Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is Lennie Walker’s favorite book: a repeatedly read, underlined, and annotated volume whose physical wear records years of her life. Its story of Cathy and Heathcliff’s destructive love becomes a frame through which Lennie recognizes patterns of bad choices and emotional entanglement, including her own. When grief and conflict overwhelm her, she and Gram cut the book to pieces, turning a familiar literary object into a tangible focus for anger, sorrow, and an effort to move forward.

The Book in Lennie’s Life

The novel belongs to a box of books associated with Lennie’s absent mother, Paige Walker, kept in The Sanctum. Unlike those books, which have no dog-ears or annotations, Lennie’s copy bears the marks of intimate, repeated use. By the time Lennie acts on it, the pages are creased and soiled with years of handling, river water, summer sun, beach sand, and sweat from her palms. The book’s condition makes it more than a title she admires: its material surface has accompanied her through ordinary life and become bound to her body and memory.

Its hold on Lennie is measurable in her own correction of a joke from Sarah. Sarah attributes Lennie’s declaration that she belongs to a guy to having read Wuthering Heights eighteen times; Lennie corrects the count to twenty-three. The exchange presents the novel as a persistent influence rather than a passing reference. Lennie’s reading has been frequent enough to shape the language and ideas through which she thinks about love, even as the book’s tragic model gives her reason to question what it has taught her.

A Tragic Pattern for Present Troubles

When Lennie takes the garden shears to the novel, she cuts into what she calls its passionate, hopeless story: the lives and impossible love of Cathy and Heathcliff. She condemns Cathy for bad choices and compromises, and the cutting becomes a way to attack a pattern of love that appears to frustrate itself. Her response is not detached literary criticism. She turns from the fictional couple to Joe Fontaine’s jealousy, anger, and judgment, then to her own duplicity, confusion, hurt, bad judgment, and continuing grief.

The book thus gathers several kinds of pain into one object. Lennie’s anger at the characters’ choices runs alongside her anger at Joe’s refusal to forgive and her recognition of her own part in the conflict between them. She imagines that what is keeping them from a great love can be cut away with the same pages. The gesture has force precisely because she is attacking a book she has loved and marked so thoroughly: the object embodies both the tragic story she wants to reject and the years in which she repeatedly returned to it.

The Cutting with Gram

Lennie places the book and the shears in Gram’s hands and urges her to join in. At first Lennie cuts without the fear she had felt earlier that morning. The blades pass through chunks of paper and the tiny words, while the novel’s romance and tragedy become literal scraps. She also directs her anger at the all-or-nothing judgment she sees in Joe and at her own behavior and grief. The act does not separate those feelings into neat categories; it makes them part of the same destruction.

Gram watches wide-eyed before a faint smile appears. She asks for a turn, begins tentatively, then becomes as absorbed in hacking through handfuls of pages as Lennie. Words fly around them like confetti. Their shared cutting changes the scene from Lennie’s solitary assault into an unexpected act between granddaughter and grandmother. When they stop, both are out of breath and smiling giddily. The novel has given them a physical activity through which anger and grief can be expressed together, and the shared laughter marks a brief change in their closeness without implying that the underlying losses have vanished.

What Remains of the Story

Afterward, Lennie looks at the piles of words and wishes she could put the story back together so Cathy and Heathcliff might choose differently and reach each other. She cannot restore the pages; instead, she sweeps the remains into the trash. The irreversible action sharpens the contrast between the imagined revision of a tragic love story and the limits of changing what has already happened. Destroying the text does not rewrite its ending, nor does it settle Lennie’s uncertainty about Joe.

Later that evening, Lennie plays Joe’s melody repeatedly on the porch and considers books in which love triumphs, finding the literary examples insufficient reassurance for her own chances with him. The sequence places the ruined novel beside another artistic form that remains available to her: music. The book has been physically silenced, but its influence persists in the questions Lennie asks about love and whether a story can end differently. Sarah’s later teasing reference to the number of times Lennie has read it confirms that the novel continues to define part of her romantic imagination, even after the copy itself has been cut apart. Its role is therefore double: it supplies a tragic pattern Lennie resists, and its destruction gives her a concrete, shared expression of feelings that cannot simply be cut away.