I have arranged for reviews I write on Goodreads to automatically publish here on Urban Earthworm. I would love to hear the opinions of my Urban Earthworm followers as to whether or not this is desirable. I read a wide variety of books across numerous genres, so most of these reviews will fall outside Urban Earthworm’s themes of Ethical Eating and Everyday Sustainability.
Please let me know if you enjoy these book reviews, or if you feel the detract from the overall purpose of this site. Thank you!
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights Feminist Review: I first read Wuthering Heights when I was about 15, and I loved it. It was the first book to open my eyes to the fact that not all “classics” were the same. This one was dark, creepy, and the “love story” aspect of it was twisted. Great fodder for a teen with a “jaded” persona. Perhaps my young mind was subconsciously resonating with the Emily Brontë‘s veiled straining against cultural norms of the submissive and dull female. Or perhaps I just liked the shock value. Probably the latter.
After reading The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde, I was inspired to give both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights a second look as an adult.
My second reading of Wuthering Heights was certainly a different experience from the first. I was drawn much more into the characters and causal relationships in this reading than in my first. Both times I read it, I found the story completely engrossing and thought provoking. It was not so much suspenseful as intriguing.
Reading it now as a married adult and a mother, I was struck by the amount of child abuse in the book that hadn’t even registered with me when I was a teenager. It is a truly sad tale of the lifelong emotional destruction that can be wrought by a lack of nurturance in child-rearing. To me, the rippling effects of childhood situations, even through generations, was the most pervasive theme in the book, though I would be the first to admit that this is far from the only theme. If I had time, I would love to explore the themes of death/transcendence (for positive and negative), symbolism in nature (heath in particular), and love in all its unusual variations here – for starters! (On that note, I will say that while I have heard this called a kind of love story, that is about the last label I would apply – the other aspects of the story were much more powerful to me, and while broken, corrupted, or weak love weaves through many of the other themes, I nevertheless found it secondary at best).
I was consistently caught by the fact that the female characters, with the possible exception of Nelly Dean, seemed to remain locked in a childlike state while the males matured. A good friend recommended I consider this novel (and others like it) as being written out of protest. I suggest that it is the trapped and stunted natures of the women best captures that protest.
I’m glad I read it, both times. Now on to Jane Eyre (with a short break for some Terry Pratchett).
I never read Wuthering Heights as a teenager. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I ever picked it up. I hated every moment of it and wanted all of the characters to die in the end.