I longed for thee, both with soul and flesh… ~ BrontëBlog

Thursday, October 15, 2009

I longed for thee, both with soul and flesh…

Thursday, October 15, 2009 5:47 pm by M. in Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References, Weirdo, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights 1 comment

Via GalleyCat we have found a project launched on WowOwow: Words Move Me, where readers and writers are asked about the books that inspire them. Fourteen Sony Readers will be given away to the contributors. We have found, a Brontëite usual suspect Alice Hoffman giving her opinion about Wuthering Heights:

I always return to Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte's masterpiece -- the greatest psychological novel ever written. I'm always amazed by how much Bronte knew about the human spirit, and I'm in awe of the passion and beauty of the world she created.

The Telegraph devotes a whole article to the coronation of Mr Rochester as the greatest literary hero (or something like it):

He was the second man I fell in love with, was Mr. Rochester. The first was Rhett Butler but that was only because I met him first. Dashing, charming and incredibly sexy as Butler is, Mr. Rochester – and his great dane, Pilot – walked into my life, and blew him out of the water forever.
So it comes as no surprise to me that when surveyed by Mills and Boon, the nation's readers voted Charlotte Bronte's Mr Rochester the most romantic character in literature. The true hero, you see, has to have more than charm and dash. Those things are all very well, and fine for having a flirtation with, but if he is to get a real hold of your heart, then he must hurt it a bit, make it bruise and bleed.
True, heart-stopping, emotion-wrenching, all consuming hero-power comes from a whole range of qualities, not all of them instantly, or even ongoingly, lovable. And Mr. Rochester (isn't it funny how seldom he is referred to as Edward) has unlovable qualities in spades.
But, reader, I loved him (to paraphrase Miss Bronte). It is, of course, terribly important that I met him when I did. When I was extremely young, about thirteen, and first read Jane Eyre, my ideas of love were most innocently and tenderly formed. Had I been older and more experienced, I would given him very short shrift (while probably still going a bit weak at the knees). I would have been shocked by him and what I'd have seen as his appallingly high handed, even brutal, behaviour. He would certainly give a true blue feminist the vapours. But, desperate for love as I was, and so far from finding it for real, how could I not have tumbled helplessly into it with him, with all his brooding, difficult, almost savage complexity? For this is what you want in the man you fall in love with (Rhett Butler lacked such complexity).
From that very first meeting, when Rochester's horse slipped on the ice, and he was unseated, and I was confronted by his dark, unsmiling presence, his "stern features, and heavy brow… his considerable breadth of chest", I was completely in his thrall. I was there, my heart beating wildly, desperate to help him, trying but failing to hold the horse, offering my shoulder (rather sturdier than the frail one of the young governess, Jane Eyre) for him to lean on, hastening to post his letter, hurrying home as he bade me.
I forgave him everything as I read on, his imperious manner, his disdainful treatment of his daughter, the way he toyed with Jane's emotions, like some great dangerous beast, testing and teasing her, even the dangerously wicked and deceitful game he played in encouraging her belief that he was to marry the beautiful Blanche Ingram.
Mr. Rochester was horribly, almost fatally, flawed. He was difficult, and yes, cruel at times. But the thing is that he was so wounded and troubled, trapped in the wretched, life-wrecking mistake of his youth (marrying the beautiful but insane Bertha Mason, the first Mrs Rochester, whom he keeps hidden in his attic). He was so desperately in need of care and tenderness and love himself, how could I – or indeed anyone – fail to respond to that?
The power and beauty of his of language was yet another reason for me to love him, and never more so than when, agonised, he lamented to Jane: "You will not be my comforter, my rescuer?" Having agreed to marry him, she quite understandably changed her mind when she found out about Bertha. But I am not at all sure I would have followed her virtuous example and fled across the icy moor; I might have been easily persuaded to be his comforter and rescuer instead.
But then, had I stayed and not exiled myself as she did, I would never have heard his anguished cry across the moor, in that "known, loved, well remembered voice of Edward Fairfax Rochester" – one of literature's utterly orgasmic moments. (Not that I would have known it as such then.)
And by the book's conclusion, he redeemed himself totally, of course, as I knew he would, in his struggle to save his mad, troublesome, attic-bound wife from the fire that burned his house to the ground. That was born of a great goodness, and of great courage. When all is done, and Jane goes to him at last, she finds him maimed, humbled, his eyesight lost, but his voice and his love unchanged: "I longed for thee, both with soul and flesh…"
Oh, honestly, of course he is literature's most romantic hero. (Penny Vincenzi)

Heathcliff has also made into the top ten:

Vengeful, tormented, and passionate foster-brother of his love Catherine Earnshaw. Admirable loyalty to Cathy rather offset by demonic urge to destroy everyone around him. Hinted-at supernatural provenance.
Least likely to say: “Linton? Well, when you put it like that, I can completely see what you see in him…”

The Telegraph & Argus asks Andrew McCarthy for his opinion:

