u/MllePerso

As far as I know, there's no evidence that Emily Bronte ever read anything by Jane Austen, but sometimes I wonder if she read persuasion because the basic plots are so similar : guy and girl are in love but don't marry because the guy is too poor, guy goes away for years and comes back rich, will they now reunite?

Except persuasion is this plot on easy mode : he's not "degraded" but respectably broke with a plausible chance of making his fortune later , she is persuaded not to marry him by listening to the wrong advice ​but could have plausibly married him without a severe reputational hit - his being white helps. When he comes back, she's single, so the only thing standing in their way is insecurity and self-doubt .

​​Wuthering Heights is this plot on hard mode : he's not just broke but literally dirt poor, a dirty uneducated field servant. The local gentry family assumes he's most likely Romani, so *obviously* must be a born thief and pre-criminal scum. No one has to persuade her to not marry him because her marrying him is unthinkable to almost everybody around her, even Nelly who doesn't want her to marry for money doesn't tell her to marry the man she loves instead. When he comes back rich, she's married to another man (and, as we find out last minute, pregnant with his child), and so instead of being free to go back to her former lover without issue, she's faced with a whole new set of societal reasons not to.

​​Wuthering Heights says she still should have chosen love. Regardless.

Isabella, for different reasons, gathers the courage to make the hard choice Catherine didn't, takes the risk and leaves her husband as a single mother with no obvious source of income, and lives a dozen or so years after that near London. She is not punished by the narrative for it, and readers are left free to imagine those years as peaceful.

Wuthering Heights also doesn't make things easy for the reader, at least not for the reader who thinks of themselves as having good morals and good judgment. She doesn't give us straightforward heroes to root for (sorry Hareton/Cathy2 fans, but those two show up too late to be major characters and don't get any of the good dialogue), and she doesn't give us super bad villains to make the main characters look good in contrast. Probably the closest thing Wuthering Heights has to a straight villain is Hindley, who only needs a little help from Heathcliff to self-destruct and dies midway through the book, and papa Linton who dies almost immediately after showing up.

One thing I especially appreciate Emily Bronte for is that she didn't make Edgar a bad guy. Reading WH, even though I stan Heathcliff and Catherine to death and beyond, I don't hate Edgar. It would have been so easy for her to make him hateable. I watch a bunch of TV historical dramas and it's a pretty common trope to have an adulterous female character who we root for because her husband's a POS, but Edgar is the kind of guy who'd be goals in any Jane Austen novel, and not just because he's rich and handsome, but because he's a good person. He is gentle, doesn't drink or gamble or cheat, dotes on Catherine and accommodates to her wishes in general, and when she dies he properly mourns her and is a devoted father to their daughter.​ I wouldn't even say he's more snobbish towards Heathcliff​ than any other member of his class would be, and he only prohibits Heathcliff from coming to the house after he's spent a lot of time with his wife and shown designs to maliciously seduce his sister. He's the best a woman can get in that era, the kind of husband who should rightfully make any woman happy - and it's not enough. Because he can't understand Catherine like Heathcliff does, can't love her like Heathcliff does, what he loves in her is false. And marriage to him literally kills her.

​​Bronte also doesn't make Nelly the busybody that maliciously keeps the lovers apart, I know there's one essay that argues that but I don't buy it. Nor is she the stereotypical well-meaning but bumbling servant that shows up so often in other British works, even to this day, like literally right now I'm watching a TV costume drama made in 2017 that has that extremely stereotypical comedically stupid servant character. She makes Nelly overall intelligent and good, to the point where some readers take her as ​the wise authorial voice of the novel, but I don't think that's true either. Nelly​ is the voice of commonsense wisdom, and in that capacity she correctly tells off Lockwood for his urban snobbery, manages Hindley's violent moods enough to keep Hareton safe in his early years, and correctly points out the stupidity of Catherine's plan to marry Edgar. It's not enough. Faced with a passionate love and identity crisis that can't fit the standard social boundaries, she dismisses Catherine and Heathcliff's pain as immature silliness and selfishness , something which will be gotten over if it's not indulged. She assumes that Heathcliff, hearing the love of his life intends to marry someone else, will sulk in the barn a while and get over it . She assumes that Catherine, announcing her intention to starve herself, will get bored with her ploy for attention if everyone ignores it and soon be restored to happiness with her husband. She ​values maturity, defined as resigning to oneself to one's fate and not making too much of a fuss about it.​ A classic English value, and it fucks everything up.

​Any Gothic novelist worth their salt can create a plot obstacle character who is terrifying and monstrous : an abusive greedy count like those of Ann Radcliffe, or (sorry Charlotte, but it's true) a savage madwoman. But with Nelly and Edgar, Emily Bronte gives us plot obstacle characters who are actually best case scenarios , models of the virtues of selfless resignation and noblesse oblige appropriate to their respective social roles. I love her so much for this.

​​Even compared to other tales of Star-Crossed lovers, Wuthering Heights is hard mode. Like Romeo and Juliet or Heer Ranjha, Catherine and Heathcliff have the kind of love that doesn't die regardless of everyone trying to separate them , the kind of love that even defies death. But Wuthering Heights doesn't make its lovers pure archetypal characters who only act consistently on their love, it shows how they're internally damaged by everyone else to the point where even though they only love each other and never get over each other, they can both marry other people. It would be easier for the average reader to stomach if they either acted completely blamelessly , or "got over" their "obsession". But to have them do either would be to elide the actual internal damage done to them.

It might also be easier for some readers if their setting was a little less real, if the dramatic intensity and strength of their love was being expressed by aristocratic heroes in a mythical distant era, and not by a typical farmer's daughter and a Liverpool street kid, in a 1780s Yorkshire which has the same kind of class system and marriage market as 1840s Yorkshire, only differing in the lack of industrialization. The assumption among most writers describing that kind of world is that "realistically", love will die out when too inconvenient, that people will be able to mold their feelings to fit their circumstances. Emily Bronte rejected that assumption. She said, your neighbor here in boring rural England could be harboring a passion as great as any in myth, could be not just unhappy but killing the greatness of their soul in an outwardly "good" marriage. I remember seeing on here a quote, I think from the Juliet Barker Bronte bio, about how factory girls in West Riding would pass around tattered copies of Wuthering Heights from the lending library. It probably described their actual emotions better than a lot of books critics thought more "realistic".