My Wuthering Heights Journey #2

Arielle's Wuthering Heights Journey Part 2 of ?

More rambling ensues! 

Read on for more nonsensical, scattered thoughts about my journey reading Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Here's the first leg. And once again, beware: there are a lot of spoilers in this post.

If I was confused in my last post, I am a thousand times more confused now. I'm currently reading Chapter 17 (there are 34 chapters in total, by the way), and a lot has happened since the last time we spoke. But before I tell you some of the weird things that have happened, you should know something about the characters of this book.

Everyone is crazy.

Literally everyone! Hindley's become this crabby old hermit abiding in Wuthering Heights. Nelly doesn't seem to have any redeemable traits in her character and lacks compassion altogether. It's a shame she's the one telling most of the story. In the last post we've already discovered how crazy Cathy and Heathcliff were. But now I definitely know that Edgar and Isabella Linton are crazy too. And don't even get me started on the servant, Joseph. I can't understand what he says. Let me demonstrate a snippet of his dialogue. 

"Aw sud more likker look for th' horse... Bud, aw can look for norther horse, nur man uf a neeght loike this - as black as t'chimbley! und Hathecliff's noan t' chap tuh coom ut maw whistle..."

Unfortunately he's not as minor a character as I hoped. So there's quite a bit of this gibberish to sift through. To be honest, I can't even muster up the effort to understand what Joseph (or Hareton, who talks similarly) says. I just skim through to the next bit that's written in actual English.

Despite the unattractiveness of almost every character in Wuthering Heights and the fact that their ghastly dispositions don't exactly make for a joyous read, I don't care little enough about them to be compeltely uninterested in their story. Or maybe I'm only interested because they're all mad, and the chaos of their insanity breeds incessant entertainment. Yep, that's probably why.

I have to mention this whole thing with Isabella Linton. She was quite a dull person in the beginning, but she's getting a bit more lively now! She is a complete idiot though. One of the stupidest characters I've come across in all of literature. 

So after Cathy and Edgar are married, they live together at the Linton's which is the Grange. Isabella lives there with them too because it's her home. Then after three years, Heathcliff has come back (he lives at Wuthering Heights again) and visits Cathy regularly. Suddenly Isabella is in love with Heathcliff! They don't even speak to each other. Heathcliff tells Cathy he thinks Isabella's a twit, and will never marry her. 

Well, guess what. Isabella Linton and Heathcliff run away and get married.

Cah-razy.

But the main point of relaying all of this is to outline the infuriating foolishness of Isabella. On the night they run away together, Heathcliff takes Isabella's dog and hangs him on a tree. Isabella obviously wasn't the most impressed at that point, but no alarm bells seemed to go off in her head that she might be marrying a MAD person. It's quite laughable because Cathy warned her exactly of Heathcliff's poisonous character. 

This is getting long so I'm going to end this. There are some suss things happening between Hindley and Heathcliff, and then there's the whole secret of how Heathcliff spent those three years away and how he became wealthy. Cathy's dead now; the drama has somewhat calmed down a little, so those two things are what I'm looking forward to finding out, while I wait for more characters to die off.

Here's a nice photo to ease your eyes after reading all of my nonsense! 

See you again in a day or two.