solaris_zip 's review for:

Cime tempestose by Emily Brontë

4.75

slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: A mix

Strong character development: No

Loveable characters: No

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

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Wuthering Heights is not a romance book, but rather a book about obsession, possession and annihilation. We see these themes excel in the writing, coming out to confuse us, the audience. The book is dense and sometimes difficult to keep up with for its repetition of names and slow unraveling of events, but i think thats part of the trap set by Brontë. She forces us to stay inside the suffocating world of Wuthering Heights. 

It’s done with precision and for a good reason, to make us understand the spiral and flow of 

Catherine and Heathcliff dynamic. While they start rough and somewhat on the same level (even though, socially speaking, they never were), it quickly grows disproportional. They both burn in chaos but while Catherine realises that chaos will leave the both of them broken and poor, Heathcliff sees her choice to marry Edgar as the worst kind of treason she could commit.

The book touches on themes that highlights even more the disparity between the characters: generational trauma, racism and colourism in the way Heathcliff is described as “gipsy,” “devil,” or “fiend,” sexism in how women’s lives are controlled and punished (or even described through Nelly’s narration or Zillah’s words), ableism linked to classism and the rigid standards of the then English society. 

No one is innocent; every character is cruel in some way, whether openly or through weakness. We see that in Edgar’s inability to resist Catherine’s manipulations, Isabella being used as Heathcliff’s pawn of revenge and subjected to abuse. Heathcliff treatment of Catherine’s daughter or his own son. Joseph who deems himself to be a Cristian but stands with the abuse, and in fact, he supports it, never shutting it down if not enabling it himself. 

Or Nelly, whose story is filtered through her eyes, a narrator who is anything but neutral. She, who believes herself to be exempt from judgment because better of the people she took care of, but simultaneously dares to judge everyone with no remorse. She reserves her harshest words for Heathcliff, softening the faults of others (like Hindley). Through her bias we see how he, Heathcliff, is both victim of prejudice and abuse, for how he was raised and how he was treated. But at the same time he becomes what his abusers always dehumanised him to be. 

The ending, for me, felt flat and yet at the same time it left me unsettled. After so much intensity, 

Heathcliff’s death felt almost toneless, but at the same time uncanny. His smile in death, the open window, the storm… it’s gothic in the truest sense, leaving you unsure if he wasted away into madness or reunited with Catherine beyond the grave.