There is something profoundly irritating to me about books being mislabeled as love stories. I relish a good love story. A true love story. But some of the most famous romances in literature are not love stories at all. Why does that irritate me? Why should it matter to me if people want to call Wuthering Heights a love story and swoon over Heathcliff? I think because literature informs so much of popular culture and popular thought. The books we read become the movies we watch, the television shows that are produced, and the quotes we pin on Pinterest. They become the tropes that are reused by future authors. They’re the stories little boys and girls grow up reading, the romances they are told they should aspire to. If we as a society mislabel stories of obsession and abuse as stories of love, we’re sending a damaging message to the girls and boys, women and men who read them.
Today, I’m going to discuss two stories that are not love stories. I’ll be doing a part two of this post in which I’ll talk about one more non-love story and one love story that’s been grossly distorted and turned into a terrible trope. But for now, let’s dive in.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is NOT a love story. It’s not. For those of you who need a reminder, Wuthering Heights is about Heathcliff and Cathy. Cathy’s dad adopts Heathcliff, a parentless vagrant child, brings him home and raises him as one of the family. Cathy and Heathcliff immediately connect and, over the years, fall in love.
Cathy eventually befriends Edgar and Isabella Linton, their neighbors. They’re kind to Cathy as the daughter of a wealthy gentleman, but they reject Heathcliff. Edgar proposes to Cathy, and even though she loves Heathcliff, she feels that she can’t marry him because of his low status. So she marries Edgar, and Heathcliff disappears. He returns years later as a wealthy gentleman and attracts the attention of Isabella Linton. He encourages Isabella’s love for him as a way to get back at Cathy and Edgar, and elopes with her. Cathy, cut off from Heathcliff and pregnant with Edgar’s child, dies. Heathcliff begs Cathy’s ghost to haunt him forever.
Heathcliff, of course, doesn’t care about Isabella at all. He treats her terribly, and she leaves him, giving birth to his son on her own. When she dies, Heathcliff brings his son home to live with him, and he encourages a connection between his son and Edgar and Cathy’s daughter. He forces them to marry, even though his son Linton is ill and Cathy (Edgar and Cathy’s daughter) doesn’t actually want to marry him. When Linton dies, Cathy is stuck at Wuthering Heights along with Heathcliff. He goes increasingly crazy, admits that he dug up her mother’s grave after she died, and dies himself in her mother’s old room. In the end, the people in the village say they’ve seen the ghosts of Heathcliff and Cathy walking the moors, together at last.
I’m sorry. What part of that was a love story? The part where Cathy doesn’t think the man she supposedly loves is good enough for her so she marries someone else? The part where she wastes away because she’s parted from the man she rejected? (Come on, Cathy, have a little dignity.) Or maybe when Heathcliff gets revenge on Cathy and Edgar by destroying Isabella’s life? The part where he continues to try to get revenge by forcing Cathy’s daughter to marry his son? The part where he digs up a woman’s grave? (That part always just creeps me out.) This is a story about obsession and abuse. Obsessive love can seem romantic, but it’s not healthy and it’s not something that anyone should aspire to. Read this book for the prose. Read it for the commentary on class, revenge, and madness. Read it for the vivid descriptions of the moors. Don’t read it looking for a love story, because you won’t find one.
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare is NOT a love story. I might get a lot of heat for this, but I said what I said. I’m assuming we’re all familiar with the story of Romeo and Juliet. Two families, the Montagues and the Capulets, hate each other. Romeo Montague sneaks into a Capulet party and sees Juliet Capulet. They “fall in love” (read: are attracted to one another), have that famous love scene on the balcony, and get secretly married by Romeo’s pal Friar Laurence.
Romeo carries on the feud, kills Juliet’s cousin, and is banished from the city. But don’t worry, he pops by her place first (again, after killing her cousin) to consummate the marriage. Can’t neglect that, after all.
Juliet’s parents, who know nothing of her marriage to Romeo, want to marry her off. She pretends to agree, but arranges with Friar Laurence to fake her own death to get out of it. Romeo is supposed to be in on the plan but misses the memo, thinks she’s really dead, and commits suicide by poison. Juliet, seeing Dead Romeo, stabs herself with his dagger.
The feuding families come together to find their dead children and get a stern lecture from the priest about how their endless fighting caused the death of their kids. (Maybe it was actually your really terrible plan, Friar Laurence.)
While this is supposedly one of the greatest romances in literature, what I see is two hormonal teenagers who have a few days of puppy love followed by a few days of angsty separation followed by a weird and needless double-suicide. That doesn’t negate the beauty of Shakespeare’s writing, and it certainly doesn’t mean that the play has no value. But it’s more of a cautionary tale than a love story.
Again, I get it if you like these books. They have literary value. Romeo & Juliet has some of the most beautiful lines ever written. But these two stories are often held up as examples of true love, and that’s not only inaccurate. It’s damaging.
They’re not love stories. The end.
