Wuthering Heights tidbits

We woke up - what with the daylight saving stuff we are not sure what time that was - to find a couple of tidbits in relation to Wuthering Heights.

The Miami Herald relays the following information:

Twenty years ago, The Scarlet Letter, Wuthering Heights and Macbeth were rites of passage in high school. If you hadn't suffered through some iambic pentameter and Puritan angst, you weren't going to graduate.

Not so in a postmodern world.

High school reading lists -- to the joy of students -- are now as varied as the student body. Shakespeare comes in rap and you'd be hard-pressed to find a reading list that doesn't include The Joy Luck Club. The Miami-Dade County school district includes Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire on its list. Broward County recommends Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar.

While we can wholeheartedly agree about The Bell Jar, and with The Joy Luck club to some extent, we are appalled by Interview with a Vampire. And at any rate - how are children supposed to know where those novels come from? It's okay to have some modern literature. But classics are classics. It's a sorry state of things. And this is not the first news of this kind we come across.

On the Sunday Herald, Jane Harries look into the history of servants and how it inspired her new novel The Observations:

In the past, the upper classes tended to take for granted that servants were prone to such dishonesty and maliciousness. Novels of the 19th and early 20th century – such as Wuthering Heights and Rebecca – often played on these fears of lower-class characters finding outlets for their resentment.

We take it she means Joseph. Nelly, apart from being quite a gossip, seems pretty helpful and hard-working to us. But she forgets Bessie or Hannah in Jane Eyre, for instance. The Brontës were no snobs when it came to that.

Categories: Wuthering_Heights, In_the_News