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Wuthering Heights - The Book

Min Bannister

Min Bannister

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I have just read this and would like some talking therapy to help rehabilitate. I believe @Frideswide is a fan? Anyone else?

After finishing I went to find out more about Emily Bronte and discovered that she had been drinking water that had filtered through the cemetery. :eek: It would explain a few things at least! :freak:

I also found out from the Wikipedia entry on her that in 2007 British readers voted Wuthering Heights as the greatest love story of all time. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THOSE PEOPLE? (I tried to read the reference to find out more about this polll but it was too full of annoying pop ups.) Was I reading a different book?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights
 
Min Bannister said:
Go on then, what am I misinterpreting?:popc:
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The crazed love between Heathcliffe and Cathy, it goes beyond anything natural; also the brutality of rural life. at the time. Contemporary reviews didn't challenge the reality of the harsh conditions or how people were treated. This was well captured in Andrea Arnold's 2011 feature, a dark narration of the story in more ways than one.

I really don't think it's just misery lit anymore than Macbeth is just violence porn. Macbeth also contains a great twisted love story, perhaps best illustrated in Justin Kurzel's grim horror film of the play.
 
I kind of like the book (been a while since I read it, although I have just re-read Jane Eyre, which I do reread every so often).

I find the madness of their love rather discomforting, but I don’t mind being made to feel that. It seems part of the setting, almost. If that land could love, it would be that kind of love.
 
ramonmercado said:
The crazed love between Heathcliffe and Cathy, it goes beyond anything natural; also the brutality of rural life. at the time.
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Yes, I agree with that! I was just thinking that whatever was going on in their fractured minds wasn't love.




ramonmercado said:
I really don't think it's just misery lit anymore than Macbeth is just violence porn.
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Oh no I don't think that either. I wouldn't have wanted to start a thread on it otherwise. Although it is very miserable. I am not sure I can really describe it.
 
I adore the book but the love story is as @ramonmercado describes.

It's a bit like Shakespeare's Comedies.... not very funny when you really understand them!

I think that the nightmare scene is one of the best bits of gothic horror writing that there is. And the blurred lines between reality and perceived reality and diff PoV and that ending...

In other news, Heathcliffe is an abuser and shows psychopathic traits, Cathy is an abuser and shows narcissistic traits, Ellen Dean is an enabler.

@Min Bannister where do you think Heathcliffe comes from? Why is he brought home? What race is he?
 
Min Bannister said:
I have just read this and would like some talking therapy to help rehabilitate. I believe @Frideswide is a fan? Anyone else?

After finishing I went to find out more about Emily Bronte and discovered that she had been drinking water that had filtered through the cemetery. :eek: It would explain a few things at least! :freak:

I also found out from the Wikipedia entry on her that in 2007 British readers voted Wuthering Heights as the greatest love story of all time. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THOSE PEOPLE? (I tried to read the reference to find out more about this polll but it was too full of annoying pop ups.) Was I reading a different book?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights
Click to expand...

It was my go-to book as a moody teenage goth. I love all the Bronte sister's works but this is the best. It's the perfect escapism, the landscape, the doomed love, none of the characters are particularly pleasant - which at a certain age you are beginning to figure out for yourself about people. It's the ideal teenage book.

I loved Heathcliffe - he's mysterious, traveled, strong, ruthless, and yet passionate. He's the outsider - everything moody teenage boys think they are. I'd probably consider him a psychopath now.

Cathy - my ideal. She is beautiful, fey, capricious, at times spiteful - again this is the time you are trying to figure out the other sex for yourself and getting a lot of it wrong. Ultimately she is doomed and as a teenager, you feel that too.

I've not read it in 20 years. Even though it had lost a bit of its power rereading it in my late 20's - I appreciated the gothic feel to it. You are taking a step back in time. I get the same effect with Thomas Hardy although I think of his books and poetry in a totally different way.

EDIT: Just seen your post Frides - agree totally! :D
 
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Fanari_Lloyd said:
I find the madness of their love rather discomforting, but I don’t mind being made to feel that. It seems part of the setting, almost. If that land could love, it would be that kind of love.
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I think I will cross it off my holiday list, just in case! :D

Frideswide said:
In other news, Heathcliffe is an abuser and shows psychopathic traits, Cathy is an abuser and shows narcissistic traits, Ellen Dean is an enabler.

@Min Bannister where do you think Heathcliffe comes from? Why is he brought home? What race is he?
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ARGHHHH! Now there are shivers going up and down my spine. And just when I was trying to forget the whole corpse water thing. He was a founding, of dark appearance. He seems to like wandering about the moors in the dark. I am getting flashbacks to an Arthur Machen story about "the fair folk". I am probably reading too much into it..
 
Naughty_Felid said:
none of the characters are particularly pleasant
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I agree. It was what struck me when I read it. I was used to having at least one character to root for, but mainly wanted to give these a ding alongside the ear. Didn’t detract from the strange enchantment of the book, but it was a new experience for me as a reader. Not a bad one, just new.
 
