Monday, August 6, 2012
Is there a single likable character in Wuthering Heights?
Honestly, is there a single character that you like in "Wuthering Heights"? And I don't mean in the movie WH, which makes Heathcliff into a dashing, doomed, Romantic character - Byron on the Moors or something like that. I mean in Emily Bronte's novel itself - because as I re-read it after many years I'm surprised at how utterly despicable a character Heathcliff is; and, even though it's easy and maybe even politically correct (and maybe even accurate!) to say that he's a product of his environment, that his evil character was formed by his mistreatment, and in that sense he's a representation of all the mistreated and the oppressed, and their evil behavior and animus to those more privileged is the understandable and appropriate reaction to class oppression - all true, I think - but a truly noble (not to mention likable) character would grow and mature and learn to do something productive with his life: dozens of Dickens heroes are subject to oppression and mistreatment in youth and they rise beyond that to become noble characters. Why not Heathcliff? Maybe Bronte is simply more honest about the personality of the oppressed - Dickens the sentimentalist, and Bronte (like Shakespare, see Caliban in The Tempest) the perceptive realist. Well and good - but what about the other characters? Are any of them likable? They range from the meek and spoiled (Isabella, Catherine Earnshaw/Linton) to the nasty and bigoted (Joseph), to the milk-livered and narcissistic (Linton and Edgar Linton) to the crude and irresponsible (Hindley, Hareston), and finally to that busybody Nelly/Ellen Dean, who narrates virtually the whole novel: she's everywhere and in everyone else's business and never stands up to anyone or does one single courageous thing in her life, utterly betraying young Catherine, whom she supposedly loves, by ratting her out for her love letters to Linton. She's another echo of a Shakespearean type: the nurse and priest in Romeo and Juliet, the priest in Much Ado, the Duke in Measure for Measure: characters full of hot air and full of themselves who basically just get in the way of everyone else and have no spine: I shall no longer stay!, is the Priest's pathetic final (I think) line in R&J, as the two lovers are about to die. Okay, maybe Catherine is likable in some ways, she's probably the most sympathetic of the characters - but don't we all wish she'd been able to act on her passions rather than shrivel up and die when faced with them? Or, failing that, just turn Heathcliff out and be true to your husband. She's torn apart by her passions, but in a pathetic, not an ennobling, way.
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In short, no, not a single one. Brilliant book, but very difficult to read.
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