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 Ghost of a Banyan Tree

  Image from here Fiction Jaichander Varma could not sleep. It was past midnight and the world outside Jaichander Varma’s room was fairly quiet because he lived sufficiently far away from the city. Though that entailed a tedious journey to his work and back, Mr Varma was happy with his residence because it afforded him the luxury of peaceful and pure air. The city is good, no doubt. Especially after Mr Modi became the Prime Minister, the city was the best place with so much vikas. ‘Where’s vikas?’ Someone asked Mr Varma once. Mr Varma was offended. ‘You’re a bloody antinational mussalman who should be living in Pakistan ya kabristan,’ Mr Varma told him bluntly. Mr Varma was a proud Indian which means he was a Hindu Brahmin. He believed that all others – that is, non-Brahmins – should go to their respective countries of belonging. All Muslims should go to Pakistan and Christians to Rome (or is it Italy? Whatever. Get out of Bharat Mata, that’s all.) The lower caste Hindus co...
122 comments
Read more

Unromantic Men

Romance is a tenderness of the heart. That is disappearing even from the movies. Tenderness of heart is not a virtue anymore; it is a weakness. Who is an ideal man in today’s world? Shakespeare’s Romeo and Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Devdas would be considered as fools in today’s world in which the wealthiest individuals appear on elite lists, ‘strong’ leaders are hailed as nationalist heroes, and success is equated with anything other than traditional virtues. The protagonist of Colleen McCullough’s 1977 novel, The Thorn Birds [which sold more than 33 million copies], is torn between his idealism and his natural weaknesses as a human being. Ralph de Bricassart is a young Catholic priest who is sent on a kind of punishment-appointment to a remote rural area of Australia where the Cleary family arrives from New Zealand in 1921 to take care of the enormous estate of Mary Carson who is Paddy Cleary’s own sister. Meggy Cleary is the only daughter of Paddy and Fiona who have eight so...
39 comments
Read more

Emergency - then and now

  When Indira Gandhi imposed a draconian Emergency on India 50 years ago on this day (25 June), I had just completed the first train journey of my life and started an entirely different kind of life. I had just joined a seminary as what they call an ‘aspirant’. One of the notice boards of the seminary always displayed the front page of an English newspaper – The Indian Express , if I recall correctly. I was only beginning to read English publications and so the headlines about Emergency didn’t really catch my attention. Since no one discussed politics in the seminary, it took me all of six months to understand the severity of the situation in the country. When I was travelling back home for Christmas vacation, the posters on the roadsides caught my attention. That’s how I began to take note of what was happening in the name of Emergency. A 15-year-old schoolboy doesn’t really understand the demise of democracy. It took me a few years and a lot of hindsight to realise the gravit...
9 comments
Read more