I recently re-read Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. I think I read it in high school but while I remembered the beginning vividly, I couldn’t remember the end. It came up during a recent conversation with a fellow enthusiast of 19th century literature so I spent a couple of days ensconced in the desolate moors of Yorkshire and I learned some surprising things, mainly, that it’s not primarily a love story! Only in the most superficial sense is it about the love between Cathy and Heathcliff. Most of the novel is about Heathcliff’s revenge on those who wronged him as a child. I can certainly identify with what it feels like to be a child brought into a home where it isn’t wanted and how the resentments of other family members can warp those relationships for life, but I was never fixated on revenge. One of the joys and purposes of fiction is to allow us to explore what if scenarios. What if I had been obsessed with revenge as Heathcliff is? How might that have gone? Short answer: not well! Heathcliff’s is not a happy ending and, when you finish the novel you realize his love for Cathy is completely overshadowed by his all-consuming hatred of everyone around him. It even extends to Cathy herself in their last encounter. This is not a love story; it’s a hate story!
Bronte does an excellent job of capturing the naiveté of youth. Other characters grow out of theirs, but not Heathcliff. Isabella, for instance, has a great quote when she’s talking with Hindley, another target of Heathcliff’s wrath, about how “treachery, and violence, are spears pointed at both ends –they wound those who resort to them, worth than their enemies.” Heathcliff never gains this much maturity and in this, I don’t think he’s unusual. Lots of people remain emotionally stunted their entire lives. I’ve known old men who have the same level of emotional maturity as fourteen-year-olds. Think of Donald Trump, another example of a petulant child in a grown man’s body, harboring petty jealousies and throwing temper tantrums. When such men are given power over others the amount of damage they can inflict on the world can be immeasurable.
But you know what? –spoiler alert!– in the end, it didn’t matter. The kids were alright. Catherine and Hareton, Nelly tells us “contrived in the end to reach it” –the point of loving and holding one another in esteem. Heathcliff did manage to inherit everything. But that’s all he got and, in the end, I think he found out the money was worthless. He had no love.
It reminded me of what the goddess Philosophy says about how we call things by the wrong names. In The Consolation of Philosophy Boethius writes “we give the wrong names to things, and if you examine carefully what each thing is in itself then you find that the label is false. Wealth is not really wealth, and power is not really power, just as honor turns out not to really be honor.” (Boethius was a great fan of ancient Greek philosophers and Socrates makes this argument in more than one of Plato’s dialogues.) Heathcliff did manage to take his vengeance out on those who wronged him. He was “successful” in that respect. But was he really? The final picture of Heathcliff is one of despair and madness. This is not vengeance. This is not success. And Wuthering Heights is no love story. It’s a story about the futility of revenge and how much damage small, petty men can do to those around them when they are given power.
It’s a good book to read when one such man sits in the White House.