Another misnamed book branding...

I finished Wuthering Heights last night, and though the ending mitigated it a little, my perspective on the characters can be summed up in one word: dysfunctional.
Take Heathcliff, for example. I mean, I sympathized with him in the beginning of Mrs. Dean's talk--picked up from off the streets, bullied by Hindley. And then he just became nasty to everyone and everything. Even Catherine (the elder, that is) that he is supposedly in love with suffers from his unexpected temper. And his son, Linton Heathcliff, is a whiny, almost sadistic boy who can't see that maybe other people suffer (imagine!). Even the "protagonist" of the story--in effect., the person who has the story told to him--is a blockhead.

I liked it, though I badly did want to slap the characters upside the head a couple times. It ends in a remarkable way--that should have been cliched and somehow avoided it. However, there was one thing that was really difficult for me: Joseph's Yorkshire accent. She spells it out phonetically, and it's horrible to wade through. [And that's after Charlotte went through it and simplified it, too...] An amazing book, but definitely not a love story. Really.