Wuthering Heights is a psychic tattoo

V-day is around the corner and the newspapers feel the need to publish articles about romance, love, lust, romance and love without lust, lust and love without romance... whatever. Let's start with The Independent's list for Valentine's day which includes a very unlikely Cupid choice:

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (1847)
The brooding hero, the tremulous heroine, but perhaps not the happy ending that would make it classic romantic fiction in the Mills & Boon manner.

The Age isn't inmune to the V effects:

JANE Eyre's exultant words, "Reader, I married him", won her the 1847 Prize for the Triumph of Hope over Reason, but more significantly went on to animate millions of fantasies. Mainly female.
There had been great love stories before — as far back as Madame LaFayette's 1678 La Princesse de Cleves, in fact — but Jane Eyre had something new. With its smell of the parsonage, Charlotte Bronte's version of the original French Cinderella tale — overlooked waif discovered and eventually beloved by the tall, dark, etc prince — hooked into a deep universal in the human imagination and dragged it into the sunlight where it has basked and flourished ever since.
An overlooked waif herself, Bronte manhandled all the cliches of romance and remade them into a great and furious novel about love and loving. (...)
Two-sided obsession is another matter. When conversation starts limping, toss in two words: "Cathy. Heathcliff." Wuthering Heights, first read at the right — or maybe wrong? — age, is a psychic tattoo. The testimony is in all those Cathy Looking For Heathcliff in the personals of The New York Review of Books and in The London Review of Books. This is the genius of art because these names, or symbols of great love, are symbols of human possibility. (It can't be that they're all masochists looking for sadists, can it?) This is Love. Or Passion. In fact, what they might be looking for is the other (lost) half of their soul, a love so consuming it lasts beyond death. Plato again.
Although, you can't help noticing that there are fewer, far fewer Heathcliffs looking for Cathy. Men, on the whole, have a different take on love stories — and love.
Dickens' imagination, great genius that he was, crashed when it came to adult love. The one time something adult begins to happen is between David's friend Steerforth and Rosa Dartle in David Copperfield. Steerforth is Dickens' solitary Byronic hero: mad, bad and dangerous, Byron also being the real-life template for Rochester and Heathcliff and the later Georgette Heyer, Mills & Boon clones. (Helen Elliott)

The Middlebury College Student Weekly is more original and looks for happy couples in the local area. Including the Brontë scholar Antonia Losano and Daniel Brayton:

From North Carolina to New York to Vermont, Losano and Brayton have shared many memories: arguing about literature, building their own furniture, sailing and traveling. They also have two young children, ? Nell and Niko, who share their parents' love of literature, always asking for a new story or book.
How could they not? Their parents' most frequent argument is, "Who is a better writer? Charlotte Brontë or Joseph Conrad?"
"Nobody ever wins," Losano said. (Rachael Jennings)

This Jakarta Globe's article is full of clichés:

Who harbors not a desire for an ardor rivaling that of Catherine and Heathcliff’s? For a lover to implore: “Be with me always, take any form, drive me mad!” Even Emily Bronte was a cruel cynic about love, afflicting her protagonists greatly with their overwhelming passion for each other. (Titania Veda)

But if you want more clichés than the normal average human can tolerate we have this article on beliefnet:

Then you're ready to experiment with planning an evening at home. This is not because you don't have a better offer but because you've blocked out hours on your calendar to be with yourself and enjoy yourself in some splendidly singular fashion. Maybe you'll rent a film with subtitles, or reread Wuthering Heights cover to cover, or deep-condition your hair and give yourself a facial. (Victoria Moran)

Athena Andreadis on The Institute of Ethics and Emerging Technologies looks for her own type of perfect men: the snacho ones. It seems that Rochester or Heathcliff are not examples of snachysm:

To avoid confusion, I should point out right away that a snacho man is entirely distinct from a Byronic demon lover, a much more common type to whom many women are fatally attracted - sometimes literally, since many in this subgroup start as Heathcliffes and end up as wife beaters. All the dark brooders found in bodice rippers, including (alas!) Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester, are not snacho. Neither are alpha males or the so-called strong silent types.

