A Wuthering Heights/Mirage Thought

I have been rereading Wuthering Heights (actually getting to teach it - yay!), and it has made me think again about how the story resonates with Mirage. This is not exactly a new thought, but it's coming home to me powerfully: perhaps the crucial difference between the two (besides thousands of pages in length) is morality. The core crazies at the heart of WH, Cathy and Heathcliff, aren't very concerned with moral or ethical issues outside their own crazy. Heathcliff positively enjoys being bad (a lot of the time), and Cathy is basically good-ish but very, very childish and lacking in insight into others. The core crazies in Mirage, however, are inextricably entangled with moral and ethical concerns: a sense of higher duty to a higher good is basically why they're there in the first place.

I adore WH, but this is probably the essence of why I adore Mirage more. They're both about obsessive love and the harm (and good) it can do, but Mirage has a significant layer beyond that: it's about obsessive love trying to coexist being a good person in the world. And that's a whole other ballgame.

Cross posted at Asphodel's Mirage Forums.