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Thursday, May 10, 2007

Thursday, May 10, 2007 6:16 pm by Cristina in , ,    No comments
Same as with Jane Eyre below, let's start with the novel itself.

Wuthering Heights is reviewed on LitKicks in which might be the first of other Brontë reviews to come (Brontëpalooza, we love that!). However, the review is not very encouraging.

BlogCritics talks about the novel as well. Apparently they have discovered that the New Yorker has 'whole new tricks of "opening lines" perfected by the magazine in its long 82-year history'. And then this follows:
If only The New Yorker had started earlier it could have helped the 19th century authors too. Of course, the celebrated opening lines would have been a little different.
We don't really get the point of the article, or whether they like or dislike the New Yorer kind of openings, because then they go on to ruin some of the most famous opening lines in Literature by 'New-Yorker-ising' them. Had Emily Brontë been an avid reader of the New Yorker, her only novel would have begun thus:
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
"On the evening after the rainiest summer day, I returned from a visit to my landlord - the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with."
Honestly, we still don't know whether this is supposed to be better or worse than the actual opening line:
1801.
I have just returned from a visit to my landlord -- the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.
But we know perfectly well which one we prefer.

Wuthering Heights as inspiration. We recently posted about Deborah Dunn's Nocturnes. Today Hour reviews it.
Sparks fly in Deborah Dunn's Nocturnes, a new Danse-Cité production about couples, their loves and other misadventures. The dancer-choreographer is an all-out original. In her dance landscape, Dunn is able to infuse her romantic vision (inspired by Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's sprawling tale of doomed love) with audacious irony, odd beauty and absurd sight gags.
There's plenty of hearty laughter here, and visual jokes that click, but beneath the humour Dunn laces her dance with ideas about the pressures of society, suggesting in her duets a certain tangibility to suffering. But she isn't stuck in melancholy; in fact, most of the physicality is a gas! Dean Makarenko jousting in a swooping cloak (on the wild moors?), Sonya Stefan's jagged laughs that erupt and erase into wails, the stifled rage and mock insistence that drives Stefan and Daniel Villeneuve's intimacy, and Sara Hanley's gliding avenging angel... heck, Stéphane Deligny and Audrée Juteau even exorcise demons. (Philip Szporer)
And Juliet Wittman, reviewing the play Squall for the Denver Westword, is briefly reminded of Wuthering Heights.
There's a woman alone in a house on an island off the coast of Maine; a thunderstorm batters the windows. The woman is packing. She has set out three boxes: one labeled Trash; one, Remains to Be Seen; the last, Perpetual Care. The pale face of a younger woman glimmers briefly at the window. I think of Cathy's ghost in Wuthering Heights, rapping against the pane, terrifying the traveler, Lockwood, with her moaning: "Let me in...twenty years I've been a waif." This young woman is fleshly, though. Her name is Cordelia and, as we soon discover when she enters the house, she's barking mad.
But Emily Brontë also had her own sources of inspiration, such as the moors. Smarter Travel talks about them.
Top Withins, better known to romantics and English majors everywhere as the supposed inspiration for Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, broods timelessly over the Yorkshire moors. Long since abandoned, the tumbledown remains of this old farmhouse are watched over by two windswept trees and a legion of lazy sheep. (Josh Roberts)
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