The book that changed my life
November 26th 2006 22:22
I first read Wuthering Heights in the early 80s. I was a huge Kate Bush fan and was going through a stage of wearing flowing dresses and crimping my hair (this was the first major fashion “identity” I can remember, followed soon after by my Beverley Hills 90210 inspired fashion phase) and it seemed only fitting that I should read the book that inspired Kate’s hit song.
I thought I was going to be reading a charming olde worlde tale of courtship and musings. How wrong I was. Wuthering Heights shocked me. The characters we horrible! They were profoundly flawed and they were the nastiest people, so self obsessed they hurt everyone around them and destroyed everything they touched. The story was punctuated throughout with violence – random and manufactured. Even a small scene of domestic functionality set in the kitchen, was marred by a simple sentence, describing the scene, which included a servant hanging puppies from a door handle. It was horrifying.
But what amazed me the most about Wuthering Heights was that it was a book – bits of paper bound together and covered in symbols. Because that’s all a book it. Yet this paper and these symbols caused me to be deeply disturbed and deeply moved. Reading Wuthering Heights was the first time I really understood the power of words and the relationship between words and the imagination. It really did change my life.
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