Emily Bronte : Wuthering Heights

One final digression into the canon of English literature - thanks to Azar Nafisi, though she mentioned it only in passing as something that an orthodox Muslim student found offensive due to the adultery (although I couldn't find any)

Thank goodness I was never subjected to this grim tale in high school!

It's so vastly different from Jane Austen -- it's hard to believe it was written in a time/place/social circumstance that was so similar.

I suppose the difference is that Bronte has chosen to write a Gothic novel -- a genre so popular then that Austen even wrote a parody, and might well have included "Wuthering Heights" in her list of the "Northanger Horrid Novels", to stand beside "The Castle of Wolfenbach" and "The Tale of the Black Forest"

How it compares with other examples of the genre is a question which I will never be able to answer, as I prefer horror stories that are brief and whimsical.

And yet, I did find this one as fascinating as a train wreck -- with a very long train falling off a very long bridge into a very deep valley.

And though I'm not interested in being politically correct, this does seem to be one long exercise in racial/colonial anxiety -- centering on the fear of the resentment felt by a dark-skinned anti-hero, of unknown ethnic origin (possibly gypsy), who is smarter, stronger, meaner, and, of course, sexier, than anyone else in that remote Yorkshire valley. And to throw in some class conflict, he is aided and abetted by Nelly Dean -a servant who also serves a narrator - who saves his life as an infant and who gets him what he wants even as she appears to loyally serve other masters.

(although I think the real villain might be Dr. Kenneth -- all of whose patients, just like the author herself, die before the age of 40, and usually, even younger than that)

Perhaps I stuck with this orgy of pain and degradation because it never really turned into a good vs. evil melodrama. Heathcliff was not attacked and eventually destroyed by opponents (as, say, Count Dracula usually is). He was only destroyed by himself - by his own resentment that kept him as distant from human society as he ever was when he was abandoned as an infant in the streets of Liverpool.

One may also note that, as with Austen, this fictional world is completely feminine -i.e., it's the woman's world of the home and family - with no connection to the man's world of labor, craft, commerce, warfare, law, politics etc.. Who manages the estate while Hindley is sinking into an alcoholic daze? And how does Heathcliff make his fortune during the three years that he is gone from the Heights? Why don't the Lintons have any connections in the town who can help them? (even though Edgar serves in some kind of civic capacity)

Were all the novels of that period written for, by, and about women ?

None of the men here can deal with the death of their mate. Old Earnshaw dies soon after, Heathcliff is haunted and driven mad, and Edgar leads a lonely, miserable life and dies in his thirties. Is this a woman's fantasy world -- or what!

It seems to be a fantasy for women who feel overprotected, indeed, imprisoned in the domestic world and long for the dangerous but passionate life outside the gilded cage.

Bronte's poetry would seem to be going in the same direction.