Wuthering Heights has a green-flag hero — we focus on the wrong couple

Wuthering Heights is a great love story, sure. But I put to you that people tend to focus on the wrong couple, and love and hate the book for the wrong reasons.

Of crooked trees and twisting winds

A popular opinion about Wuthering Heights is that this is a book where no person is a good person. And to a large part, the plot bears this out. All the characters, for most of the book, are horrible to each other. Insults fly thick and fast in that damned house atop a hill, as varied and original as ‘saucy impertinent monkey’, ‘infernal calf’, ‘dog in the manger’ and ‘imp of Satan’.

But buried in this hellhole of abusive parents, cruel brothers, ghost-chasing lovers, love-ditching social-climbers, is a genuinely good, strong, kind, and sweet man, Hareton Earnshaw. Only none of you bother to remember him, so fascinated you are by the grave-digging Heathcliff, the ‘I will kill myself to make you feel bad’ Catherine Earnshaw, the ‘I am too golden to shake a gypsy’s hands’ Edgar Linton, or even the judgemental and smug Nelly.

This is really not how Heathcliff is supposed to look. (Photo: YouTube screengrab)

In fact, the only person who recognises Hareton’s worth throughout the book is Heathcliff, the man who had set out to deliberately stunt and twist him.

(Finally) An apple that fell far from the tree

At its heart, Wuthering Heights is a cautionary tale about what happens if you let your worst instincts become your entire personality. Heathcliff, rejected and reviled, becomes a vengeful fiend, subjecting his own son to eye-watering cruelty. Catherine Earnshaw, never allowed to own her personality, destroys herself and those around her in trying to reconcile the contrasting versions of herself. Edgar and his daughter Catherine Linton retreat into snobbishness when in the presence of stronger personalities.

Only Hareton, surrounded with nothing but malevolence, holds on to the goodness within, with no incentive to do so, and even tries to improve himself, at the risk of ridicule.

That Hareton is nice and sweet is obvious in his first meeting with Catherine Linton. Even if that were explained away by the fact that she is a beautiful girl — probably the only girl he ever sees — his first impulse towards the annoying Lockwood is kindness; and even Linton Heathcliff says Hareton never hits him.

This one quality, plain simple niceness, is what everyone else in Wuthering Heights lacks, either by nature (Hindley, Joseph), or inadequate nurture (Heathcliff, Cathy Earnshaw, Isabella).

In fact, Hareton is the only proof that the grown-up Heathcliff has any redeeming quality. While Heathcliff degrades him by bringing him up like a ploughboy and not a gentleman (rotten Victorian class politics, yes), he clearly also does something to deserve Hareton’s loyalty and affection. Heathcliff’s interactions with Hareton are the only times we see him behaving at least partially reasonably, like a stern but not unkind employer.

And Heathcliff makes it very clear why — he can’t help praising Hareton’s strength and good sense, telling Nelly that he is “gold put to the use of paving-stones”.

Standup, but not spectacular, guy

When Heathcliff, the man sworn to destroying the Earnshaw clan, could see Hareton’s virtues, why have readers for generations ignored him? Because pop culture, when looking at a love story, tends to confuse the spectacular with the great, and the uncharismatic with the unworthy.

Cathy and Heathcliff are impossible to look away from, with her line about ‘their souls being one’ and him digging her grave to catch one more glimpse of her face. They are forever ‘wuthering’, stormy, untamed, wild.

Hareton and Cathy Linton, meanwhile, do nothing as dramatic. Surrounded by hostility, they each choose to work on their flaws, and then come together in a union of forgiveness and love.

Between chasing the ghost of your beloved on the moors, and painstakingly learning to read by candlelight, it is obvious which is the more screen-worthy moment. But Hareton not being meme-able is exactly what makes him loveable. Emily Bronte expected us to get that.

In the whole novel, Hareton and Cathy are the only people to find happiness. The G in gothic stands for green flag, and Emily did put it there. We just keep getting distracted by the ghost at the window.

Note: If you love Wuthering Heights, you should read Alison Case’s Nelly Dean, which reimagines the novel with Nelly as the protagonist. It is a very enjoyable read, giving Nelly as dramatic and passionate a history as the Earnshaws and Lintons and Heathcliffs.

See you after 15 days,

Yours Literary,

Yashee

yashee.s@indianexpress.com

P.S: If you love books, write to me with what work I should discuss next. If you are not a reader of novels, follow along, and maybe you will begin to delight in the wonder and wisdom, the practical value, and the sheer joy of fiction.