Andrew McCarthy, director of the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, said: “I’m really glad it was a Bronte character who won as opposed to an Austen character. I always find Austen’s characters quite irritating and I think those created by the Brontes, like Mr Rochester and Heathcliff, are more romantic as they are very literary and steeped in Byron.”
A tutor named Constantin Heger, whom Charlotte fell in love with while studying in Brussels in 1842, may have provided her with the inspiration for Mr Rochester, he said.
Mr McCarthy added: “You can’t help but think there’s something of Mr Heger in Rochester but as with any of the Brontes’ Byronic heroes they are more literary constructs and are based on previous literary characters they had read about as much as any real-life characters they had encountered.” (...)
The museum currently has a pair of glasses and a medicine book on display, which belonged to Charlotte’s father, Patrick Bronte, who she accompanied to Manchester where he underwent cataract surgery without anaesthetic.
Mr McCarthy said: “I sometimes wonder whether there’s a bit of Patrick Bronte in Rochester. It could be that something she experienced with her father went into the book as well.” (Hannah Baker)

The Sydney Morning Herald reviews Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope:

By the mid-19th century, women such as Charlotte Bronte could also self-diagnose a disease that in its symptoms was perhaps close to what we would today call depression. (...)
Bronte claimed to have suffered a fit of hypochondria while teaching at Roe Head, Mirfield, West Yorkshire, aged 19. She fell into ''a most dreadful doom'', which she believed had little to do with the sickly and doomed family milieu in which she lived. Rather, Bronte meant by ''hypochondria'' a dismal combination of sorrow, worry and resignation that arose, so she thought, from the fact that she now had no time to write or to think. Later, in Jane Eyre, she had Rochester accuse Jane of hypochondria when she expressed her fears about their planned wedding. In real life Bronte outlived her five siblings.

Susheila Nasta selects ten books that take her on a globe-spanning, literary adventure for The Guardian. Before beginning her selection she mentions Wide Sargasso Sea:

"Reading is a passport to travel elsewhere. When we enter a story we are often transported beyond known horizons, lifted into a new world, where we begin to think, see and feel the world differently. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys was one of the first books to take me on such a voyage, throwing me into the haunted landscape of Emancipation Jamaica and the hidden Creole history of Bertha, the so-called 'madwoman' in Jane Eyre. 'There is always the other side, always', Rhys tells us, long anticipating John Berger's vision that 'Never again can a story be told as though it were the only one'.

Derry News looks at the Gothic elements of Jane Eyre in an article about Halloween literature:

Another classic example is Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, where the main character is again an orphan who suffers an unhappy childhood at the hands of her aunt and cousins. Upon accepting the position of governess to Adele Varens, the ward of the shadowy Mr. Rochester, Jane moves into the mysterious Thornfield Hall. The secrets of the house are dark and deeply hidden and ominously emerge as she encounters strange laughter in the halls and inexplicably haunting events. As Jane grows closer to Mr. Rochester, these secrets are brought fully to light, and threaten to destroy their happiness, and even their very lives. (Kendall Ann Koladish)

An alert reader has pointed us to a HBO untitled new drama project written by Amy-Sherman Palladino (Gilmore Girls). The Hollywood Reporter describes it like this:

Sherman-Palladino will write and executive produce the untitled drama, which chronicles the complicated relationship between three adult sisters, all writers sharing the same upper east side apartment building, and their mother, a domineering literary lioness who reserves most of her affections for their ne'er-do-well brother.

With the exception of the literary lioness mother it sounds pretty Brontë-ish.

The Skinny talks about the Kate Bush striptease number of the burlesque artist Hettie Heartache:

When the band close, following stage invasion and a devastating noise finale, Hettie Heartache's Kate Bush striptease raises the temperature, tapping into adolescent fantasies and capturing the raw mixture of vulnerability and sexual confidence that made Wuthering Heights such a perennial video favourite. Holding her own against a braying audience, Heartache is erotic and creative, lining up with the burlesquers who are unafraid to be imaginative and sexy. (Gareth K. Vile)

BroadcastNow quotes Michael Grade, Executive Chairman of ITV talking to the House of Lords Communications Committee:

He admitted to have been disappointed that ITV1’s period drama Wuthering Heights would only just cover its costs. (Robin Parker)

The actual meeting can be watched here and this is a home made transcript:

Lord Fowler: You mention Wuthering Heights. I've watched Wuthering Heights and I thought it was extremely good. Will Wuthering Heights cover its costs?

Michael Grade: No.

Lord Fowler: So, you're doing it really as a service, arent' you?

Michael Grade: No (...) It will cover its costs and it will make a small profit. Will we get a proper return on the investment? Probably not.

Lord Fowler: So, why are you doing it?

Michael Grade: Because you don't know that ahead of time. You think it will. (...) It is very possible... I'm not up to date how well it's doing in the export market. It may well get a surprise and find that it has sold exceedingly well because British reputation for producing series of that quality (...) We will make a small amount of money but we won't get a proper return.

FoxBusiness surprises us with a Brontë quote: