A Victorian Englishwoman wrote The Great Anti-Romance
to the benefit of countless future readers
I’ve just read “Wuthering Heights” (Emily Brontë, 1847), yes, for the first time. My schooling did not require it of me, and I would not have appreciated it back then anyway, in my autistically foggy, CPTSD-dominated youth.
I appreciate it now!
The novel is categorized, even on the ‘zon, as ”Gothic Fiction”, “Classic Literature & Fiction”, and “Literary Fiction”, which seem appropriate if not particularly informative.
On imdb, however, the movie and miniseries versions are listed with categories like
”drama”, “romance”, “dark romance”, “period drama”, “history”, and even “adventure”, which are seriously misleading, unless those cinematic renditions truly distort the novel into something it is not, to the disservice of potential readers. (I intend to find out with the 1992 movie rendition, alleged the best.)
In any case, it baffles me that anyone could see or cast "Wuthering Heights" as a romance, even a "dark romance".
Not one thing is romantic about it.
It's GOTHIC HORROR. It is, as I see it, The Great ANTI-ROMANCE.
Why “Great”? Read on!
“Wuthering Heights” is a disturbing, frightening, horrifying tale of generational, traditional, religion- and society-supported domestic abuse which creates a co-dependent pathology in a pair of younglings that inevitably ends in tragedy. This, in turn, launches a multidecade continuation of the same via one victim's sociopathic and psychopathic lashings out, serial child abuse passed from generation to generation.
It is the romantic idealizations carried by the characters which render them susceptible, victim, and prisoner to these horrors.
Please read that bold type again. If you read the book without blinders on, you can’t not see it this way. This realization is the true value of the book.
The whole, sordid affair is exacerbated by the Victorian era's twisted, unjust social conventions and laws which render children and women nothing less than slaves to the whims of men (even well-meaning ones).
And exacerbated by the era's archaic medicine, relying on leeches and other very wrong ideas about illnesses and cures (which the ill author a year later refused until, out of despair and desperation, the very day she died). The story documents how in the early 1800s tuberculosis or even “a bad cold” can spiral a person down to an early death. Don’t get wet in an English winter, you’ll catch your death of cold! Especially in a pre-medicine, pre-vaccination, bleeding-with-leeches era! Do not romanticize the pre-science past. It sucked. Like leeches.
I very much appreciate what this novel reveals under a brutally honest light! I now love Emily Brontë for writing it. She was wiser than her years. The poor thing died at age 29 but a year after her novel was published under the male pseudonym "Ellis Bell", for all the same reasons.
I believe that every half-decently educated young person who could read this book early enough in life should gain crucial insight into the human condition and would learn how childishly romantic ideas are silly and can turn against them, terribly. This book must have unburdened many young, literate people of dangerous, romantic naivete, and that alone would make it an important work.
That it’s beloved and considered a classic warms my heart, as long as that perception is not a distorted one which ignores the real content and instead romanticizes the story and characters. Bah! That would be egregious doublethink!
The book's interestingly fractal “frame story” structure is also worthy of note. Apparently, this was a feature of gothic novels (I show my educational weaknesses), although critics at the time were confounded by this particular novel's structure. I wonder why. Was the nesting of the framing a novel idea?
I'm partial to creative structures in novels — that's partly what makes them "novel". In any case, Emily Brontë didn’t merely write a story, she put thought into how she wanted it presented, revealed.
We’re never in the heads of the main characters, never in their point of view, as is the fad these days. We’re in the POV of the observers, the visiting Mr. Lockwood and primary taleteller Mrs. Dean. That’s something I’ve been wanting to do more of since reading Theodore Sturgeon’s “To Marry Medusa”. It can allow the reader more flexibility to interpret and imbue the characters.
The structure is also impactful in the way it switches between past and present.
For example, having the catch-up frame story start in the present and then go to the past puts the reader in the mind of recognizing that when you first meet someone, you don’t know jack about their backstory and can’t trust first impressions. On Mr. Lockwood’s arrival, he encounters a house full of odd, bileful characters, but we have no idea why, and later we learn that our first impressions are not to be trusted. That’s a major lesson of the book, which it tells in other ways as well.
It also warms my heart because I did something similarly intentional with time in “Minimum Safe Distance”, although with different purpose.
Note also that the book levels the playing field across genders and genetics. The same abuses that turn a dark-skinned kid into a monstrous adult turn white English folk into monsters, with equally, tragically problematic if not identical pathologies. I find this novel to be feminist and anti-racist well ahead of its time, beyond its other “uppity” subversiveness about Victorian culture.
Is it Science Fiction?
This novel is akin to Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" of 1818, as I understand it not having read it, but with psychological deviances rather than biological/surgical ones.
One might argue that the book’s examinations and extrapolations of mental states constitute science fiction. Technically, that would require the author to at some level propose psychological contexts, causes, and possible cures, which she doesn't, of course — psychology developed into a science over the subsequent century.
Yet, "Wuthering Heights" becomes retroactively science fiction to any reader with a modern dilettante's understanding of psychology. It's a case study in abuse, CPTSD, delusional obsession, masking and deception issues, etc.
One of the key realizations of modern psychology is that psychological problems/illnesses/disturbances (as distinguished from mental issues that stem only from neurobiochemical causes) is that they are inherently social, not simply in one person’s head. They form in social conditions, they are triggered by social conditions, and they are healed in social conditions. e.g. A psychologically troubled child, spouse, worker got that way in a social context (at home? at work? in school? in the dark recesses of the church? upon visits from/with certain people?) and the social contexts must be examined and addressed in order to resolve the problem(s) and restore health. The term “co-dependent”, now part of the common vernacular, carries this idea explicitly. Interestingly, in her mid-twenties Emily Brontë understood this key principle — it’s clearly evident in the story and characters of “Wuthering Heights”. If she’d lived long enough, she might’ve taught Sigmund Freud a thing or two.
So, this book is, at least to me, psychological science fiction. But, ultimately, that's just my playing with genre definitions and has no bearing on the book's universal value.
“Frankenstein” seems like simplistic, pop sci fi in comparison. Is that because I’m only incidentally familiar with the story through the filter of pop culture, not having read it? That serves as a reminder that cinematic renditions and pop culture zeitgeists, even if only by how they shorten, simplify, and categorize written works, probably don’t do them justice. It’s just another reminder that the book is always better. I need to read “Frankenstein”.
“Anti-” doesn’t mean “bad”
Teach your kids to love reading, and in their mid- to late teens give them "Wuthering Heights", The Great Anti-Romance Gothic Horror. Read it yourself first, if you haven't already. But please don't bloody well misrepresent or restrict it by casting it as romance when it's actually mind-expanding, health-inducing, common-sense-developing anti-romance! :)