The Heart of the Gothic
The first time I read Wuthering Heights was last fall, though I’ve known about it since childhood, having read in The Babysitter’s Club that it was the greatest love story ever told (per Mary Anne, the nerdy book reading one). I hated it. I threw it across the room, something I haven’t done since reading Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero and learning, via the novel, that snuff porn existed.
This was not stormy romance, but a novel about sadism, brutality, psychological torture, and a not-insignificant amount of rape and incest. Emily Brontë is interested in a lot of things: property, the transactional nature of marriage, the quality of a storm, the feeling of poverty on your skin, the way violence becomes inheritance. But romantic love is not one of them.
“It’s punk rock! It’s about the darkness!” my friend argued to me. “But,” I asked, “toward what end?” The main characters’ stories are narrated by others, and thus relay no self-knowledge; we are subject only to the brute fact of their pain, not its meaning. The novel is famously claustrophobic, each of the two houses haunted in their own way, with two families so entangled it’s as if they’re the last people in England. Everyone keeps running out onto the moors because, I thought, they’re trying to escape.
But here’s the thing: I hate-read the book compulsively. I mean, I went over and picked it up from where I had thrown it against the wall and kept reading into the night.
Why? To find out, I went to the source. The gothic novel, of which Wuthering Heights is a prime example, emerged in Europe from a stormy, bloody world — the Age of Revolutions, but also the height of the transatlantic slave trade and the colonization of the Americas. That wealth fuels the marriage plots, that revolt fuels the restlessness of the characters, those masters’ fears of a slave revolt undergirds the gothic’s “power of blackness,” as Melville put it. The heart of the gothic is not Europe; it’s the Caribbean, where most of the enslaved are and most of the wealth is made. (It’s significant that Brontë’s Heathcliff is not white.)
Accordingly, I turned to the French-Caribbean writer Maryse Condé’s brilliant and vibrant 1995 rewrite, Windward Heights, set in post-emancipation Guadeloupe and Cuba amid a race-obsessed Creole society, a rising (corrupt?) Black socialist politics, and white planters falling into ruin. Cathy is light-skinned and Razyé (“heath,” in Creole) is dark; Cathy marries up to be accepted into white society. In keeping with the diversity of Caribbean society, Condé gives us not two but many narrators — indentured Indian servants, Black housekeepers, Vodou oungans, poor whites, sex workers, and the main characters themselves. “Is there a place outside the claustrophobia of race?” Condé’s novel asks. Its characters search for that place in as many ways as there are people. Maybe it’s love. Maybe it’s the dazzling sea.
Brontë’s novel is a masterpiece because it unflinchingly throttles us with the claustrophobia of a stratified society. Condé’s is because it asks if there’s anywhere outside of such a closed place. Would that a filmmaker could, someday, actually do justice to either of these writers’ visions! —Jessie Kindig