What Wuthering Heights should have been like.
These saved reviews of Wuthering Heights invoke a strange feeling. On the one hand, some of these critics who did not enjoy the work for being “so gloomy…elaborated with such dismal minuteness…eccentric and unpleasant.” (pg 282 H.F. Chorley) clearly do not have a full understanding of Gothic novels and seem extremely unaware of what turns literature will eventually take past the 1800’s. This poses a question: What if you agree with them?
That is not to say you have to agree with everything they say. The questioning of importance of a work that provides a woman’s point of view(forcing the Bronte sisters to take on the name Bell to get their work recognized seriously) is clearly more a relic of their time than criticizing the overall gloomy nature of the work. Even to this day works are criticized for being too dark or overly cynical. The difference being that today’s complaints are more rooted in complaint against cliche rather than towards a work that incites praise such as “All our readers who love novelty…we can promise them that they have never read anything like it before.”(pg. 284 DJ’s Weekly Newspaper) Still, one can’t help but feel that Wuthering Heights possibly is too gloomy, to a point where it seems the dire of the situation almost takes over for the characters (excluding Heathcliff).
Wuthering Heights is revolutionary for it’s time, like The Scarlet Letter it moves things forward in such a way that literature would surely change forever. We need to look at it with the time it was written in mind to truly enjoy and appreciate it. There is really no other way to read it but I am afraid it is impossible for some to look at it without the works that followed it in mind. In that sense Wuthering Heights can prove to be an experience that is “inexpressibly painful” (Pg. 283 Atlas)
