Great Loves #4: Cathy and Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

On June 30^th, Wim Tigges will tells us about the great love between Cathy and Heathcliff in the fourth GREAT LOVES event.

Wuthering Heights (1847), Emily Brontë’s only novel, has become a ‘classic’ and a steady seller. Almost everyone knows the names of ‘Cathy’ and ‘Heathcliff’, if only through Kate Bush, or through the numerous film adaptations of this ‘romantic’ novel. The author lived out contrasts between wild (‘real’) nature and nature experience on the one hand and domestic civilisation on the other, between town and countryside, and in that countryside between the traditional, ‘primitive’ inhabitants of the 300-year-old Wuthering Heights estate and the ‘modern’ inhabitants of Thrushcross Grange. These contradictions also manifest themselves in the way feelings, and erotic feelings in particular, are handled. In Wuthering Heights, Catherine Earnshaw, as a 16-year-old girl, must choose between her passionate love for the wild ‘migrant’ Heathcliff and a materially sensible marriage to the well-behaved Edgar Linton. Later, her daughter faces a similar choice…

Don’t miss this classic and join us on Sunday, June 30^th at 16.00!

Wim Tigges is anglicist and literary scholar, as well as a guest-lecturer at Leiden University and HOVO.