The Bright Book of Life by Harold Bloom

IF THERE IS A NOVEL IN Wuthering Heights, it centers upon Catherine Earnshaw, caught between the social reality of Edgar Linton and the daemonic Byronism of Heathcliff. Once Catherine Earnshaw and the Lintons are dead, the book is entirely romance. Wuthering Heights is almost uniquely the story of early marriage and early death. Catherine Earnshaw dies at eighteen, Heathcliff's son, Linton, at seventeen, Hindley at twenty-seven, Edgar at thirty-nine, poor Isabella at thirty-one, and Heathcliff at about thirty-eight (if my arithmetic is right). Edgar Linton is twenty-one and Catherine Earnshaw seventeen when they marry. Hindley marries Frances at twenty, and the marriage made in hell between Heathcliff and Isabella starts when he is nineteen and she is eighteen. The survivors, Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton, make the only happy marriage, at twenty-four and eighteen, respectively. Everyone marries very young because they intuit they will not live long. Unless Hareton and the second Catherine can defy their lineage, no protagonist in Emily Brontë's cosmos reaches forty, unhappily prophesying that even the stalwart Charlotte did not attain thirty-nine. Emily died at thirty of the family malady, tuberculosis.

I first wrote about Wuthering Heights as a Cornell undergraduate in 1947. Whatever that was like, I cannot know, since time's siftings have stilled it. Since then I have written three essays on Emily Brontë's one romance, all we have of her except for her mixed yet frequently magnificent body of poems. Rereading her at eighty-eight, I find, more strongly than before, that what fascinates me most is the abyss at the center of the book. Nearly all Heathcliff is in that void and perhaps more than half of the first Catherine. I mean "abyss" in the sense of Genesis 1: 2, the Hebrew tehom, for a turbulent bottomless sea. In the Gnostic heresy the Pleroma or Divine Fullness is equated with that abyss, which precedes Elohim, the normative godhead.