A TURBULENT LOVE STORY
In re-reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (English novelist and poet 1818–1848) I can’t help but be surprised at the remarkable difference between her life and her novel. According to her biographers, Brontë lived an extremely boring life. Emily’s life took place in a vicarage which she almost never left. The only thing that saved her was her feverish literary creativity. She died when she was thirty years old leaving behind a small number of poems and one of the most beautiful novels of all literature.
Wuthering Heights is the story of a turbulent love. (When I write the words ‘turbulent love,’ I can’t help but wish that I had lived in the past. I think this must be due to tedium or to a rejection of the times in which we live where I observe a passive attitude towards love and a lack of desire to fight for it, and — perhaps even — people’s inability to love. I also see less communication between the sexes, courtship is dead.)
It was Emily Brontë’s destiny that love should pass her by, but, at the same time she was fated to know the anguish of a passion she never experienced: an imaginary passion that was powerful enough to familiarize her with violence and death. Wuthering Heights is not only a love story but also an explanation of how an impossible love can change a man to the point of making him do things he would never otherwise do, including to the one he loves.
The plot is as follows: Catherine and Heathcliff’s feelings develop in their childhood (which is free, sovereign and wild — the complete opposite of the restrictive adult world). Heathcliff, however (an illegitimate child) — must leave. When he returns a rich man he finds Catherine has made a marriage of convenience. Heathcliff, who wishes to recapture the lost paradise, reacts by unleashing a passionate and uncontrolled rage. With feelings born in his youth he needs to be able to love Catherine, who, although she loves him too will not leave her husband to be unfaithful to him (even in her mind). This passion consumes Catherine because she blames herself for her feelings. This is why — to atone for her sins — she prefers death to the continuous torment caused by love (she doesn’t commit suicide but her mental pain develops into physical pain).
There are two basic elements in this novel: prohibition and death. Prohibition sanctifies what it forbids. When death approaches, in any of its forms — break-ups, adverse circumstances leading to continuous friction or death as a biological phenomenon — it renders love impossible at which point we fall into the area of prohibition. I sincerely believe there is nothing more pleasurable, and — at the same time — more painful than an impossible love. It is the most pleasurable of sensations because for the time it lasts (which is generally short) it truly fascinates — it makes us ecstatic and happy because to love under these circumstances is the most sublime feeling in the world. But — as everything which begins has to end — when it ends there is terrible pain. It is at this moment that all our previous experiences become important to us.
The process of remembering comes first (I think at this stage one relives the past with more intensity than when it was first experienced) — then comes oblivion. Time, thankfully, erases memory to such a degree that at times we cannot even remember the face of the one we once loved. I declare that one half of our heart is like a graveyard — a place where we bury loved ones who have deceived us, people who said they were friends and turned out not to be, loves that ended, loves that didn’t, short and intense loves, long and lukewarm ones, and loves we rejected because they did not fulfil the requisites for entering our graveyard. On each tombstone is written an epitaph — words that are slowly erased by the constant flow of blood to our hearts.
I know the time is coming — though it hasn’t arrived yet — when I shall need a heart surgeon to remove a few tombstones to make room for the dead who are yet to come. I only pray that the next to enter my graveyard will be the product of as turbulent a love story as the one conceived by Emily Brontë.
