Pajiba

Of course they wanna focus on the young romance aspect of Wuthering Heights. Copies of Wuthering Heights now fucking come with an "Edward and Bella's favorite book!" sticker. Bleughghghgh.

I don't even like Wuthering Heights much, but GOD.

I'm feeling extra feminist today, so I'm gonna ask: why must you always post naked pictures of women and you only post pictures of men's abs?

I would be super-pleased if they did Wuthering Heights in the most honest possible way, that is to say, portraying the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff every inch as fucked-up and mean as it was in the book.

In the same vein as Nat, I'm tired of the Twilight approach to that book. Wuthering Heights wasn't a love story, per se. It was more a hate story. And there's really nothing in there as far as romance goes to aspire to.

In his version, he’s planning on focusing more on the Gothic.

One ticket, please.

If only Twilight ended the same way "Bella and Edward's favorite book" ended -- (um, Wuthering Heights spoiler? Does the statute of limitations on spoilers go for 175 year old books?) -- she dies and he goes crazy and makes everyone else miserable. Actually, it kind of fits, Bella's as interesting as death and he is moody all the time....

I'm torn between wanting a movie version of Villette (my favorite Charlotte Brontë) and realizing they'd just fuck it up. (They'll give Lucy Snow a bustles montage; they'll ignore the complexity of the ending.)

Once upon a time there was a biopic about the Brontë sisters. I think Michelle Williams, Bryce Dallas Howard, and Evan Rachel Wood were attached. That movie sounds like it would be as awesome as anything starring those three could be. (Cf The Southerner's Dictionary entry on "Bless her heart" and "She's as cute as she can be".)

Juliet Barker's biography of the family is worth slogging through (there's a lot about Patrick and his challenges with the church. If you're all about church-fighting, then it's your thing. If you're about drunken Bramwell and his illegitimate baby -- you've got some pages to flip before you get there.) Also, Lucasta Miller's The Brontë Myth is an interesting look at how the sisters have been manufactured to conform to whatever (wrong) point about Lady Victorian Novelists is being made.

Jane Eyre - yay. Wuthering Heights can go suck on a diseased camel's festering sores. I have never in my life hated a character like I hated Catherine and Heathcliff. Of course it's the Twi-twats' favourite book, it would have to be.

I love Wuthering Heights so much. I love the language and the Gothic angst and the fact that there is not ONE sympathetic character in the whole thing. It's just like real life!

To support Nat Kittyface's comment:

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/jezebel/2009/08/wuthering_heights.jpg

I'm feeling extra feminist today, so I'm gonna ask: why must you always post naked pictures of women and you only post pictures of men's abs?

Posted by: Bizarro Sofía at January 21, 2010 12:08 PM
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No ladybits showing = Guys With Abs have no manbits showing.

Sounds fair to me.

@ ScienceGeek: "Can't speak for anybody else, but I can accept not liking the character in certain books, but not ones that are supposed to be a romance. Especially if the author tries to claim that one or both of the protagonists are wonderful and romantic when they're actually behaving like emotionally abusive psychos or whiny, spineless fuckwits."

I think I agree with you on this. An author should have an understanding of her characters. Among a frillion other reasons, The Fountainhead is a toughy for me because I can't read Howard Roark the way Ayn Rand intended.

I don't think Emily Brontë meant for readers to come to Wuthering Heights expecting a romance novel. She's keenly aware of how unlikeable everyone -- from Cathy to Heathcliff to Nelly Dean to the narrator -- is. These are not good people.

Emily Brontë, I think, is writing a romantic novel -- but romantic in the way that Beethoven's symphonies are romantic, or the canvases of John Everett Millais* are romantic; which is to say: stormy and scary and emotionally turbulent, not puppies, rainbows, and heart-dotted i's. I think she's commenting on how destructive insular relationships are -- those two families in that novel are on the road to being Hapsburgs, what with all the intermarrying -- and how destructive love itself can often be, especially when misunderstood.

If you can bring yourself to do it, try re-reading Wuthering Heights as if you were watching an episode of A&E's "Intervention." Read it for the trainwreckiness of the whole thing. Notice how frankly Emily Brontë writes about sexual violence -- a pretty amazing thing for a young woman to write about in the nineteenth century.

Or, of course, don't read it at all -- because there's nothing worse than reading a book you hate on every single page.

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* The woman in that painting? She laid in a bathtub of tepid-to-cold water every day for several weeks for Millais. She then got super sick and died. Thanks, art!

@ J.K. Barlow: "Has anyone read Cold Comfort Farm? One of the secondary characters was a scholar lurking around the village who was convinced that Branwell Brönte had in fact written all the Brönte novels and his sisters had stolen them from him. His favourite conversation opener was, 'Do you believe women have souls?'"

Ah, Mr Mybug. Creepy, dirty, way-too-sexual Mr Mybug. I enjoy that scene a lot, because I love the Brontë sisters (well, mostly Charlotte), and it's great to watch Flora continue engaging Mybug on the alcoholic Branwell rather than talking more about how hills look like breasts. (I love how he claims that it's the sisters who are the drunkards, actually: "They were all drunkards, but Anne was the worst of the lot.")*

There is so much that's great about Cold Comfort Farm. I think it gets written off as a droll English comic novel, but she's a smarter writer than she's given credit for.

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* There's this irritating line of thinking in Austen studies about the novel Mansfield Park -- that since Austen barely mentions slavery, the novel must be consumed with slavery. That's how you know when someone is consumed with something, according to these thinkers: they never mention it. With that in mind, I draw your attention to this exchange in Cold Comfort Farm between Mybug and Robert Post's child:

"I've proved all this [that Branwell wrote the sisters' novels] by evidence from three letters to old Mrs Prunty."

"But do the letters," enquired Flora, who was fascinated by this recital, "actually say that he is writing 'Wuthering Heights'?"

"Of course not," retorted Mr Mybug. "Look at the question as a psychologist would. Here is a man working fifteen hours a day on a stupendous masterpiece which absorbs almost all his energy. He will scarcely spare the time to eat or sleep. He's like a dynamo driving itself on its own demonic vitality. Every scrap of his being is concentrated on finishing 'Wuthering Heights.' With what little energy he has left he writes to an old aunt in Ireland. Now, I ask you, would you expect him to mention that he was working on 'Wuthering Heights'?"

"Yes," said Flora.

"No - no - no! Of course he wouldn't. He'd want to get away from it for a little while, away frmo this all-obsessing work that was devouring his vitality. Of course he wouldn't mention it. Not even to his aunt."

...this was, of course, back when Clueless was just released and young people still read magazines. I'm just throwing that out there to re-establish my credibility, after the possibly damaging admission that I once read Seventeen.

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