Wuthering Heights

Author: Emily Bront? (English), translated by Zhang Ling and Zhang Yang
Publisher:
Publication Date: 2003-01-01
Features: The translator mentioned in an article over ten years ago that Wuthering Heights was a novel written by a pure poet, not like Hardy, who was both a poet and a novelist, or like Dickens, who was a pure novelist. In terms of the basic elements of traditional realistic novels—characters and plot—only the male and female protagonists in Wuthering Heights stand out, and in fact, it is their emotional characteristics that stand out the most—since human emotions should be the primary element of poetry. The other characters in the novel lack the profound and intense emotional depth of the protagonists, so they are mostly bland or even unreasonable. For example, Isabella's love for Heathcliff and young Catherine's love for young Linton are both contrived by the author. Only Heathcliff and Catherine are real, natural, and full of charm, standing above the other characters, gripping the readers, leaving no room for criticism or fault-finding.
In terms of structure, as the core love story of the novel develops to the point of separation between the two, Catherine's death, and seemingly reaches its climax, followed by Heathcliff's continued emotional suffering and his revenge on the Lintons and the Earnshaws. This should be the descent from the climax to the end. When he undergoes a four-day fast and hallucinates, it becomes a U-turn, and the story approaches its conclusion. Yet, in this part, a large number of love entanglements of the second generation are interwoven, and in the end, a distant happy ending is arranged, which makes what could have been a brilliant conclusion. Emily seems to have strayed away from poetry and fallen into the maze of writing novels. This perfectly proves from the opposite side that Emily was originally a poet. Writing poetry, whether in verse or prose, was her forte, and Wuthering Heights was precisely a poem written in prose. Its enormous success, outstanding charm, and some of its flaws all stem from this.