How do we exit these wuthering heights? on generational trauma, primroses and odd numbers
December 1847. Emily Brontë publishes her first and only work: Wuthering Heights – under a pseudonym, clearly, because, well, you know. First regarded as violent and immoral, brutal, cruel and strange, the gothic novel is not met with enthusiasm. Apparently its themes of spiteful possession, revenge and obsessive love were not doing it for the Victorian refined palate. Misunderstood then, misunderstood now, its latest adaptation/Coollenhooverizaation (ty Letterbox reviews)/ rebranding by Emerald Fennel has not been met with wide acclaim. Apart from it being very pretty and aesthetically pleasing, the audience majority despised any other Fennel’s choice.
We will leave that anger to linger on and move to something that seems to have sparked a huge question among book fans: why is everyone so scared of adapting the second part of the book?
Apparently its themes of spiteful possession, revenge and obsessive love were not doing it for the Victorian refined palate.
For everyone that has not read it, Cathy’s death actually happens halfway through the novel.
Yes, halfway. As if it was not tragic enough, the story refuses to end with a grave and shows us the aftermath: Heathcliff’s grief and the “second generation”, Cathy II (Cathy and Edgar’s daughter, because in the book Cathy does not actually have a miscarriage), Hareton (Hindley’s son) and Linton (Heathcliff and Isabella’s son). It’s here, we think, that we witness, more than before, how destructive the love between Heathcliff and Cathy always was. Even dead, Cathy haunts Heathcliff thoughts and actions; even dead, she succeeds in turning his grief into a weapon. And Heathcliff sees her ghost everywhere: Hareton’s eyes are her eyes and he cannot kill him, because that would mean killing the last reflection of Cathy that he can experience, but he hates and degrades him nonetheless. Heathcliff steals his heritage, making him poor and powerless in his own home, forbids him from learning how to read, enjoys watching the boy slowly becoming harsh, just like him: “Now, my bonny lad, you are mine!” Heathcliff tells him “And we’ll see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!”, I want to see if i can make you as brutal as me.
And yet, Hareton, despite the trauma inflicted, does not hate Heathcliff. Heathcliff may not be kind to him, but Hareton loves him nonetheless. This is precisely where generational trauma begins to stutter, when hate is unresponded for. Linton, Heathcliff’ own son, is viceversa, the tragic counter-example, the expression and cautionary tale of what hate can do. Linton, indeed, cannot survive his own dad: he surrenders to that hate, absorbs the spiteful identity that Heathcliff attaches to him and, withered, dies himself.
“And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!”
The second part of the novel shows us how identities are forged by the environment, people and surroundings we grow up in. Heathcliff is born in violence and repeats that violence, over and over again, to escape it, to atone it, to make someone feel as he himself felt his own life: never just a bad, “sexy”, misunderstood boy, but a man consumed by violence, obsession and traumas. He dies, haunted not by Cathy’s ghost as he begs for, but because he gets eaten up by his own memories, so lost in the past that he forgets to live his present.
That’s when Cathy II decides to bring to the wuthering heights “parcel of roots”, to transform that dark land into a garden.
And so, the gooseberry bushes – spiky, harsh – get replaced with primroses (from the Latin primula, first, the first rose after winter). Those are still the same heights, the same: windy and dark and sharp, but they are covered in flowers now. And not any flowers, but those known to be symbols of rebirth, revival, youth, hope.
A book is open in Cathy II’ hands: she is teaching Hareton, illiterate on account of Heathcliff’s rage, to read. Across from them, stands Hareton’s house door, where his own name has been engraved on for centuries, only he never knew how to read it. A prisoner in his own house, with Cathy II teaching him how to read, she is giving him back his identity, returning a name that couldn’t be claimed before.
Those are still the same heights, the same: windy and dark and sharp, but they are covered in flowers now. And not any flowers, but those known to be symbols of rebirth, revival, youth, hope.
The resolution and perhaps purpose of the story becomes clearer, then: trauma does not have to be perpetuated and regenerated nor is never magically erased or simply stopped: it is outgrown. Love can grow in the most toxic soil, if we nurture it, if we reclaim it. And it’s endearing that this all happens in chapter 33. Not an even, “clean” one, to start a new chapter of life, but 33, an odd number. Still, it’s here that Emily Brontë sings hope, writes about new beginnings and primroses, it’s here that the dead stop chasing the living, and the living bloom. The gate of the house is not latticed nor chained anymore: yielded, it opens.
As if it’s saying: you don’t need an even number to start, a monday to begin, an early morning to set up a new life: you can start in autumn, in spring, in the middle of the day, when numbers are all uneven and strange, when the day is not promising anything better. You don’t need a hill, sunny and lean, you can decorate the sharpest of heights nonetheless. Your garden can still grow there.
Or, at least, that’s what our “Wuthering Heights” tells us.
