The ripple effect of Wuthering Heights

Author Melissa Jones picks Wuthering Heights as her 'book of a lifetime' in The Independent.

Wuthering Heights has an undeniable hold but an elusive meaning. It has been continually cited as the archetypal story about romantic love, where the lovers experience an exquisite communion doomed by its own extravagance. Yet theirs is a love almost without tenderness. Unlike lovers such as Romeo and Juliet, whose downfall is wholly sympathetic, Heathcliff and Cathy behave with extraordinary perversity towards one another.
Catherine swears it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff; he determines to pursue her like the angel of death as punishment. This has contributed to the inherent flaw in any dramatisation. By attempting to soften, humanise, explain the lovers, screen adaptations have failed to capture the book's power. Self-destruction is a feature of tragedy rather than romance; Wuthering Heights is a tragedy in the purest sense, the tragedy of self-betrayal and transgression. The lovers experience the essential only through one another. Divide them, and the rest of the world, as Cathy so memorably puts it, means nothing.
Despite Nelly's view of the lovers as wicked, the book reveals the world as the aggressor, the lovers driven to their extremity. The enduring image of Cathy is a spirit ensnared, losing her physical shape; Heathcliff becomes a maddened animal. The so-called civilised Lockwood scrapes Cathy's ghost-self's wrist against the broken window pane, the dog guarding Thrushcross Grange captures her in its maw, Edgar is the cat who will not let the bird (Cathy) escape, toying with her as prey.
When Heathcliff leaves the Heights he loses his humanity, a creature committed to revenge. As the wild boy on the moor with Cathy he was himself and she was herself. What the lovers initially share is the "heaven' of being uncivilised, unsocialised. When the exiled, married Cathy cries "Why am I so changed?" it is the cry of every woman forced to dress, behave, live within a prescribed social setting. She is every tomboy forced to grow up; her very femininity appears to kill her. But it is more than that. Cathy and Heathcliff have lost an Eden and that is the power of their story.
Wuthering Heights itself is abandoned as a dwelling-place by the end of the novel. Its name remains. Our sense of our human loss of heaven always remains.
So the meaning of Wuthering Heights cannot be condensed, it has a ripple effect as mathematical as its time scheme, its layering of narrative, its constant evocation of heaven and hell. The second Cathy and Hareton achieve a compromise between these opposites, but it is pallid and unsatisfactory. The reader longs for "the sleepers in the quiet earth" to wake and so turns back to the beginning: the Heights, the "misanthropist's Heaven", vital, essential, which a part of us will always yearn for.

The Music section of Canoe has an article on today's concert at Toronto's Hugh Room: This Woman's Work: A Live Concert Tribute to Kate Bush. Miranda Mulholland, who will be taking part in the show, speaks about Wuthering Heights too:

The singer says that she was struck by Bush's individualism the first time she heard her, calling Bush's smash 1978 single, Wuthering Heights, "a gateway drug."
"First off, the striking timbre of her voice and also the range she sings in -- quite a high tessitura -- is very unusual in pop music," Mulholland says, when asked what she likes most about Bush. "Also, the subject matter ... I remember devouring the (Emily) Bronte novel curled up under the covers with a flashlight way past my bedtime, lost to the plights of brooding Heathcliff and headstrong Cathy."
Mulholland adds that Bush "never tried to sound 'pretty' -- an affliction I hear all the time in pop music. She uses spoken word, audible breath and the full span of her range. Her vocal interpretation serves the text and not the other way around.
"Add on top that she was a woman in a very man's world and all these things become even more impressive," she adds. "How could one not be smitten?"
Mulholland, who'll reinterpret Wuthering Heights in her own wonderful way, described the challenge of covering the song.
"It's very high musically -- I studied as a soprano at opera school but that trained aesthetic doesn't seem appropriate. Still, the ethereal quality of a woman's voice in that range is certainly very evocative. It suggests to me ghosts, and howling winds and the pathos of the story.
"I'm not sure I will change the key too much so I can maintain some of those elements." (Errol Nazareth)

Of course, there are those who speak about Wuthering Heights in a much more metaphorical and free way, as seen in this Phillyist article on baseball:

But I was wrong. For a scant seven years later, a center from the Far East would come along and become the seeming Cathy to my Heathcliff. (William J. Hayes)

China Daily discusses Jane Eyre and its contrast with today's Chinese society and pop culture:

One work that clicked with Beijing audiences was Jane Eyre. Wildly popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s when China opened its doors to Western influence, the classic story about a young governess and her rocky romance with her employer faded on dusty shelves when foreign books were no longer taboo.
Last year, the National Center for the Performing Arts had two runs of Jane Eyre. It dawned on me this tale really strikes home today. Jane is not beautiful, she is not rich, the man who is willing to marry her has a castle. Yet she walks away from the wedding because he has a wife.
Now, contrast it with Dwelling Narrowness, a recent TV show so popular it was banned - a woman uses her beauty to become a concubine for the sole purpose of getting a decent apartment. What would she think of Jane Eyre? Nuts, probably. Edward Rochester could have got a full house of concubines.
You see, Jane Eyre is poignant because it is a perfect counterpoint to Dwelling Narrowness and the harsh reality it depicts. In both Avatar and Jane Eyre, you can detect the real issues that grip China - an emerging middle-class, made up of those in their late 20s and early 30s, blocked out from affordable housing, and an army of property owners in a losing battle against developers and the interests they represent. More irony: The latter group is robbed so that more houses can be built and the former group has to buy them at prices so high they are essentially robbed, for life. (Raymond Zhou)

Newsday reviews Sheila Kohler's Becoming Jane Eyre but unfortunately only subscribers can read it. EDIT: The Victoria Advocate republishes it in its entirety:

Before Jane Austen seized control of the popular imagination, zombies and sea monsters trailing behind, the Bronte sisters were the reigning queens of English literature.
As Lucasta Miller observed in her 2004 study, "The Bronte Myth," these Yorkshire spinsters were as celebrated for their romanticized life stories as for their classic novels, "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights." The Bronte narrative — three wildly imaginative women, scribbling away on the bleak moors, with a tragic drunken brother and stern parson father, one by one succumbing to consumption — has inspired countless films and novels.
The Bronte cottage industry shows no signs of slowdown. Last year we saw novels by Denise Giardina ("Emily's Ghost") and Syrie James ("The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Bronte"), and this month brings "Becoming Jane Eyre," by Sheila Kohler, author of "Cracks" and "The Perfect Place."
Kohler opens the story in Manchester in 1846, where Charlotte sits by her father's bedside, with pencil and pad, as he recovers from an operation to restore his eyesight. She already is depressed by a publisher's rejection of her first novel, "The Professor." ''What is she to write about now, in the silence of this darkened room?"
Why, the tale of Jane Eyre, of course: an orphan girl turned governess, who finds a soul mate in her employer, Mr. Rochester, despite the complications of age, class, temperament and that crazy first wife in the attic.
Kohler chronicles the unfolding of this literary creation, as Charlotte works bits and pieces of her own experience — especially her tenure as a schoolteacher in Brussels and a passionate crush on the headmaster.
Along the way, we encounter Charlotte's sisters and their self-destructive brother, Branwell, as well as publisher George Smith, whose championing of "Jane Eyre" will transform "this small, frail person, hardly five feet tall, with these dainty hands and feet" into an unlikely London celebrity. The point-of-view shifts among these and other peripheral characters, including the Rev. Bronte's nurse and Smith's mother.
It's all recounted in accomplished literary prose, but the problems are twofold: One, the story is familiar to Bronte enthusiasts; and two, it's difficult to fashion much drama out of the writing and publication of a novel.
In other words, "Becoming Jane Eyre" is, well, a bit dull.
What's more, the story feels lightly brushed over rather than fully inhabited. Branwell is more a cameo than a character, his "red hair, freckles and brilliant blue eyes" — and his dissolution — all we really get of him. The least-known sister, Anne, author of "Agnes Grey" and "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall," hardly registers beyond her "earnestness" and "clear, pale face."
Perhaps most lacking is the vitality that courses through "Jane Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights." Completists may feel obliged to check "Becoming Jane Eyre" off the long list of Bronte-inspired fiction, but the rest of us would no doubt find more pleasure in re-reading the sisters themselves; they novelized their own lives and concerns better than anyone. (Tom Beer)

And finally, one more story of animals named after the Brontës. The Flathead Beacon has an article on Katie Davis, who takes part in the Yukon Quest, a sled dog race.

Davis’ dogs have names like Shilo, Detour and Diablo. Or, in a nod to literature, there are these two Alaskan huskies: Charlotte, as in the Charlotte Bronte, and Margaret Atwood. They all have names, they all have specific jobs and they all live to run. (Myers Reece)

Blogs: Books That Fail and The Intermost Workings of My Mind are not too thrilled about the Brontës right now. c3AuthorSpot is reading Jane Eyre and Our Mutual Read has just finished it.

Categories: Alert, Books, Brontëites, Jane Eyre, Music, Weirdo, Wuthering Heights