Paediatric and 1950s Comic Books Readings

Let's begin today with one of those discoveries that only the blogosphere can bring. The Horrors of It All reproduces a short story, Withering Heights, published in the August 1954 issue of Witches Tales #26:

Time for an atmospheric Bob Powell / Howard Nostrand classic from Harvey today as we continue along on our Week of Weird Women stories. GCD calls this a “parody” of Wuthering Heights, although aside from changing one letter in the title, labeling it "A Boo of the Month” (and the 3 center panels on page four) I’m not really sure what else about any of this actually qualifies as a parody.

See the complete story here. Parody or not, we at BrontëBlog are still laughing. We also wonder why they would change Heathcliff for Heatcliff.

Dovegreyreader scribbles reviews Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain from Mary Shelley to George Eliot by Janis McLarren Caldwell with a special mention to its chapter on Wuthering Heights: 'WH and domestic medicine' :

There have been countless readings of a novel like this and Janis (sorry I don't do the academic surname thing) flags up quite a few obvious readings of Wuthering Heights that make you feel a bit daft for not noticing them before. Then there are the others you may have suffered in a past life, feminist, psychoanalytic, structuralist, deconstructionalisticism the mystical romance. There's some good down to earth stuff from Arnold Kettle as you'd expect from Open University old school,

'The story of Wuthering Heights is concerned not with love in the abstract but with the passions of living people, with property ownerships, the attraction of social comforts, the arrangement of marriages, the importance of education, the validity of religion, the rich and the poor.
There is nothing vague about this novel; the mists in it are the mists of the Yorkshire Moors.'

You can almost hear Arnold saying 'we'll be having none of that modern rubbish talked here'.
But Janis advances something very interesting. A reading focused on the cult of the child, the idea of prolonged childhood,the characters who

'grow physically larger, they marry, but they remain emotionally pre-adolescent, unwise, demanding and unswervingly loyal.'

Then some more elaboration,

'Reading Wuthering Heights as a novel fundamentally about childhood does explain many of the so-called mysteries...Bronte signals through incessant references to childhood and childishness and that, in this enclosed little corner of Yorkshire, nearly all the players remain children'

So a sort of paediatric reading, well I should be able to do that.
There are some excellent references to Stevie Davies' invaluable thinking on Wuthering Heights as the novel whose 'power lies in its ability to awaken the reader's own experience of childhood' and suddenly I'm fired with enthusiasm and now quite desperate to read the book again in a new light after all these years.
Of course others may think, huh, forget it, it's a gurt great big tragic read and leave it at that, but if we're talking getting your moneysworth out of a well-known novel yet again, then for me this all adds a bit of spice, excitement and interest to a book I thought I knew quite well.
More on my paediatric reading of Wuthering Heights soon.

It really sounds promising.

The Indian newspaper The Stateman carries on an article about single women in India and the Brontë sisters are mentioned (although Charlotte eventually married Arthur Bell Nichols) :

The average married woman defines herself as wife and mother in the context of the larger family set-up. Who is the single woman and what has she to show for her life in this result-oriented consumerist world that prioritises becoming over being? Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters forged their identities in the male-dominated literary scene and critics link their artistic excellence to their spinster status. But all women are not as motivated or as richly endowed as these redoubtable spinsters. (Arpa Ghosh)

And now a real pièce of resistance of multiple referenciality. How to bring together Richard Strauss, Tennyson, Emily Brontë and even Star Trek or Tom Hanks? Audiophile Audition has the anwer: this review of a Sony Classical release of several Richard Strauss pieces including Enoch Arden -- Melodrama for Piano and Speaker After Alfred Lord Tennyson, Op. 38. The Speaker is Jean-Luc Pic... sorry, Patrick Stewart:

The poem, a tale of three childhood friends in a Scottish seaside village, recounts their intertwined destines in a manner reminiscent of Wuthering Heights or the contemporary movie Castaway. (Gary Lemco)

On the blogosphere: Forge & Brew and Fabellina comment Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre respectively. 168 hours explores similarities between Jane Eyre and The book of Ruth from the Christian Bible or the Jewish Tanakh. In The Open Space. God & Culture reviews Franco Zeffirelli's Jane Eyre 1996. And finally, we cannot resist entering into this self-recursive race ad absurdum :P.

Categories: Books, Comics, Humour, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Wuthering Heights