Wuthering Hates

The Yorkshire Post publishes an article by Joolz Denby, the Artistic Adviser to the Radical Brontës Festival. As a matter of fact, the article is the introduction to the Radical Brontës brochure that can be found on the Illluminate Festival website (you can downloaded it here).

Ms. Denby explains clearly who are the Brontës that she's trying to uncover from the Brontë merchandising (which in a way is still an appendix of that Victorian reconversion of the coarse Charlotte Brontë into the angel-in-the-house in Lucasta Miller's words) and the fast-food Brontës of the movie adaptations. Although we don't agree with everything she says (i.e. that image of Patrick Brontë is still too anchored in Gaskell's preconceptions or the sexual abuse topic, why does some modern scholarship have this tendency to judge everything by 20th-century standards?, etc) , she is quite right in many other things:

It's not hard to find things I hate about the Brontës – I could give you a list a yard long, but just for starters:

1. Dainty tea shops called after Brontë characters serving fourth-rate rubbish also named after the Brontës or one of their characters. I once saw a Brontë Burger. A friend reported a Branwell Sundae – what was that comprised of? Two scoops of vanilla with absinthe sauce and opium sprinkles?

2. Adaptations of Brontë novels – especially Wuthering Heights, which is one of my all-time favourite books so this really gets my goat – featuring terminally fey French actresses as Cathy and lugubrious English accents with soupy Oxbridge-RADA accents as Heathcliff. She wanders drippily around a highly manicured moor while he looks slightly cross and snaps at people irritably.
Neither of them look like they could summon up enough passion to get mildly narky about the weather, never mind convey the stark, brutal emotional violence that is the hallmark of this amazing novel.
No, yet again the TV or Hollywood castrate this remarkable work in order to create soppy Victorian weepies that are carefully constructed to make sure no-one gets offended by the original story – which they might if they actually knew anything about it – and also that after its short turn at the cinema, Sunday afternoons are ruined throughout the country by the matinee showing of this farrago of spin.

3. And, while we're at it, why will no one ever cast an Asian actor as Heathcliff, when there are constant references to his being very likely of either full or half Asian extraction? When he is brought to Wuthering Heights, a small child rescued from the streets by the Liverpool docks where he is starving, he is referred to as possibly being a child of a Lascar (an Asian seaman) or a gipsy, which in those days would have meant a true Romany, rather than an Irish traveller. He is called "dark" throughout, and the loquacious housekeeper narrator Nelly Dean says of him: "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up with one week's income Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together". She also mentions the "gibberish that nobody could understand" he kept repeating on his first arrival which was probably some phrases in Romani or an Asian language. The racial subtext in this novel – Heathcliff cannot marry Cathy because she is white, cannot – and should not – be ignored.

4. The fact no one now seems to fully realise the terrible personal suffering endured by these incredibly brave and resourceful women and what an incredible story it is in itself that they managed to bring their work to the public. They battled against the scourge of tuberculosis – a cruel and terrifying disease that laid waste most of the women in the family, leading to the impression that for every book that was published one of the sisters died. They lived in the kind of "genteel" poverty that led them to be constantly malnourished (and I do mean they literally didn't get enough proper food to eat) and forced them to live in cold, damp conditions. Some of them were sent by their father – a selfish petty tyrant with a violent temper – to boarding schools so barbarous and brutal in their regimes that they more resembled concentration camps than education facilities.
Their beloved brother was a hopeless junkie and alcoholic whose ruinous life more resembled that of Pete Doherty than the Byronic figure he is so often painted as. Some of the experts have suggested the sisters were serially sexually abused – a topic which even now people prefer not to discuss, but which was utterly taboo in Victorian times – leading to their notorious fugue states, possible anorexia and worse.
Except for Charlotte's tragic late marriage, they never formed lasting relationships with partners, no love, no romance, no sex-life, no companionship. Their lives by anyone's standards were horrible. But they wrote like fiery angels and left a legacy so brilliant it is admired all over the world.

I expect by now you can see it's not the Brontës I hate, it's the rape and pillage of their reputations and images I despise. So let's take the sisters seriously. Let's bring them back to the place of honour and respect they deserve. Because you know what, they really do deserve it.
Bradford-born novelist and poet Joolz Denby is artistic adviser to the Radical Brontës festival.

The Radical Brontës, which is part of Bradford's Illuminate Festival, runs from September 14 to 24. We have reported information about the different activities that will take place, as the presentation of Wuthering Heights: The Graphical Novel by Siku and Adam Strickson, Cornelia Parker's exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum: Brontëan Abstracts. There are many others that we will be presenting in future posts (you can check them here if you don't feel like waiting).

Categories: In_the_News, Art-Exhibitions