We’ve all done it; had that feeling when you’re so immersed in a great story that you make such a strong connection with one of the characters and actually start to feel their pains and desires. You see things and relate to other people through their mindset, attitudes and prejudices. In short, you begin to act and think as if you are them.
There have been many studies on this deep and fascinating literary experience whereby a person seemingly comes right out of the page to entice you into their world (Tom Riddle’s diary *ahem*); it begs the question whether it is safe to read books! A friend recommended a novel called Wuthering Heights to me and the character named Heathcliffe.
Strange name, I thought, but fair enough. Betraying my ignorance of eighteenth-century society literature, I had expected to be connecting to a generically upper-class upstanding gentleman wooing a sheltered beautiful maiden in a thoroughly honourable and respectable, if not a little clichéd, manner. I couldn’t have been further from the truth in what this story draws one into.
Thought up by the reclusive Emily Bronte, Heathcliffe must be one of the most animalistic, destructive yet fascinating characters ever constructed. He has a unique passion, and it is this which draws the reader in. Heathcliffe, a mere ‘gypsy’ in comparison to Edgar Linton, his antithesis, nurses incurable wounds which imbue him with an intense anguish and unbridled focus to recover his lost soul-mate (as a result of Linton’s romantic interference), Catherine Earnshaw. Heathcliffe is brooding, single-minded and sees the idea to have a right to somebody else’s heart in a manner so total it would make us baulk; however his twisted form of obsessive longing nevertheless reflects a passion so pure that it can only be described as unadulterated love. While Heathcliffe may be something of an exaggerated romantic anti-hero, his potential for an all-consuming love mirrors the deepest and most powerful desires that lie, dormant yet intrinsic, within every one of us.
His actions not only defy all notions of social decency and moral values, but actually break the lives, marriages, families, reputations and hearts of every single other character (including his own wife and child). He is a character repulsive but yet enthralling, and long after the final page of Wuthering Heights is closed, one is left with both a feeling of lingering guilt and staggering awe as the reader is left to question how much they truly love somebody.