Why I hate Wuthering Heights

A guest post from a new novelist

While everyone is talking about already hating Emerald Fennell’s forthcoming Wuthering Heights movie and especially hating Margot Robbie's wedding dress (yes, it is white…), here is a provocative take about hating the original novel. I am delighted to bring you this guest article about the book itself by my friend

Klara Feenstra

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Klara is a young writer, who has been published in several literary journals. I just read her (currently unpublished) novel in a single sitting. It’s excellent. (I have tried to reason with her about Jane Eyre, but alas Klara is as stubborn as I am.)

Here is Klara’s website.

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The first time I read Wuthering Heights I was seventeen and loathed it. It wasn’t so much Cathy’s whininess or Heathcliff’s sad boy chauvinism. No, the book’s egregious sin was its unforgivable narrator—Mr Lockwood—telling this supposedly passionate love story at a narrative remove so distant, you had to squint to see the action.

Over the years, more and more trusted friends encouraged me to reread and I resisted on the grounds of my own death—there are countless books to read in my lifetime and I was hesitant to dedicate even one hour to a novel so insufferable. But after a healthy amount of peer pressure, I conceded.

Comrades, this was a mistake. I won’t get that time back, but I can save you those hours. Wuthering Heights is not a passionate tale of desire and eroticism. It is Alan Partridge in a pub trying to tell a romantic tale but getting waylaid by his own banal anecdotes on the weather and quality of his sleep.

“ALAN,” we all plead, “will you get to the point, to the part where the flames of desire and revenge and eroticism wreak havoc on these characters’ lives??”

“Yes, yes,” Alan says, “we’ll get there, but first let me give you an extended description of the layout of my sleeping quarters.”

If you don't believe me, allow us to play a literary parlour game of my own design called, Who said it—Mr Lockwood or Alan Partridge?

• “I was encouraged so far as to volunteer another visit to-morrow. He evidently wished no repetition of my intrusion. I shall go, notwithstanding. It is astonishing how sociable I feel myself compared with him.”

• “My neighbour struck me as bordering on repulsive; I knew, through experience, that I was tolerably attractive.”

• “As I write these words I’m noisily chomping away on not one, but two Murray Mints. I’ve a powerful suck and soon they’ll be whittled away to nothing. But for the time being at least they have each other. For the time being, they are brothers. Which is more than could be said for me, for I was an only child.”

I read my nineteenth century novels for escapism, not to be back in an English pub trapped in a conversation with a tedious man. So the question that stirs my soul is: Why do we have Lockwood as a narrator?

Now, it’s no crime to have a somewhat bloated introduction, it’s very much the wont of the 19th century novel. Jane Eyre—a practically perfect book—starts with nine dull chapters where Jane goes on and on about the austere Lowood Institution (Lowood, Lockwood…I’m just saying).

But I will read those nine chapters enthusiastically, because I know what’s coming. It’s literary foreplay and I willingly partake, apprehending the heady apex sustained over the rest of the novel, where Charlotte Bronte flattens the narrative distance, getting us right up close to the desire and the yearning.

In Wuthering Heights the (awful) foreplay just goes on and on. It is essentially fanfiction of a would-be sexual encounter with Alan Partridge—ceaseless one-way pillow-talk without ever getting to the fun stuff.

Jane Eyre works because of the direct IV-drip between her desires and our reading experience. Wuthering Heights is if you took Jane’s POV and replaced it with, say, the religious schoolmaster Mr. Brocklehurst, disrupting Jane and Rochester’s passions with lengthy lectures on Corinthians every few chapters. It chooses to narrate a duet of desire by getting the whole village involved. No, not even that—by getting the outsider village idiot involved, designating him storyteller of the whole affair.

And even when Nelly Dean wrestles the narrative authority from Lockwood’s clammy hands, he only grabs it back again. “I’ll continue it in her own words, only a little condensed. She is, on the whole, a very fair narrator, and I don’t think I could improve her style.” So why are you still here, Lockwood!!!

Somewhere towards the end, he gives us a rare glimpse of hope; “This September I was invited to devastate the moors of a friend in the north.” Oh, thank goodness, he’s off to go devastate elsewhere. But just when we think we’re shot of him, he backtracks. “A sudden impulse seized me to visit Thrushcross Grange.” No! Isn’t it last orders yet?

I accept there’s an argument that your first reading of a text might well be the ur-reading, with all subsequent ones tarnished by it. Wolfgang Iser’s theory of reading outlines an active collaboration between text and reader, the latter filling in gaps with their own experiences and imagination. My first impatient teenage exposure to Wuthering Heights (exposure à la virus or a disease) may well colour my experience with the book—perhaps I cannot see the text clearly.

But take my first reading of Pride and Prejudice! I had no idea it was a satire. I was horrified by the unfeminism of it all, Elizabeth’s haughtiness, emotionally stunted Darcy. On my second read, however, I realised it wasn’t to be taken at face value. I fell for its wit, charm, generic conventions—the text won me over. Wuthering Heights does not have that seductive skill. If anything, now that I’m older and my days on earth more numbered, I’m even more despairing that I spent any time at all in the company of Lockwood.

There is a delusion around this novel. My friends are blinded by the image of it, the collective hallucination that it is somehow a salacious romance. And it’s not just friends. As I was on the final, painful stretches of my reread, I was also finishing up Michel Houellebecq’s Extension du domaine de la lutte, and in the last few chapters, came across this line:

This progressive effacement of human relationships is not without certain problems for the novel. How, in point of fact, would one handle the narration of those unbridled passions, stretching over many years, and at times making their effect felt on several generations? We're a long way from Wuthering Heights, to say the least. The novel form is not conceived for depicting indifference or nothingness; a flatter, more terse and dreary discourse would need to be invented.

It seemed Houellebecq had been Wuthering-pilled too. His condemnation of the ‘dreary discourse’ in contemporary fiction started sooner than he realised. Sidestepping all unbridled-passions, Lockwood imposes that ‘nothingness’ on us, chaperoning our experience of fiery eroticism by pausing it to announce that he is now putting on his bonnet. That is some serious abuse of narrational power.

We misremember Wuthering Heights. It is many things; the failure of a Londoner to grasp the mystic opacity of ‘Northern folk.’ The social function of British manners in tamping down erotic chaos. But a rompy love story designed to stir my passions? Absolutely not. Too much Alan Partridge and not enough wily, windy moors. As an unerring Kate Bush fan, I can say with confidence that the best narrative framing for this story is a three minute and forty five second song, alongside some interpretive dance. That is quite enough for me.