Being an English major in college permanently ruins your ability to simply passively enjoy literature. Anyone who got a humanities major has surely been accused of "reading too far into it", where the "it" is like an episode of Friends or something. Every read is an argument, a parable, allegory, satire etc etc.
Which is not to complain, this muscle memory, every time I crack open a book, is probably one of the only things that makes non-contemporary literature accessible. When I saw the new Wuthering Heights movie come out and all the subsequent complaints around the atrocities it visited to the text, I knew I had to give it a go. Anytime literary fiction is in the discourse, I feel the need to read it.
The only thing I knew about Wuthering Heights was that I remembered a number of girls I really liked in high school who read it and talked about it a lot. Brontë's work was stacked next to Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell. So I was sort of expecting similar, some excising commentary of their time with a heavy ladle full of romance.
That is...not what I got. For one, nothing in this book can feasibly be called "romantic". There is plenty of familial love and emotional bond, but there is also bitter hatred and intractable abuse crossing in those same streams. Romance implies two unrelated individuals who love each other through circumstances that generally aren't amenable to the blossoming thereof. I'll come back to it, but trust me, you won't be finding that here. Wuthering Heights also evokes some commentary about the time it was written, but not as you'd expect; the setting is extremely remote, and the cast of characters is very thin and quite (literally?) incestuous. The entire work struck me as a comment on the field of male-dominated literature (Brontë wrote it with a male pen name).
While one might be tempted to synopsize the various activities of the characters first, the book is named after the estate, Wuthering Heights. The Heights is old, haunted, inhabited at various times primarily (and sometimes exclusively) by men. It's foiled by the Thrushcross Grange, home of the Linton family, which was often the site of various women characters learning to read and being treated like humans.
Brontë also has a lot of fun with the narrators and point of view. The novel starts from the perspective of Mr. Lockwood, a sort of insufferable baby who fancies himself worldly. From there, he falls away almost completely, and the housekeeper Nelly, becomes the focal narrator. This is the equivalent of Brontë looking directly at the camera as if to say, "gee, women sure are good storytellers too".
Then there is Heathcliff, the very allegory for male authorship himself. He is inexplicably beloved by women, particularly Cathy, which was probably the most shocking aspect of this book. There are zero scenes of intimacy between Cathy and Heathcliff, but she does wax extremely eloquently about him (although many of the lines seem to be a wink/nod to the possibility of their being related). Later in the novel, Heathcliff essentially captures the offspring of every character in his machinations and forces them to live out a little play version of their lives constructed solely by his will. This is Bronte's depiction of the male-dominated field of fiction, mean-spirited and fraudulent. It is clear she holds no love for women who throw themselves at its feet, nor the fanatic men who cling to it like barnacles (portrayed here by Joseph, the servant at the Heights, whose dialogue I had to read out loud to understand).
Brontë effectively demonstrates the need to take women authors seriously. They can be as dark and ravaging as the male authors of their time. They are perfectly capable of redefining or even perverting the romantic novel society expected them to be writing. The fun of Wuthering Heights was mostly because I fell into the same trap Brontë expected readers to fall into when they saw a woman was writing it; they expected a love story. What you're given instead is shocking cruelty. So bring your preconceived notions when you read this one, it makes it all the better.