“He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

all of these characters are terrible people and I LOVE THEM!

“I can not live without my life! I can not live without my soul!”

That is love! That is romance! And yes, Heathcliff is the literal worst person ever, but gosh darn it, I loved his emotional rants! I swooned guys! SWOONED!!

I can see why so many people dislike this book. Heathcliff and Catherine are monsters. Monstrous. They are unlikeable, thus you won’t like them. They exhibit pretty much every bad quality you can imagine having without collapsing, including being illogical, selfish, and nasty. They act without considering the effects as they search and destroy. And I think it’s remarkable that Emily Bronte made them the focal point of her story.

Due to how totally unpleasant these two characters were, when this was initially published, it was regarded with hostility. I shook my head in complete and utter judgement at the way Catherine and Heathcliff went about their business, acting as if they could see me and were then effectively put in the doghouse by their deeds.

Wuthering Heights is epic, in my humble opinion, because I believe that the scope of this story is monumental. Let me explain: it is a simple tale between two families that are bound in such a way that their fates are irrevocably linked. What affects one, affects the other. Its about Catherine and Heathcliff who fall in love and how their relationship ruins the lives of those around them. The book, all 400 pages of it, occur almost entirely at Wuthering Heights, the estate of the Earnshaws, and at Thrushcross Grange, the estate of the Lintons with only a couple of miles of land in between.

And yet it is not a small story.

It is not a little story, though.
This novel has a significant and broad emotional impact. Bronte’s work is alluring because it is thought-provoking and unabashed. It often seems as though the author is daring us to give up reading and throw the book away because the act of reading this novel may be so masochistic. Like it’s a test of our own strength to see how much we can withstand and how far we can push ourselves. She challenges us while pushing us, all the while knowing that we must continue reading in order to find redemption. Nothing about it resembles its contemporaries.

The moors, the darkness of the moors, that curses the household of Wuthering Heights and its inhabitants is ever present. Nature is personified. It is its own character; its there, lingering and simmering ever so quietly, saturating every scene with its silent threats of doom…okay, I have to stop talking like this…what am I anymore?

There is poison in this book, but let me ease your mind by saying that it is balanced with goodness also. This isn’t a perfect novel. There were still moments I found myself in perplexion (recently invented word). And while everything about Catherine and Heathcliff may be corrupt, there is hope in Wuthering Heights. If you can journey through the menacing forest of Emily Bronte’s imagination, do it because the view is something to behold.