Run-up to V-Day

As usual in the run-up to Valentine's Day we see an increase in Brontë mentions. And they are not what you'd call scholar precisely, but quite entertaining for cynical people.

The Sunday Herald, in an article called '50 ways to please your lover' suggests Wuthering Heights.

8 BOOK Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847) Pronounced Woothering Heights, Emily Bronte's only novel has influenced everyone from Stephen King to Kate Bush. On one level, it is pure, gothic shlock. On another, it is poetic perfection and way ahead of its time. Heathcliff - part Ted Hughes, part Gordon Brown - is its totemic hero, a brooding, mysterious, disruptive presence in the Earnshaw household to which he has been charitably introduced. The target of his passion is Catherine Earnshaw but fate transpires to keep them apart. Heathcliff, described by one pundit as "a gentleman psychopath", beats his own wife and tells Cathy in her husband's presence: "I wish you joy of the milk-blooded coward." In short, he is that ultimate of female fantasies, a bit of rough. "Wuthering", by the way, is Yorkshire for stormy weather.

This is not the first time that Gordon Brown has been compared to Heathcliff, but does it really help to get couples into a romantic mood? We don't think so. The rest of the suggestion are not bad actually, V-Day or not.

A couple of articles from the Philippines serve as reminders of the opening on valentine's Day of The Promise, which is, as you know, loosely based on Wuthering Heights (trailer, here). The articles don't really add anything new and are written in a mixture of Tagalo and English. But if you're interested, here they are:

Richard Gomez and Eric Quizon give "The Promise" a thumbs up
Rhian Ramos shines in her new film

Incidentally, talking about Wuthering Heights, The Hindustani Times (via Yahoo News India) wonders what people have recently read in the area of romance.

But first, let us understand the genre. As Thomas Abraham, CEO and president, Penguin Books, India, clarifies and as we all know, classics such as Wuthering Heights or Pride and Prejudice are not really romantic fiction, nor is chick lit 'romantic.' "Both may have romance as an important part of the narrative, but that does not make them romantic fiction. That's the territory of Mills and Boon and Silhouette which is formula driven, almost factory style output."

Thomas Abraham is our new idol. Well said!

The Scotsman pauses to consider whether the myth that women go for rich men is true to life.

But could it be true? When you think about it, lovely man though Bill Gates clearly is, for all his money, he hasn't got what it takes to pull.
And there are precedents. Jane Eyre could only have Mr Rochester after he had lost his money and been blinded. Cathy's passion for Heathcliff deepened as he went mad and destroyed everything about him. Scarlett only loved Rhett when he was down on his luck. Could it be that there is something seriously damaged in the feminine psyche? (Teresa Hunter)

Perhaps all that means is that we are not all that shallow as some men would like to think ;)

The Independent has an interesting article on the literary impact of the writer in question love life. There are many examples, but the Brontës are carefully examined:

The Brontë sisters
Aged 25, Charlotte Brontë, together with her sister Emily, left the insular world of Haworth Parsonage to spend nine months at a girls' school in Brussels. Here Charlotte met Constantine Heger, a brilliant and high-powered teacher of literature, seven years her senior. Heger, who was married to the pensionnat's headmistress, encouraged his new pupil's talent for writing. Charlotte, gifted, foreign and older than his usual teenaged students, must have had quite an effect on him too, but her growing emotional dependence on Heger was one-sided.
Back in England, she longed for him. He tore up and threw away the desperate letters she sent him, but in a remarkably generous act, they were retrieved by his wife and sewn back together. Twenty years later, Heger discarded them again, only this time they were retrieved by his daughter who, recognising their importance, donated them to the British Library.
They make powerful reading: Brontë writes as someone who wants recognition from her mentor as much as admiration from a loved one. "Ah Monsieur! I once wrote you a letter which was hardly rational, because sadness was wringing my heart ..."
"Day and night I find neither rest nor peace - if I sleep I have tormenting dreams."
Heger's refusal to answer her letters seemed to strengthen Charlotte's resolve to become a writer, and it was two months after sending her last missive to Brussels that she went to a publishing house with some of the three sisters' poems.
It is in The Professor, and to a greater extent, Villette, that Brontë's love for Heger is explored. In Villette, the most emotionally powerful of all her novels, he appears as Paul Emmanuel, the professor with whom Lucy Snowe falls in love. Mrs Gaskell, Brontë's friend and first biographer, remarked, "It reveals depths in her mind, aye, and in her heart too which I doubt if ever anyone has fathomed."
Over a dozen years later, following the death of all her siblings, Brontë was proposed to by Arthur Bell Nicholls, her father's curate. Initially rejected, Nicholls responded with a weeping fit worthy of a Rochester or a Heathcliff. She eventually accepted, and found, to her surprise, that she liked being married. Her joy was short-lived: she died in pregnancy.
Emily's biographers, baffled that the creator of Wuthering Heights, the template for romantic love in the Western world, was apparently never in love herself, have looked for the Heathcliff in her life. Some speculate that Emily was in love with Heger or Nicholls.
Scholars debate whether Anne was in love with William Weightman, the curate who came to Howarth [sic] in 1839. He shares qualities with her fictitious character Edward Weston, for whom Agnes Grey falls in her novel of the same name. Weightman died of cholera in 1842, Anne seven years later.
'Brontë' is released later this year (Frances Wilson)

What the article doesn't mention is that Charlotte Brontë turned several marriage proposals too. Jane Austen and Edith Wharton's love lives are also looked into at length. Mrs Gaskell's is rapidly dismissed, however:

Mrs Gaskell, contentedly married to a Unitarian parson with whom she had a brood of children, is the exception that proves the rule: that it is compulsory for women who write, and particularly those who write well about love and marriage, to have peculiarly unrewarding, and certainly unconventional, private lives of their own. (Frances Wilson)

'Peculiarly unrewarding'? So love is all about stormy relationships, then? Elizabeth Gaskell tended to sound quite happy and contented about her marriage and family, to the point even of having Charlotte Brontë ask for advice shortly before her wedding.

But to go back to Brontë, the film. Michelle Williams and Heath Ledger recently threw a party and guess who attended?

The event, held at Ledger and his partner Michelle Williams' Hollywood Hills mansion, was initially suspected by guests to be a surprise celebration of their rumoured secret marriage but the event turned out to be a birthday party for a close friend of the Brokeback Mountain star.
Among the 150 guests partying into the wee hours at Ledger's bash were former Ally McBeal star Portia de Rossi and young AFI award winner Emily Barclay, who is in the process of playing Williams' sister in a new film about the legendary British sibling writers the Brontes. (The Sunday Telegraph)

And finally marz8earth has created some more Jane Eyre icons, available here.


Categories: Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, In the News, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Wuthering Heights