Blogging Wuthering Heights: Part THE END

Coffinmaker did it! He blogged the whole dang book! Connnnnngratulations! —Sparkitors

You know how the very first chapter of the book started in the year 1801? That was when Lockwood came to Wuthering Heights to get curious about Heathcliff, hear a long story from Nelly Dean that took up most of the book, and mistake dead rabbits for not-dead kittens.

Well, this final chapter begins with the year 1802. Lockwood starts off by saying that he was "invited to devastate the moors of a friend in the north," which is probably all he ever gets invited to do these days. During his visit to "the north" he decides to pop in on his good old friend Nelly Dean and let her narrate again for a while.

He is surprised to find that she is at Wuthering Heights, and as he's coming in he hears Hareton, Hindley's son, flirting and talking nicely with Cathy. The two seem to be in love, and it strikes Lockwood as strange that Heathcliff would allow such a thing, since last we saw they hated each other.

Lockwood runs into Nelly, and she tells him the whole story. First, Heathcliff's dead.

He grew more and more reclusive as the winter came, she says, and then his fowling piece exploded and sent a splinter into his arm. Ah, fowling piece, the knife-gun's brother! You too have passed into the Gun Netherworld! May you find your soulmate, the best magazine clip in the universe, and may you two become one, and start shooting out little baby bullets.

What really did him in was Cathy and Hareton deciding to be friends, and then falling in love with one another. Heathcliff had thought that he had ruined Hareton and made him unlovable by giving him only hate from a young age. But he did not count on the restorative power of love!

After seeing the two together, he says to Nelly, in a famous passage from the book:

'It is a poor conclusion, is it not?' he observed, having brooded awhile on the scene he had just witnessed: 'an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don't care for striking: I can't take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case: I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.'

Heathcliff is losing his will to live.

One time, he disappears all night, and when he comes back in the morning, he frightens Cathy by looking happy and excited, in a way he's never looked in his life. He refuses to eat all day, and he smiles and makes Nelly wonder if he's a vampire. She knows she's been with him all his life, but she wonders where he really came from when Mr. Earnshaw picked him up as a little baby on his way back from Liverpool.

So this is where Stephenie Meyer got her idea for vampires! Emily Bronte, what have you DONE to the world!? The only way Emily Bronte's soul doesn't deserve to spend a million showings of War and Peace with Audrey Hepburn (the longest movie in the world) in Purgatory—and no I'm not Catholic but I wish I was at times like these—is if someone publishes a book about knife-guns next. Only way.

Heathcliff spends several days acting strangely and not eating at all before Nelly finally finds him dead in Cathy's old bedchamber one morning, with a strange, somewhat frightening smile on his face.

Ah, Heathcliff. You were creepy and your hair was unwashed, you talked to ghosts and you could foot-punch dogs, but in the end, beauty killed the beast. Cue the fighter planes! BOOM!

Of course, Nelly then tells Lockwood that the townsfolk still speak of Heathcliff walking around the moors with the ghost of Cathy. I'm not sure whether they make out or not, and I'm not sure if the ghost of Linton chases them around, shaking his fist. Maybe they switch off nights.

Cathy and Hareton will be married on New Year's Day, Nelly says, and they'll move from the Heights to the Grange. Wuthering Heights will be boarded up and left... empty.

Well, gosh, I was meaning to do some sort of happy dance or something now that the book is over, but I get here, to the end, and now I feel a tear traveling down my cheek. Stupid tears! Manklers don't cry!

But I'm sad to be done with Wuthering Heights. In the end, it had both a feeling of happiness at Cathy and Hareton's marriage (does the woman only go after her cousins?) and sadness at Heathcliff's death and Wuthering Heights being boarded up.

And now, for the final tally for Blogging Wuthering Heights:

Musical numbers: Too many

Knife-gun fights: Not enough

Bat Hawks: 2

Buttcheeks: 3 1/2

Dora the Explorer jokes: Never enough

Ballistic applesauce: INCOMING!

Woman Violence: 3.3 per 100,000 people

Accusations of copying Dan Bergstein: Scissors can double as weapons and castanets

Babies dropped: 1

Babies shaken: 1

Smeyer jokes made: infinity plus five

But actually, Stephenie Meyer didn't make too bad of a choice with this book, and, to reference the first post on this column, I think zella435 was right about it being a good book on its own merits.

Adieu, Sparklers! May your knife-guns forever be sharp.

Are you sad? We are!

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