Far more than a love story

More reactions to the UKTV Drama poll where Wuthering Heights was chosen as the Britain's favourite "love story". Martin Kettle writes in The Guardian a very good article with which BrontëBlog almost fully agree. We only quote several passages, but the full article is highly recommended:

I have only one question to ask the 2,000 readers who, according to a new poll for UKTV Drama, have just voted Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights the greatest love story of all time. How many of them have actually read the book? Don't get me wrong. I am as intense an admirer of Emily Bronte as you will find. Wuthering Heights is pretty much my most treasured novel, astonishing with every reading. Like Bronte, I am a child of the West Riding, so I also take fierce local pride in the writer and her novel coming top of almost any poll. But Wuthering Heights a love story?

Don't get this wrong, either. The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is, without question, at the novel's heart. But theirs is a much more complex, contradictory and unreconciled relationship than could be described as a love story. It goes far beyond romance, sexual attraction or even mutual dependence. In fact it would be hard to say how far the Catherine-Heathcliff relationship contains any of those qualities at all. Only death resolves it.

Wuthering Heights is also about many other things besides that relationship. It is about class conflict and Heathcliff's obsessive revenge. It is about the vindictive soul of a wronged man. It is about society on the Pennine moors. It is a horror story. It is about wealth, power, obsession and death. If Wuthering Heights is a love story then Hamlet is a family sitcom, Tristan und Isolde a musical and the Sistine Chapel a cool piece of interior design.

But this has always been the fate of Wuthering Heights. Right from the day the novel was first published in 1847, every generation has tried to confine and rearrange it into easier categories than Bronte herself ever permits. These attempts have taken many directions. The effect, though, has always been the same - to make Wuthering Heights something less than the book actually is.

Early on, Charlotte Bronte set the trend, softening the Yorkshire dialects of the old servant Joseph for the 1850 reprint. Romantic critics, religious critics, Marxist critics and feminist critics have all done their simplifying, sometimes illuminating, bits too. And then there is Kate Bush, and the Monty Python semaphore version. But the two most influential culprits of the modern era are Hollywood and the Bronte industry, which in their separate but related ways have conspired to belittle Wuthering Heights and to reduce Emily Bronte to someone barely connected to the real world. (...)

But the Bronte industry image of the ethereal, spiritual Emily, too remote and too good for this world, has misled just as much. Charlotte has to take a lot of the original blame for this too, since she went to such trouble to construct this maid-of-the-moors version of her dead sister in the 1850s. Yet even now, 150 years later, the gift shop image of Emily, wandering the Pennines with the wind in her hair and her dog by her side, communing only with her own interior world, is incredibly hard to shift.

Yet shift it we should, if we are to get a more truthful, insightful and less romanticised version of this great writer. Read the biographies - Winifred Gérin, Juliet Barker and, in particular, Lucasta Miller - and you can begin to discern a more formidable woman who could cope with the world rather better than the image of the doomed Emily might suggest. (...)

This picture of a woman who read newspapers, who was interested in the transport revolution and the markets, who could use a gun and make bread and who may even have been able to play the Appassionata Sonata, needs to be given its proper place. Too much of the time all we get is the fantasist of the Gondal stories, the chainless soul of the poems and the mystic visionary of that solitary novel.

Emily Bronte and her achievement need no help from me to endure. Wuthering Heights is one of the greatest imaginative achievements of English culture. It is a work of fibrous and poetic power worthy to rank with Milton, Blake and Conrad. But the book should not be banalised and its author should not be infantilised. In a world where Barcelona FC can claim to be "més que un club", it is right to insist that Wuthering Heights is more, far more, than a love story.

Categories: In the News, Wuthering Heights