Skip to main content

Heights of Evil

Illustration by ChatGPT

Evil has a peculiar charm, a charm which seems to belong to an alien world. But somewhere deep in our hearts we know that it is our own world, not an alien world. We romanticise it as Lost Paradise, Rama Rajya, Utopia, or whatever. That ‘romance’ is what I love about Emily Bronte’s novel, Wuthering Heights.

Emily died at the age of 29. Most Romantics died young. But those Romantics like Keats and Shelley imagined beautiful worlds and died because their souls knew that such beautiful worlds were impossible. Emily was born just three years before Keats died and four years before Shelley followed Keats. But the literary age was changing to the more prudish Victorian morality as Emily grew up.

Victorian morality was more than prudish. Women were supposed to be the western counterparts of India’s Satis, women who immolated themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres. How could a woman like Emily Bronte, daughter of a Christian parson, born and brought up in a parsonage in a very rustic background, write a novel like Wuthering Heights?

Wuthering Heights is the gospel of evil. The satanic Heathcliff is the hero and the angelic characters are all too impotent even to be anything worthwhile. Heathcliff would be a hero with a halo in today’s blockbuster movies. He is driven by bitterness and vindictiveness because history has been heartless towards him. He would have been the most heroic figure in today’s politics that seeks to wreak vengeance on the wrongs of some antique relics.

Angels weep in this novel. Devils carry the sengol, the sceptre. All because of the wrongs of history.

The devils dwell on the hills of the Wuthering Heights. And the angels are confined to the valley of Thrushcross Grange.

Who is above and who is below matters a lot in the moral edifice of the society.

Wuthering Heights suggests that evil is not a singular force but a complex interplay of human motivations, societal pressures, and individual actions. This novel will teach you why goodness is not easy on the earth as long as human beings exist on it. In spite of all religions. In spite of all moral codes. In spite of all gods and gurus.

This novel keeps haunting me with a strange melody that I love for reasons that the devil knows.

PS. This post is a part of Blogchatter Half Marathon


Labels:

Comments

  1. Anuradha sowmyanarayananAugust 28, 2024 at 9:18 PM

    Wuthering Heights represents human nature at its darkest. It represents the fatal and selfish side of love. Moreover, the good and evil in humanity are outlined through characters like Catherine and Heathcliff. Their love is fatal not only to them but also to everyone around them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 28, 2024 at 9:21 PM

      Passion reigns supreme there. As in the human world. Up to this day.

      Delete
  2. Yamini MacLeanAugust 28, 2024 at 9:58 PM

    Hari OM
    Here's a confession; I've never read WH. Was forced to read Jane Eyre for English at school. Those Bronte's sure had a bleak opinion of m/f relationships. Goodness struggles in all their characters. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 29, 2024 at 6:36 AM

      They weren't a happy family apparently. Or maybe there was a streak of crankiness in the family genes.

      Delete
  3. Liz A.August 29, 2024 at 7:26 AM

    I read this when I was about 12. Way too young. I should reread it as I barely remember it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AmbicaAugust 29, 2024 at 9:37 AM

    I listened to the audio book recently, and then decided that I should read it. I did romanticise it when I read it in my 20s, but now, I see the evil that you talk about. However, life has so many shades and we live with our shadows all through.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalAugust 29, 2024 at 10:13 AM

      The evil in the novel is so captivating that it's easy to romanticise it.

      Delete
  5. vanderloostAugust 30, 2024 at 4:46 PM

    My favourite classic. I remember we were all drawn to Heathcliff as a devilishly brooding hero.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
18 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

I’m Alive

Illustration by Copilot Designer How do you prove to anyone that you’re alive? Go and stand in front of the person and declare, “I’m Tom, Shyam or Hari”? No, that won’t work in India. Let me share my personal experience. It’s as absurd as the plight of Kafka’s protagonist in The Castle. A land surveyor is summoned for duty, only to be told that the mere fact a land surveyor was summoned does not prove he is that land surveyor though he has the appointment letter with him. I received a mail from the Life Insurance Corporation of India [LIC] that I should prove my existence in order to continue receiving my annuity on the sum I had invested with them five years ago. They’re only paying the interest on the sum I have given them. They’re not doing me any charity. Yet they want me to prove to them that I am still alive in order to continue getting the annual amount they are obligated to pay me. This is India. LIC is a government undertaking. If I don’t follow their injunction, I wil...
12 comments
Read more

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...
14 comments
Read more