"Cliff Notes - Wuthering Heights" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

"He stands unredeemed," she wrote in her preface to the novel,
"never once swerving in his arrow-straight course to perdition."
She went on to question whether it was even right or advisable
to create such beings.

Although modern readers, on the whole, are more sympathetic
to Heathcliff, it's easy to understand Charlotte Bronte's
position. To recite a catalogue of his sins is almost to retell
the novel. You sympathize with him at first, when Hindley
mistreats him and he loses Cathy, but when he returns
transformed, and his plan of vengeance begins to unfold, your
feelings change. You begin to question his love for Cathy. Was
it selfish, not true love at all, but an obsession? Can love
exist so intertwined with jealousy, hatred, and anger?

Mrs. Dean says that Heathcliff is greedy, and Cathy herself
tells him he's close and covetous. His name is generally
surrounded with words like hell, devil, diabolical, infernal,
and fiendish. Worst of all, he's unrepentant. "I've done no
injustice," he says at the end of the book.

The author's contemporaries were upset that such an evil
character loomed so large in her book. In looking to identify
the source of that sense of evil, some modern readers claim that
Heathcliff represents a specifically sexual energy that Emily
Bronte, a true Victorian, was bound to denounce.

Simply to condemn Heathcliff, however, is to ignore the real
sympathy for him, even identification with him, that Emily
Bronte evokes from her readers. People have seen Heathcliff in
two very different lights:

1. As a rebel. Heathcliff, a friendless laborer, is
mistreated by the landed gentry. He loses his true love to a
man with wealth and a higher social position. He takes revenge
by seizing control of Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights.
In this view, his revenge is an assertion of his dignity as a
human being, and right is on his side.

2. As a person committed to a higher love. That is, a
person committed to a love beyond the conventional notions of
religion or morality. When Heathcliff identifies himself with
Cathy ("I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my
soul!"), this is not selfishness; he is describing a love that
holds nothing back. And he remains true to his love even when
Cathy has betrayed him for Edgar. When he returns from his
three-year exile, he plans at first to have revenge only on
Hindley and to "look in" at Thrushcross Grange and make sure
Cathy is happy. But his suffering overwhelms him, and he starts
to torment others, especially Isabella, Edgar Linton's sister.