Wuthering Heights

 

Wuthering Heights is much more melodramatic than I expected. I can't remember why I decided to read it this week. While reading, I remembered almost nothing from any earlier reading, which took place as part of the assigned curriculum sometime during my high school or junior high school years.

Heathcliff, the enormously evil and perverse main character, is definitely despicable — perhaps to an exaggerated extent. I was startled to realize that one of the clear reasons given for Heathcliff’s seemingly inborn, perverted nature is that he is a black man: I was somewhat shocked at the fact that his race is considered to be a part of his character. His racial difference is a key from his first appearance in the family, when the housekeeper/narrator describes him as "a dark- skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman." (p. 3).

At the beginning of the housekeeper’s story of the twenty years when she knew Heathcliff and the other members of the family, she tells how the father of the family at the center of the novel had come home with a street urchin he had found. Returning weary and cold, he has brought not gifts but this street child – who is racially different. He shows his wife and children what he has under his great-coat:

"'See here, wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life: but you must e'en take it as a gift of God; though it's as dark almost as if it came from the devil.' We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy's head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child." (p. 31). 

As the narrator Ellen, the faithful servant, struggles to understand the emerging nature of Heathcliff -- spiteful, harmful, and vengeful -- his racial identity seems to be one of the causes:

"Heathcliff - I shudder to name him! has been a stranger in the house from last Sunday till to-day. Whether the angels have fed him, or his kin beneath, I cannot tell; but he has not eaten a meal with us for nearly a week. He has just come home at dawn, and gone up-stairs to his chamber; looking himself in - as if anybody dreamt of coveting his company! There he has continued, praying like a Methodist: only the deity he implored is senseless dust and ashes; and God, when addressed, was curiously confounded with his own black father!" (p. 158). 

The housekeeper, in her narrative, dwells on Heathcliff's "blackness of spirit that could brood on and cover revenge for years, and deliberately prosecute its plans without a visitation of remorse." (p. 204). At the end, she still expresses her cosmic incomprehension of the nature of this evil man: 

"'Is he a ghoul or a vampire?' I mused. I had read of such hideous incarnate demons. And then I set myself to reflect how I had tended him in infancy, and watched him grow to youth, and followed him almost through his whole course; and what absurd nonsense it was to yield to that sense of horror. 'But where did he come from, the little dark thing, harboured by a good man to his bane?' muttered Superstition, as I dozed into unconsciousness." (p. 300).

While Heathcliff, with his overblown nature, dominates the novel, the other characters are somewhat pale in comparison. Though each one has his or her own identity, they aren’t nearly as compelling. All in all, I found the novel somewhat overblown — I can see why it’s considered as good material for adolescents.

If this novel is still part of the school curriculum, I wonder if the teachers bring up this racist theme. The novel is in the "common core" that's recommended for college prep, but I don't know if that means it's discussed in classes. Times have changed greatly since I read it in school! 

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