I like to write bits of my reviews while I’m reading, just so I can better remember how I felt and reacted as I was reading. I think that approach was detrimental to my take on Wuthering Heights. I’ve included a bit of those original thoughts to contrast my final thoughts.
I don’t get it. Maybe I’m the wrong audience, but Heathcliff and Catherine feel so immature. Is this a well written book about detestable characters? Heathcliff reminds me of a toxic/abusive partner and Catherine feels obnoxiously melodramatic. But as bad as those two are Linton really puts them to shame. He is easily one of my least favorite character’s I have ever read. As I was reading I wrote, ‘I’d only like him less if he were a traitor.’ Then he was!
I was really struggling with this book and then around when Heathcliff laid out his plan to Nelly something felt different. I started liking the book more and couldn’t stop reading it. I was on a walk and started wondering about it as a meditation on revenge. I thought possibly that ‘treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends: they wound those who resort to them, worse than their enemies.’ was a thesis for Heathcliff’s life. I wondered if I would dislike the Count of Monte Cristo now, maybe I just didn’t have a taste for revenge any longer. Quick aside, these two books came out between one and three years of each other, which is wild to me.. Then I thought more about the Count of Monte Cristo and how it is almost a glorification of revenge, granted I think it has been twenty years since I read it. This book is nothing like that. Wuthering Heights is almost the antithesis of the Count of Monte Cristo and its view of revenge. I still think Heathcliff’s view of love is blindingly childish, but I like the book more than I thought I would when I was at the halfway point.