deathwarmedup
New member
- Joined
- Dec 6, 2012
- Messages
- 416
- MBTI Type
- IXTJ
- Enneagram
- 6w5
- Instinctual Variant
- sp/sx
I just finished Wuthering Heights and it's one of the most gripping tales I've read since before I was a teenager. I was led to believe it was a romance. Eh -- no, it's a bit more profound than that.....
I think it's an attempt to explore love on many levels from its antithesis of self-interest and cowardice (Linton), through duty and affection and tenderness (Edgar Linton) to the mystical thirst for annihilation in the All (Heathcliff and Cathy), which is eventually so ferociously all-consuming that it even finally exhausts Heathcliffe's evil and leaves him in a state of powerless surrender. Against this mystical imperative lies the emptiness and vacuity of orthodox religion (Joseph) and the materialistic barriers of social class, money and power.
Heathcliff is an axial figure, a conduit for the most perverse, vampiric evil and the most crushing, annihilating Love. His funeral is devoid of the fluff of religious ritual and when he eventually joins the other two main characters, laid in a Trinity in a lonely graveyard, they return to the soil and the All (the moor).
It's a lot more complex than that but that's how I like to read it. Not as a novel of of passion, hatred or vengeance. I think it's riddled with allusions to the mystical and the main characters would look ridiculous in any other context than as props for this theme.
I think it's an attempt to explore love on many levels from its antithesis of self-interest and cowardice (Linton), through duty and affection and tenderness (Edgar Linton) to the mystical thirst for annihilation in the All (Heathcliff and Cathy), which is eventually so ferociously all-consuming that it even finally exhausts Heathcliffe's evil and leaves him in a state of powerless surrender. Against this mystical imperative lies the emptiness and vacuity of orthodox religion (Joseph) and the materialistic barriers of social class, money and power.
Heathcliff is an axial figure, a conduit for the most perverse, vampiric evil and the most crushing, annihilating Love. His funeral is devoid of the fluff of religious ritual and when he eventually joins the other two main characters, laid in a Trinity in a lonely graveyard, they return to the soil and the All (the moor).
It's a lot more complex than that but that's how I like to read it. Not as a novel of of passion, hatred or vengeance. I think it's riddled with allusions to the mystical and the main characters would look ridiculous in any other context than as props for this theme.
