An Essay on Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights
By Paul Chi
7 May 2004
It has been 157 years since Wuthering Heights has been published. Since then, Emily Bronte and her sisters have been elevated to the status of literary goddesses. It has taken 157 years for this book to reach me, in the twenty-fifth year of my existence.
This book is a rare gem of attractiveness and repulsiveness. It is a train wreck of a novel that one is drawn to as unerringly as the chainsaw-fodder teen is drawn to the monster's deathtrap. There is precious little love in what has been called a love story, and yet, anyone aspiring to be a lover must read it. It is a tale of selfishness and weakness. Malice and dead hearts. Pride and stupidity and fatal, murderous, pride. It could be called a cautionary tale, but is far too malign and unrepentantly evil to be belittled.
Weakness allows evil. Evil begets more evil. Evil perverts that frail, pathetic, sickly, ignorant flower of emotion that dares to call itself love. Betrayers betray, the faithful one betrays, the hypocrites are hypocrites, the ignorant foolish dash headlong to their doom despite nothing.
What is good? What is right? We see a frightening picture. Is it to be admired? Desired? Scorned? Hidden? Explicated on infinitely, nauseatingly, absurdly? We see sickness, evil, baseness, purity, utter folly. We see a microcosm exploding and imploding, no more connected with reality than a stack of leaves marked with squiggles, or dots of color on a pane of glass, or the oscillations of radiation. No more connected with reality than the discharge of electrical potential between cells of crap, stone, mush, enigma, formed from the real, imagined, perceived, and unseen.
Read, wanderer, lover, cynic, fatal, and wonder. Yet wonder not at words in a book, nor at authors. Wonder at the wondrous, then wonder at the unthought-of. Draw what you will, but think not that you discover new territory or have seen the divine. Think not of sanity. Search. Perhaps to find.
In the end, there is the end. Seeing, we do not see; hearing, we do not understand. Now through tears,
