Wuthering Heights was not highly recommended to me, but something drew me to it. Part of this invisible force was probably that it's one of those typical "everyone's heard of it but no one's read it" classics. I wanted to be able to say "I've read it."
Three chapters in, I stopped reading and started over. The amount of characters introduced was overwhelming and trying to make sense of the plot so far was not easy. After a second look, the story became more clear and I was interested in who the young characters would grow up to be.
My grandmother was right - the characters were not kind or good people. Even the maid, who narrates the story, didn't impress me much. Cathy's adult tantrums and fits made me want to smack her, and Heathcliff turned out to be cruel, conniving and selfish. The rest of the characters mostly seemed to be shallow.
In class with my students we have been writing our own fiction books and discussing what exactly makes a reader fall in love with a book. One of the most common answers is a connection with the characters, falling in love with them or seeing yourself as them while you're in that "zone" of reading. So if there was no real connection for me with the characters, then what made me enjoy the book so much?
The answer is simple: humans are nosy. We pine for information, although in most cases it has no direct use for us, and feel the need to know "what's going on" in the lives of others. Look at our general obsession with celebrities. How many Americans make their living off of the magazine industry, which captures as much trivial information as possible to pass onto us "average citizens" who skim the covers in line for the grocery checkout, or snag an old battered copy to page through while using the elliptical machine at the gym, or buy the latest issue to accompany a cup of Starbucks coffee? It's like it gives us comfort, even fuel, to see others' lives in worse shape than our own. If nothing else, we are intrigued by these people who are supposedly alike us but in many ways so different. This is exactly what kept me reading Wuthering Heights. I needed to know if each character would get what was coming to him or her by the end of the book.
Another person I talked to about the book couldn't fathom that I actually liked it, saying that it was tragedy after tragedy. True, there were enough deaths in the story, mostly of mothers after giving birth, to render this story a tragedy. However, I felt that for the most part they were stated so matter-of-factly that it didn't affect me much as a reader like a true tragedy should. To me, they were more accepted than things to dwell upon.
I probably wont' reread this book. I enjoyed it once, and was truly happy with the ending, but I don't see myself coming back to it as I do with other books that I fall in love with. I will recommend it to others who want to read a true classic and would be interested in the dynamics of family conflict - also known as drama. In my mind, this is a book to check off my list and talk about with the few others who have also read it. I'd be curious to know what they think of the characters and the tragedies, and why they chose to read it too.
No comments:
Post a Comment