Heathcliff lives a life full of suffering and uncontrollable sadness, but he inflicts that suffering on those around him and feels no compunction about it. According to O’Callaghan, by not correcting his mistakes and allowing him to die without further punishment, Brontë poses more complex questions to his readers rather than giving them answers. “What is love?” Does the marriage system work? What are the limits of violence?
It’s part of this novel’s complicated legacy. “Popular culture tends to say that this is a great romance; [readers] This book is something completely different, so you will encounter the jar for the first time. It still has the power to shock, and I think, like the Victorians, we’re still struggling with how to define it and what to do with it,” says O’Callaghan.
Another common misconception about this novel is that it is relentlessly dark, but at times very funny. The two servants, Nellie and Zilla, are the center of great gossip. Linton Heathcliff is a grumpy, sickly, and brash child who makes readers roll their eyes. And when he can understand what the farm servant Joseph is saying in his thick Yorkshire dialect, he is often a quick-witted sarcastic and never has anything nice to say. When Catherine falls ill after searching for Heathcliff in the rain, he sarcastically exclaims, “Are you going after the lads like you always do?”
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Lockwood’s brashness is also interesting. “He’s like a character from a Jane Austen novel who wanders into Brontë’s world, and that’s really interesting to me,” O’Callaghan says. “If you read this book and take it as a kind of gothic satire to some degree, it’s a completely different book. But I think that’s one thing, too. People take this book very seriously, you know? They’re absolutely convinced that these are real characters, not this gothic, far-fetched thing.”
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