Shabbat's Shalom analyzes love stories:

All the great “love” stories involve overcoming some sort of obstacle to the couple getting together. There the initial dislike that is really a smokescreen for smoldering, unacknowledged attraction (e.g., Pride and Prejudice, or Gone With The Wind), warring families (e.g. Romeo and Juliet), an inconvenient spouse (Jane Eyre), different origins or social class (Pygmalion/ My Fair Lady), a long-buried secret from the past (Rebecca, Jane Eyre again), etc. That’s because it’s human nature to want things we can’t have more than we want things we have easy access to. The challenge is what makes it exciting, what increases the characters’ determination to get together no matter what the cost. The element of challenge also increases the reader’s conviction that this love must really be something special if they are willing to go to such great lengths to obtain it. (Barbara Bensoussam)

But today's Brontë news are not exclusively Valentine-related things:

Jeremy Paxman continues his defense of Victorian paintings (and also promoting his new book, of course) in the Daily Mail:

The answer is that, if you spare them the time, they will reward you as richly as a novel by Dickens, Hardy or one of the Bronte sisters. They are the great unappreciated witness to how life was when Britain rose to become the greatest power on earth.

Broadway World announces the Pittsburgh Irish And Classical Theater new season which includes Alan Stanford's adaptation of Jane Eyre (premiered at the Guthrie Theatre, Minneapolis, in 2007):

PICT season ends with a holiday production for the whole family -- a stage adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's beloved novel Jane Eyre. A simple governess, Jane Eyre wins the heart of Edward Fairfax Rochester, the brooding and mysterious master of Thornfield Hall. Questioning the boundaries of class and gender, it is one of the most heartrending and powerful tales of romance and suspense ever told. Adapted and directed by Irish director Alan Stanford (Salome) Jane Eyre previews December 2nd and 3rd, opens December 4th and runs through December 20th in The Charity Randall Theatre.

The Washington Post reviews Donkey Punch, a film by Oliver Blackburn:

But "Donkey Punch" is more interesting than that, not as art or entertainment, but as a symptom of the old, social stratification that still haunts British society. When Bluey introduces us to the donkey punch, he subtly challenges Josh (Julian Morris), an aspiring lawyer with an innocent face and the whole world before him, to give it a whirl. And suddenly we're in the old, macabre, fun house of British class anxiety, the world of Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte and the whole colonial project upon which the sun never set. How easy it is for someone in the lower orders to reach a hand out of the muck, and drag you down. (Philip Kennicott)

We find a Brontë reference in this Prague Times's review of Václav Havel's play Odcházení (Leaving) at the Acha Teatre, Prague:

He satirizes Rieger's melodramatic tendency to wallow in self-pity with devices that would fit snugly in a Bronte novel: A crack of thunder and cascades of flying papers symbolize Rieger's distress, bold effects that were absent from the London production. Radok's cast also takes expertly to self-mockery. (Hannah Nepil)

Another Wuthering Heights reference can be found on this Village Voice article about the musician Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson:

If we met one night in the Lower East Side, I would have bought you a Heineken and stared at you adoringly all night, and then clearly would have enjoyed an exuberant courtship process unknown since the time of Heathcliff and Cathy. (Stacey Anderson)

The Columbia Star reports this nice news item:

Emily Padget, a junior in two of Richland Northeast High School's magnet programs (Horizon and Palmetto Center for the Arts/Literary Arts), was the first runner- up in the Poetry Out Loud Midlands Regional Competition, held in Sumter on January 18.
Representing Richland School District Two, Padget competed against contestants from 18 South Carolina counties. She read "No Coward's Heart Is Mine" (Emily Brontë) and "Planetarium" (Adrienne Rich).

On the blogosphere, Psychobabble reviews Wuthering Heights 1992 (in Czech), the novel is also mentioned on this Livros e Outras Coisas post (in Portuguese), Hawker Family talks about Jane Eyre. In the Pages... interviews the children's author Deborah Hopkinson, another Brontëite:

Who are some of your favorite authors?
I have to admit that I am one of those folks who read Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte every year! I even dragged my daughter on a “literary pilgrimage” to Great Britain once, and of course we went to Bath and Haworth, where the Brontes lived.

Morgan Gibson. Photography posts a splendid picture of his new acquisition, a 1943 set of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. The ones with the Fritz Eichenberg's illustrations.

Finally, Dale! leete un disco morocha! posts in Spanish several illustrations, by Ernesto García Seijas, from a 1961 (?) Argentinian edition of Jane Eyre (Collection Robin Hood, ACME Agency).

Categories: Brontëites, Illustrations, Jane Eyre, References, Theatre, Wuthering Heights