Resumo de Wuthering Heights

?Why did you betray your own heart??

This question from a tormented Heathcliff sums up Emily Bronte?s classic tale of a passionate tragic love spanning 3 generations. Probably stronger than the love, which at most times is violent and yet has its gentle moments, is the thirst for revenge unleashed by Heathcliff on his enemies. Seemingly a man without friends except for his beloved Catherine and ironically Hareton, the son of his arch foe-Hindley Earnshaw.

Wuthering Heights is like life itself. Routine and comfortable when spent with loved ones and under circumstances we are at ease with. In reality though there is always that defining moment when that someone or that circumstance enters our lives and suddenly everything is not the same. We lose footing but then it forces us to become our true self and not the shadow we all so often show to the world.

Heathcliff is the surprise at Wuthering Heights and brings to fore the cowardice, bigotry and selfishness of mankind in the way he is treated at the Heights. Everyone but Catherine and her father show him any affection. To the rest he is a weird creature better confined to slave in the fields and sleep in misery and darkness. Without the warmth of love from a family he has to endure in, Heathcliff survives on sheer defiance, indifference and the hope to have his revenge someday.

That day comes after 3 years absence from Wuthering Heights. He comes back a wealthy man but still the same dangerous, brooding and yet passionate man. At times it?s difficult to tell what drives him more. His love for Catherine or his lust for revenge on all who have caused him grief. It is easy to sympathise with this hero so wronged and so in love with his Catherine. That is until a point where his revenge runs amok and is seemingly unstoppable. He lives to wound and destroy and even Catherine cannot seem to reach him or can she?

Catherine is a complex heroine. She wants it all her way or no way and is never wrong but always the victim. She brands her nanny, Nelly, a traitor and on her deathbed tells Heathcliff that it is he and Edgar who have killed her. To her they should be happy now that she is dying but still she promises not to let Heathcliff have any peace even when she is gone. Her violent fits of hysteria and drowning herself in pitiful episodes of fevers and deathly sickness astonish even a hardened soul. Happy as a bird one minute and raging with fury the next and the love that should free them and make them happy is the love that haunts them and leads each to death.

Heathcliff as one would expect fears not even death and being haunted by his beloved. On the contrary he goes to her room every night to beseech her roaming ghost to come to him even if it is to take him to her world. After her death though, he is only spurred on to live by his unfinished revenge. He turns Isabella into a pale shadow of herself and makes her ask what even the reader would like to know,? Is he mad or the devil himself??

He finds his own son, Linton, weak and pathetic just like her mother. Still, he uses this weakness to force him to marry Catherine?s daughter by Edgar, also named Cathy. It is clear that Nelly, the narrator of this story has no sympathy or love lost for Mr. Heathcliff whom by the way has no other name.

Cathy is probably more of a character to admire than her mother. Maybe even more of a heroine. Its almost like she makes up for all the weak points of her mother, Catherine. They both have a fighting spirit but Cathy is devoid of the drama and hysteria that her mother so was. Most unique is the feeling one gets that she has been sent as a saviour to Hareton Earnshaw. He who looks to Heathcliff as a father and actually loves the man and would hear no ill of him mentioned. Despite the fact that Heathcliff in his revenge has brought him up uneducated, uncouth and without love.

Enter Cathy and slowly but surely he begins to transform and starts reading insecret if only to impress her. Heathcliff?s demise is the freedom the two need to make a life in a normal world. Certainly having a Heathcliff in your world is losing normalcy and living on the edge of life itself.

Even in death Catherine and Heathcliff are still the gossip of the village and you can almost feel people shudder anytime his name is mentioned and ask what she ever saw in him! Then again most people probably lumped them together as mad beyond help and destined to die before their time.

Indeed a classic tale that always seems like it was written way ahead of its time and yet makes one wonder whether any generation is ever ready for such raw emotion and passion at any time. We are more content to deal with what is normal and what we can handle but when forced to reckon with our own Wuthering Heights, might we not weave a tale more violent in depths and emotion than the genius of Emily Bronte.

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