Wuthering Heights Wins by a Knock-Out

I’ve lost count how many times I’ve read this novel, how many strips of myself I’ve lost to it. I’d just watched “Southpaw,” too, which is basically about Jake Gyllenhaal gettin all up in the guts of what it means to be a man—and he was as believable as hell, love anything JG does, but there was that little problem of Rachel McAdams’s character gettin all caught up in the cross-fire of men getting all up in dem guts of what it means to be a man. A little problem easily solved by a stray gunshot —which never really got satisfactorily resolved in the film—because as one male who I talked to pointed out—the stray bullet (or was it?) that killed the woman in the way, “wasn’t really part of the plot”. The plot was that her death left the ring free for the main event: two messed-up dudes leading each other to bloody and violent redemption.

Wuthering Heights (1847) says no to such easy solace, follows that stray bullet right to its source.

‘You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff! And you both come to bewail the deed to me, as if you were the people to be pitied! I shall not pity you, not I. You have killed me—and thriven on it, I think. How strong you are! How many years do you mean to live after I am gone?

Heathcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down.
‘I wish I could hold you,’ she continued bitterly, ’till we were both dead. I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your suffering. Why shouldn’t you suffer. I do!’

Them’s fighting words, and Wuthering Heights wins by a knockout, IMO.