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Weathering the Wuthering Heights


I recently watched the BBC production of "Wuthering Heights" with my roommate last week and found it incredibly enjoyable.

This is funny because I read the book before and didn’t feel the same sentiment. It was really difficult to read! What was funnier though was my English-major roommate felt more reluctant to watch this movie. She knows the Bronte sisters frontwards and backwards. But by the time part one was over, she was insisting we continued watching into crazy hours of the night.

We both discovered a new appreciation for Wuthering Heights thanks to a fantastic artistic take to this notorious 1800's novel.

What was so compelling to draw me back to Wuthering Heights? I recall hitting the middle of the book where the plot shifts to different characters and I wanted to quit.

The passion Heathcliff and Catherine is so twisted and compelling because their emotion overrides all the circumstances around them, and affects every person around them in the book. The book shows how un-changeable love and passion is destructive in nature, with Heathcliff and Catherine as the example of destruction and the younger generation Catherine and Hareton as the positive example that restores balance back to Wuthering Heights.

Perhaps the movie helps put faces to the characters and helps me understand the emotion that didn’t translate before as I struggled to understand the old-school text.

I heard once that Wuthering Heights gets better with age, five years later has helped validate this statement. And who knows, maybe I will like it more in even five years.

-Hillary