they must. It's part of the structure and meaning of the novel. Cathy is 'hardly six years old' when Mr Earnshaw brings the 'dirty, ragged, black haired child' home with him and the incomer is only a few years older. Cathy is eighteen, going on nineteen when she dies. The casting of every version invariably makes a mockery of the story. And if you think these early deaths are unusual for the time, read a little about the Brontës themselves.
Heathcliff lives on after Cathy's death. Unwillingly. Soullessly. Hatefully.
Wuthering Heights is a story full of sadism and cruelty. Perhaps the movie gets this right at least. I don't know. I do know that it isn't a romance, even though it has spawned a million tales of the 'bad man redeemed by the love of a good woman' variety. Heathcliff hangs poor misguided Isabella's dog as they run away together. Even Lockwood's straitlaced narrator, prompted by the horror of nightmare, tries to rub the ghostly Cathy's wrist against the broken glass of the window pane till the blood runs down and soaks the bedclothes.
I note that a journalist has written a clickbait article in the Independent describing the novel as 'awful'. This is nothing new. Years ago, an elderly Scottish writer, by no means as good as he thought he was, told me that the Brontës were 'daft wee lassies in love with Byron.' I disagree now as I did then. Wuthering Heights is an extraordinary novel about obsessive love and hate, about jealousy and self harm and a chaos that can only be corrected by the transition to another state of being on the one hand and by the imposition of order through a different, gentler and more human kind of affection on the other. The second half of the novel, which some critics seem to want to damn with faint praise, is essential in restoring balance on an earthly plane at least.
Nevertheless, the fate of the two central protagonists, fey and inhuman and unfit for any Christian notion of heaven, remains uncertain. After Heathcliff's death, a little boy herding a sheep and two lambs sees 'Heathcliff and a woman yonder under 't nab' (a rocky point) - a vision he dare not pass. Neither will his sheep. We should remember that the final 'unquiet slumbers' lines come from unreliable and conventional Mr Lockwood. Like the fairies of traditional belief, Heathcliff and Cathy inhabit a middle ground, neither mortal nor divine, but I think this deliberate tension between two realities disturbs contemporary readers.
Among so much else, Wuthering Heights is also a novel about the nature of madness. The Victorians were terrified of lunacy, seeing it as demonic, as I discovered when I was researching my own Leeds Irish family history for a book called A Proper Person to be Detained. It is no surprise that there were more Irish than English inmates of asylums in 19th century England. It's also no surprise that although Emily never specifies the origin of her dark haired and disruptive incomer, picked up on the streets of Liverpool, he is in all probability Irish, as was her own family, his 'gibberish' the much maligned Irish language. She would have been well aware of the prejudice against these incomers, often characterised as vermin, 'but little above the savage'. Aware that Liverpool was the port of entry for so many Irish incomers.
In Jane Eyre, Charlotte displays no sympathy at all for the first, foreign Mrs Rochester, who is reduced to little more than a beast. By contrast, Emily portrays insanity more impartially and far less judgmentally. When Heathcliff sees Cathy for the last time, the two make 'a strange and fearful picture'. Utterly unfit for heaven. Elemental and terrifying. But this is Nelly speaking, not Emily.
Years ago, my own obsession with Wuthering Heights led me to write a novel called Bird of Passage, that was a kind of 'homage' to the book. It wasn't a retelling. How would I dare? But it was an exploration of obsessive attachment, and the damage done by extreme childhood cruelty, with an occasional nod in the direction of Wuthering Heights. It was certainly inspired by my enduring love for that novel.
It's on sale for 99p, for a few days from 13th February, the film's release date. But in all honesty, I'd recommend that you go back to Wuthering Heights itself. Read it with an open mind. Forget every terrible TV and film version you've ever seen or heard about. Remember when it was written and by whom. Then note its emotional power, its complicated structure, its vivid language, and the way in which it challenges so many of the cultural and societal norms of the time. Perhaps especially when written by a woman. You don't have to like it. It is a deeply shocking book. But its author was a genius.
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Top Withens in the 1950s |
