Book of a lifetime: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

From The Independent archive: Melissa Jones on ‘Wuthering Heights’ by Emily Brontë

Emily Brontë used her glorious novelistic imagination to create Heathcliff (Getty)

Wuthering Heights has an undeniable hold but an elusive meaning. It has been continually cited as the archetypal story about romantic love, where the lovers experience an exquisite communion doomed by its own extravagance. Yet theirs is a love almost without tenderness. Unlike lovers such as Romeo and Juliet, whose downfall is wholly sympathetic, Heathcliff and Cathy behave with extraordinary perversity towards one another. Catherine swears it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff; he determines to pursue her like the angel of death as punishment. This has contributed to the inherent flaw in any dramatisation.

By attempting to soften, humanise, explain the lovers, screen adaptations have failed to capture the book’s power. Self-destruction is a feature of tragedy rather than romance; Wuthering Heights is a tragedy in the purest sense, the tragedy of self-betrayal and transgression. The lovers experience the essential only through one another. Divide them, and the rest of the world, as Cathy so memorably puts it, means nothing. Despite Nelly’s view of the lovers as wicked, the book reveals the world as the aggressor, the lovers driven to their extremity. The enduring image of Cathy is a spirit ensnared, losing her physical shape; Heathcliff becomes a maddened animal.