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Wuthering Heights - The Book

I had no idea Wuthering (good word) Heights was so intense - I thought Heathcliffe just stood around cliff tops waiting to be chased off by packs of greyhounds. Hang on, that's the Mallen Streak - me mum liked that one.
 
I had no idea Wuthering (good word) Heights was so intense - I thought Heathcliffe just stood around cliff tops waiting to be chased off by packs of greyhounds. Hang on, that's the Mallen Streak - me mum liked that one.
I didn't either when I started it! If he was alive today he would just have entire packs of social workers chasing after him. :axem:Though probably not with axes. I don't think social workers are allowed axes.
 
I didn't either when I started it! If he was alive today he would just have entire packs of social workers chasing after him. :axem:Though probably not with axes. I don't think social workers are allowed axes.


U crazy kids! You can't read it by today's standards.

Don't ever give social workers axes as the self-injury rate would be horrific and then they'd just get bored and leave them lying around.
 
Read it at school, enjoyed it.

Also enjoyed grafittiing the cover to turn Heathcliff into Bret "The Hitman" Hart...
 
I read the book for A level and read it again when I had to do resits. I loved it.

Obsessive love that becomes love of the obsession. We've all been there, haven't we?

I seem to remember spending a lot of time looking at stuff about viewing things through windows, I think this was because it was a theme for exam questions.
 
an adjective for stormy or windy weather

"Hurlevent" - howling wind, was the French title for Rivette's 1985 adaptation of a few scenes.

Most adaptations cannot deal with the book's darkness, tending to omit such charming details as the man-servant hanging an unwanted litter of puppies on a chair-back! It is casually reported, as if to establish his quotidian duties in that household.

Expecting something more conventially romantic, I can recall being delighted by Wuthering Heights. As a personal footnote, it accompanied me to the launderette at Bethesda. Odd the things that stick in my mind!

Opera fans may want to look up Bernard Herrmann's three-hour setting. It is not too forbidding, musically speaking - nothing in advance of Puccini. It has not had much life on the stage but the composer's day-job in the movies enabled him to pay for its recording in the 1960s. A collector's item in its day, I see that the whole of it can now be had for free on Youtube!

Howarth remains a place of pilgrimage for many, though I am tempted to say that a walk on the moors in that region is more memorable than its tea-rooms and parsonage. :btime:
 
Most adaptations cannot deal with the book's darkness, tending to omit such charming details as the man-servant hanging an unwanted litter of puppies on a chair-back! It is casually reported, as if to establish his quotidian duties in that household.
That was Hareton! (His complete change in character is he only thing I find rather hard to swallow. I just don't see where it could have come from with his start in life he didn't stand much of a chance. )

Isn't he a gypsy?
He is described as "a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect" but I don't think that is trying to say he was an actual gypsy. Although it leaves it open that he could have been.
 
If you want to derail a game of charades, suggest Wuthering Heights and marvel at the confusion.
 
It sounds deliebretly vague, -he could be anyone, including mixed, middle eastern or some interesting medditeranian type.

Or Gypsy.

or then again, just plain dark of aspect english.

the possibililties are endless, and though a modern author might pin him down, she isnt so concerned.

But shes buying into many ladies sexy male steriotypes too...
 
The one book that continually defeated me as a teenager. I'd pick it up and read the first two pages, then put it down again - and this must have happened a dozen times. Eventually I forced myself to persist with it, but I didn't enjoy it and I was very confused all of the way through. Perhaps I need to approach it again with an open mind.

For the record, I love Jane Eyre, enjoyed Middlemarch, can go for Thomas Hardy and have a sneaking admiration for Charlotte Mary Yonge - but I think Dickens is overrated - so I do have something of a reasonable track record with 19th century literature.
 
Eventually I forced myself to persist with it, but I didn't enjoy it and I was very confused all of the way through. Perhaps I need to approach it again with an open mind.
I will admit it is a bit confusing. I think because of having different narrators (you have to remember who was talking last before you put the book down) plus referring to people sometimes by their first names and sometimes by their last. I think having some sort of family tree to hand while reading might help.
 
He is described as "a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect" but I don't think that is trying to say he was an actual gypsy. Although it leaves it open that he could have been.

Heathcliffe's origins are hazy. He is found on the streets of Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw and brought back to Yorkshire.

Liverpool has had a well-established Black population since the early 18th century. To a rural Yorkshire person a child of mixed race might indeed look like a 'dark-skinned gypsy'.

The book's characters speculate about his racial origin. He might be American or Spanish or the offspring of the Emperor of China and an Indian queen.
Or a the child of a 'Lascar', which was a sailor from the Indian subcontinent. (Conan Doyle also mentions Lascars.)

Heathcliff might be any of those, or simply a Liverpool mixed race child, whom Earnshaw probably had no right to take away from his admittedly inadequate home. We will never know!
 
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Heathcliffe's origins are hazy. He is found on the streets of Liverpool by Mr Earnshaw and brought back to Yorkshire.

Liverpool has had a well-established Black population since the early 18th century. To a rural Yorkshire person a child of mixed race might indeed look like a 'dark-skinned gypsy'.

The book's characters speculate about his racial origin. He might a American or Spanish or the offspring of the Emperor of China and an Indian queen. Or a the child of a 'Lascar', which was a sailor from the Indian subcontinent. (Conan Doyle also mentions Lascars.)

Heathcliff might be any of those, or simply a Liverpool mixed race child, whom Earnshaw probably had no right to take away from his admittedly inadequate home. We will never know!
The important part is that he is Not English.
 
