LOVE KILLS The romance between Heathcliff and Cathy is one of the most enduring stories in all of English literature, and one of the most infamous. Driven mad by passionate love, is there anything we can learn from this tragic affair? Photo and words by JARED CARL MILLAN
Love is the universal language of the world. All religion, stripped of their moral imperatives and biases and tenets on how to live one’s life, has a common denominator; and it is not about worshipping a supreme being or somebody of higher power. Love is most often the method to our madness, our singular justification for everything done that ended badly or brought us consequences. How many madmen have committed crimes claiming they were driven by “love”? How many successes and triumphs have been recorded spurred out of the singular power of “love”? In the case of Heathcliff and Cathy, it is precisely “love” that brought their demise. Reading Wuthering Heights is not unlike finding one’s self in a dream not quite a nightmare and certainly not paradise, but a dream nevertheless bleak and chilling. In gothic fiction the setting in which the story takes place is a character in itself, and the dismal Yorkshire moors in Northern England that Emily Bronte paints in the novel is both the backdrop as well as its central character: everything that takes place is a reflection of the marshes and bogs and
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barren landscape and bleak hilltops and ominous isolation that saturate the land. I had first read the novel when I was sixteen, expecting a story quite along the lines of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind, expecting the love story of Cathy and Heathcliff to be similar to that of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. It is not. Cathy and Heathcliff’s romance—if one can even call it that—is dysfunctional beyond comprehension, saturated with misplaced passion and a vague sense of purpose. As it happens, the novel collectively is so grotesque and distorted that it is important to ask one’s self if Emily Bronte had intended to write the story in this manner, as though at every point in the book she challenges her readers to a game of endurance. And Heathcliff is the catalyst. I suppose if you look hard enough and introspect long enough you can find reason behind Heathcliff’s endeavors, and depending on which side of the coin you’re in you’ll either find him a formidable antihero or a downright demon incarnate. When Cathy takes
Edgar Linton’s hand in marriage, Heathcliff was devastated, swearing revenge, and he comes back with an “everything or nothing” plan to destroy the lives of the people who ruined his and take everything that was deprived of him, which in this case takes the form of the two estates. This comfortless and miserable story told through Bronte’s vigorous and ardent narrative makes an interesting contrast, the same way Wuthering Heights, a household reflecting desolation and bleariness, is situated atop a hill and Thruschross Grange, a household full of love and warmth, below the valley. It is easy to dismiss this novel as something garish, but what really makes this novel a classic is its robust characterization as well as its brilliantly explored theme, and the emotional intensity of the story is colossal and does a great deal to your head. But perhaps the best thing about this novel, with all its imperfections and flaws, is that at its very core it tells the very classic story that with bad there is good and that love, good love, honest love, always redeems.