Obsession and Story

There's No Doubt: Wuthering Heights Persists. But Why?

I am sure I read Wuthering Heights. Maybe I was in high school. Probably not in college - I was a Math major. No reading lists there. I’m absolutely sure, though, that I got acquainted with—in some younger-me, innocent way—the characters of Cathy and Heathcliff.

Especially Heathcliff.

And while I don’t remember the specifics, I remember the feeling. It’s a chemical reaction, but one our minds eagerly welcome and accept. That whole wandering the moors in a dejected state thing. I’ve felt something like it a couple times, and while it’s rare enough that I don’t usually get too concerned about it, let’s face it: that feeling of strongly wanting to put something on an unending repeat loop can be worrisome. I mean, how many times can you listen to that one Bruce Springsteen song when you’re twenty years old? I’m sure I far surpassed the acceptable number of times I listened to Jungleland.

Why was I so obsessed?

Well, Jungleland is a pretty complex story: a story that takes nearly ten minutes of playing time to tell (which was quite unusual for the song’s era/genre). It’s highly imaginative. Realistic people inhabit it, and it whisks us away somewhere we must want to go to, as often as possible, to relive the tense fear, the hopelessness of those dark, after-the-bars-closed streets of a New Jersey shore town. I’ve wandered those streets, and remember them well. In other words, the feeling that the obsession triggers is persistent. It lies dormant in our memories, and the obsession reignites it. Every encounter feels like the first time.

But why do some stories, like Wuthering Heights, continue to trigger strong feelings, so many years after they were first written? What do some stories contain that lifts them, gives them life, causing us to crave them, over and over again?

Why do they persist?

I think some stories stay with us our whole lives. We feel at once lonely and connected, abandoned and united… when a story hits our hearts and worms its way into our minds. Stories that create obsession connect us to a world we don’t inhabit in the first-person, but they get us as close as possible without swallowing us up. It’s a mild form of insanity, to be sure. And it can turn bad. The thing to know is: we might think obsession controls us, but perhaps obsession is the very thing we totally control in our lives. We make the rules, we set the parameters.

Don’t we?

Wuthering Heights is, itself, a story about obsession. And Heathcliff isn’t real. But those moors—wet, wild, tortured—they are, indeed, real. How many of us will get the chance to go there? And aren’t we all just a little jealous that he gets to wander them so beautifully?

Stories are the physical manifestations of our own limitless imagination. When the waves crash onto the craggy beach, whether we’re mentally visiting the Jersey shore or the Yorkshire moors, we dance without leaving our armchairs, and Heathcliff is no longer alone. He has us.