Emily: An imagined life of Emily Bronte, setting out events which might have inspired her to write Wuthering Heights. Emily (Emma Mackey) has a torrid affair with her father's young curate, William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) she is also led astray by her brother Branwell (Fionn Whitehead) who introduces her to alcohol and opium. Emily suffered from social anxiety so these drugs may have been a crutch for her, Mackey puts in a powerful performance, ranging from gloom and downcast eyes to ecstasy and then determination as Emily seeks fulfilment in literary endeavours. She wanders the moors like Cathy seeking Heathcliffe. Her sister Charlotte (Alexandra Dowling) always seems at odds with Emily, yet is also caring when Emily breaks down at school, she also vies Weightman's attentions and seems to be inspired (out of jealousy) at Emily's achievements to write Jane Eyre, Adrian Dunbar is the Patriarch of the Bronte household and channels Supt Hastings rather than DI Ridley with his fearsome sermons from the pulpit, fortunately he doesn't sing. The gray dark skies (the rain puts Angela's Ashes to shame) and starkly beautiful Yorkshire moors and heaths are also stars in this narrative. A sombre scene is captured during a game of charades when Emily dons a mask and transforms the amusements into a seance. A wonderful tale brought to life by Frances O'Connor who Wrote and Directed the film. 8.5/10.
 
As our sitting tenant on behalf of the Romance brigade, I have to report that WH is generally regarded as NOT an romance novel. Much in the same way as Fifty Shades of Grey isn't a romance novel. It's a story of two terrible people who treat one another awfully, pretty much for their own amusement.
And so is Wuthering Heights.
 
As our sitting tenant on behalf of the Romance brigade, I have to report that WH is generally regarded as NOT an romance novel. Much in the same way as Fifty Shades of Grey isn't a romance novel. It's a story of two terrible people who treat one another awfully, pretty much for their own amusement.
And so is Wuthering Heights.

This is what I wrote about it a while back. I'll stick with that except to say that Joel Coen's Macbeth may have better interpreted the twisted love story.
  • Jun 5, 2020
    • 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.
 
As our sitting tenant on behalf of the Romance brigade, I have to report that WH is generally regarded as NOT an romance novel. Much in the same way as Fifty Shades of Grey isn't a romance novel. It's a story of two terrible people who treat one another awfully, pretty much for their own amusement.
And so is Wuthering Heights.
For years as a teenager and then as a young adult, I was told that this was a great love story - now I suspect that those who told me this had not read it. Anyway, I read it a few times over about 20 years and never could see the "love" aspect. I thought the main characters were messed up, unhappy and unpleasant.

Do you, as an author, have any insight as to what the point of the novel was? Or what the author wanted the readers to see?
 
As our sitting tenant on behalf of the Romance brigade, I have to report that WH is generally regarded as NOT an romance novel. Much in the same way as Fifty Shades of Grey isn't a romance novel. It's a story of two terrible people who treat one another awfully, pretty much for their own amusement.
And so is Wuthering Heights.
I do see it as a romance, probably the first gothic romance, two lovers, one with a secret, destined never to be happy. Boy with an an exotic and mysterious past. Love beyond the grave. Etc, etc.
 

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I do see it as a romance, probably the first gothic romance, two lovers, one with a secret, destined never to be happy. Boy with an an exotic and mysterious past. Love beyond the grave. Etc, etc.
I don't think it's love. It's obsession. Love means wanting to make the other person happy (or at least, happier). WH is two people tormenting one another because they don't want anyone else to have them.
Do you, as an author, have any insight as to what the point of the novel was? Or what the author wanted the readers to see?
I'm not sure that when the Brontes were writing there was quite the same view of a novel as we have now. Nowadays novels tend to have character and story arcs, where the characters grow and change throughout the story and end up better people at the end, with a story that forces them to face up to who they really are underneath. I think WH is more a 'slice of life' story, showing how badly people can behave within an almost claustrophic relationship, where neither can really escape. I'm not sure it has a point, books were rather different things back then. Unless the point was for readers to empathise with what it must be to have little exposure to mainstream life, and to almost be forced to desire a relationship with the only people of the opposite sex to come into your orbit.
 
Emily's dad Patrick (Bronte aka Brunty aka Prunty) was of Irish origin. There was an ancestor of his that was a noted villain and who kidnapped a young girl and carried her off. There is a theory that Heathcliff is a nod to that fellow.

I don't think Emily had any messages. Just a somewhat singular imagination due to the gothic novels and poetry she loved, bereavement and grief, a schooling from hell, damaged health, local ghost stories and tales, a history of Unwise Crushes and a family that fed off each other's creativity. Reading between the lines I wonder if she was autistic and that is why she loved Nature so much and had specialised interests which were so strong. But it is dangerous to attempt to diagnose people retrospectively.

I studied WH several times as it kept coming up as a set text at every stage of my education. I got a bit obsessed for a while. I created a timeline for the children in the novel and I think most of the main action happening to Heathcliff and Cathy happened when they were teens. I think Cathy may have died when she was about 19/20 ish. That might explain the confused and f***ed up nature of some of their passion. Teenagers are not known for sensible relationships. The second Cathy was also a kid when she was forced to marry the first cousin. The second half of the novel is a story about her coming into her own womanhood and taking back the power from Heathcliff as his power fades.

If Emily did had a message it was that true happiness came from having free choices...
 
Reading between the lines I wonder if she was autistic and that is why she loved Nature so much and had specialised interests which were so strong. But it is dangerous to attempt to diagnose people retrospectively.
I suspect it was more the very insular nature of their lives. School or a parsonage in an incredibly underprivileged mill town, or the moors with immediate family. Not a lot of chance for broadening one's horizons.
 
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