Why is Wuthering Heights your favourite ?
To me it's my favourite for it's raw power. Raw emotion. It's still such a wild sinful book even for today's standards. That's why I love it.
I love the story. I love revenge stories, stories about social mobility, stories about old houses, Gothic literature, family sagas, stories about obsessive love and unnecessary drama. The story of Wuthering Heights was almost written for me.
I love the language. I love how it is so beautiful but almost never feels purple or forced.
I love how almost none of the characters are one-dimensional. Wuthering Heights is a melodramatic story that seems to get its conflict from clear-cut binaries (Earnshaw-Linton etc.) so you would expect the characters to be caricatures, but they are not. They all have reasons for what they are doing, they all have their pitiable moments, they all have good or bad sides. At the hands of a worse author, Hindley would be a one-dimensional villain, but he isn’t. At the hands of a worse author Isabella and Younger Cathy would almost be the same character, but they feel very different.
I love Heathcliff’s character. I love his sarcasm. I love his contradictions. I love how he is a human being that you can empathize with at various points but the author never tries to redeem him.
I love how original a character Catherine Earnshaw is. I love that she is quite toxic and selfish but also loving and naive. She doesn’t fit into any neat categories.
I love how despite this being a novel of reasonable length, not too much time is spent on any one thing. There aren’t any unnecessary details in Wuthering Heights. Because of this, every detail becomes fascinating. In each reading you can discover a detail that you didn’t notice before.
I love how despite this being a very dramatic story, it never feels like the book is emotionally manipulating me. I am never forced to feel something. I am never forced to take one side.
I love how this dramatic story is told through Nelly’s no-nonsense perspective which creates an amazing sense of mood change. It is genius.
I love how ambiguous everything is. Because of the narrative perspective, everything in Wuthering Heights is a puzzle. There is a reason why it has so many varying interpretations.
I love how it can be both very earnest and ironic and darkly humorous at the same time.
I love how neat its structure is despite the explosive emotions it depicts.
I can probably find many other reasons why I love it, but I should probably stop now.