Fanari_Lloyd said:
I agree. It was what struck me when I read it. I was used to having at least one character to root for, but mainly wanted to give these a ding alongside the ear. Didn’t detract from the strange enchantment of the book, but it was a new experience for me as a reader. Not a bad one, just new.
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Lol yes, I was waiting for that person too. It is definitely "different". I was amazed to find she (and indeed the other Bronte's) were so influenced by Walter Scott whose books tend to be filled with warm, funny beautifully drawn characters.
 
I think it's the only novel she completed. If we all have one novel in us, WH is Emily Bronte's. Which is just... :freak:

Have you read any of her poetry @Min Bannister ?

Although the "no good deed goes unpunished" idea works better if it is a random act of kindness, I always wondered if Heathcliff was an illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw, who brings him home when his mother dies. That would make Heathcliff and Cathy incestuous I think?

I've also wondered if Heathcliff wasn't 100% caucasian. If you go with that it explains some of the rarum avis reaction the people have to him.

If either of those was bronte's intent then she'd have to subtext very hard for the thing to be published...
 
Frideswide said:
Although the "no good deed goes unpunished" idea works better if it is a random act of kindness, I always wondered if Heathcliff was an illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw, who brings him home when his mother dies. That would make Heathcliff and Cathy incestuous I think?
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Yes, this would help to explain it. After all, there must surely have been more than one orphan wandering Liverpool at the time and it is hard to see what could have attracted Earnshaw to Heathcliff even as a young boy. Though having come up with it I am going to stick with fairy.. :D Incest seems to have been a bit less of a problem in those days since young Cathy marries both her first cousins in short order?

I haven't read any of her poetry. I am a bit scared to now. :eek:
 
Min Bannister said:
I have just read this and would like some talking therapy to help rehabilitate. I believe @Frideswide is a fan? Anyone else?

After finishing I went to find out more about Emily Bronte and discovered that she had been drinking water that had filtered through the cemetery. :eek: It would explain a few things at least! :freak:

I also found out from the Wikipedia entry on her that in 2007 British readers voted Wuthering Heights as the greatest love story of all time. WHAT IS WRONG WITH THOSE PEOPLE? (I tried to read the reference to find out more about this polll but it was too full of annoying pop ups.) Was I reading a different book?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuthering_Heights
Click to expand...
Oh dear, it's one of my favorite older books. "Greatest love story" is not necessarily greatest literature. Thomas Hardy or George Eliot it's not. It was not intended as high literature - it was romantic fiction of 1847 and hit a number of the touchpoints for popular literature of the day. Possible incest, The Other (probably a Gypsy, which was shocking), obsessive forbidden love, the supernatural, madness, death, gothic home, etc. Beautifully written and with social characterization really well drawn, especially ancillary characters. And of course the movie - Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon - gorgeous.
 
Lb8535 said:
Oh dear, it's one of my favorite older books. "Greatest love story" is not necessarily greatest literature. Thomas Hardy or George Eliot it's not. It was not intended as high literature
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I thought it was good, a very compelling read. I was only disputing that it was a love story. In fact there seems to be a pretty severe lack of that throughout.
 
Frideswide said:
I think it's the only novel she completed. If we all have one novel in us, WH is Emily Bronte's. Which is just... :freak:

Have you read any of her poetry @Min Bannister ?

Although the "no good deed goes unpunished" idea works better if it is a random act of kindness, I always wondered if Heathcliff was an illegitimate son of Mr Earnshaw, who brings him home when his mother dies. That would make Heathcliff and Cathy incestuous I think?

I've also wondered if Heathcliff wasn't 100% caucasian. If you go with that it explains some of the rarum avis reaction the people have to him.

If either of those was bronte's intent then she'd have to subtext very hard for the thing to be published...
Click to expand...

Of course he was, it's so implied in the book. Why this sudden philanthropy? Why make him part of the family?
 
I'm something of a fan. It's an intensely original novel - there's nothing else quite like it. And to think that it was dreamt up by a young woman who had scarcely set foot out of her Yorkshire country estate!

Well, that said, the novel does conform to a certain trend that existed at the time: that of the Byronic hero. Heathcliffe is a rural varaition of the dark, conflicted, destructive, ambiguous character that Lord Byron had created in his verse as a heroised self-projection and which was then hugely influential within Nineteenth Century fiction. (For another, more urbane, example of this type - and to see how far it travelled - take a look at A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov from 1840).

I agree with Frideswide - the haunting scene which occurs early on in the story (or is it a nightmare?) is about as good as it gets in terms of a description of spookiness.

Many think Heathcliffe was intended to be half black (or of mixed-heritage, or whatever). He was picked up from a Liverpool port where such people doubtless existed at that time (owing to the slave trade). Constant reference is made to his ` swarthiness`` throughout the novel and he does seem to be subject to a certain amount of prejudice, maybe of a racial kind. There is at least one British adaptation of the novel in which Heathcliffe is played by a black actor.

In a previous incarnation as a teacher of GCSE English in an independent high school I made the mistake of choosing Wuthering Heights as the set text for us to do. How naive of me!
 
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