The Day I Fell in Love with Emily Brontë

The Red Deer Advocate reviews Vern Thiessen's Wuthering Heights adaptation now on stage in Red Deer, Canada:
Picture Credits: JEFF STOKOE/Advocate staff
Kelsey Ranshaw as Catherine and Chad Pitura as Edgar Linton look on as Danielle Rishaug playing Esabella Linton and Justin Bronson as Heathcliff kiss during rehearsal. (Source)

“Let’s put the past to rest,” says the ever-misguided Edgar Linton in a world premiere adaptation of Wuthering Heights, which opened Thursday at The Red Deer College Arts Centre.
Manoeuvred into marrying a woman who loves another, Edgar naively allows his wife Catherine Earnshaw’s soul-mate, Heathcliff, back into their lives with those words.
But Edgar, who’s wrong about so many things, is also mistaken about the past being able to rest.
The past is always present in Wuthering Heights — both in Emily Bronte’s classic novel and in Alberta playwright Vern Thiessen’s superior stage production, which captures the eerie atmospherics and cruel sensibilities of the tragic love story.
Thiessen’s engrossing play, staged in partnership with the Red Deer College Theatre Studies department, is swarming with ghosts.
The bleak halls of the Earnshaw estate on the wild North English moors, echo with scenes from the distant and not-so-distant past, as well as the present. This is depicted to creepy effect by ghostly images of Heathcliff, Catherine and her brother Hindley appearing on stage at the same time.
Once the audience accepts that the child, teenage and adult version of Catherine can all be present during a single dining scene, for example — along with all three versions of Hindley and Heathcliff — it becomes a good dramatic tool to heighten tension.
When Hindley is mistreating Heathcliff, for instance, all three Hindleys torment him at once — the oafish boy (Zac Shaab) who’s jealous of the attention his father is showering on Heathcliff, the teenage miscreant (Alexi Pedneault) who’s threatening people with knives, and the adult alcoholic Hindley (Stuart Browne), who’s becoming a wasted shell.
Thiessen manages to convey what any imaginative person who’s wandered through an old setting has felt — the layering of epochs, the sense that the walls or hills remember, and that time is ephemeral — lift the curtain that separates now from then and the past will mesh with the present.
Director Lynda Adams does an inspired job of staging and pacing this ambitious production, which only deals with the first half of the book but still involves 22 actors and understudies, a behind-the-scenes whispering, chanting chorus, and an unique atmospheric score, composed by local musician Morgan McKee.
There are fantastic period costumes by Carrie Hamilton, and impressive set and lighting effects by Edmonton designer Narda McCarroll, that bring the outdoors in, with changeable, brooding skies visible through giant windows.
This is important to the plot-line because Catherine and Heathcliff are either gazing at, or running to, a rocky outcropping on the moors called Penistone Crag, where they first pledge their love. The six young actors playing the romantic leads generally have good chemistry.
Portraying Catherine are Kelsey Ranshaw as the contradictory adult, Kari Ann Kinnear as the coquettish teen, and Amber Whitebone as the willful, playful child.
The tough job of connecting all of Catherine’s disparate traits falls mostly on Ranshaw, but she does a great job of making us believe that someone so passionate and loyal can also be selfish, self-deceptive and cruel.
Playing Heathcliff are Justin Bronson as the adult, Nathaniel Atakora Martin as the teen, and Christian Isbister as the child. All three young actors, especially Bronson, make us care for Heathcliff and feel his pain after Catherine’s abandonment.
The leads get good support from Chad Pitura as Edgar, Danielle Rishaug as his sister Isabella, and Niamh Taylor as the housekeeper Nelly Dean and Jesse Byiers as the servant Joseph.
The audience was held spellbound by the play’s first act, and the early part of the second — right up until Catherine’s death scene, which lacked the appropriate intensity of feeling.
Maybe Bronson needed to convey more devastation. Maybe he should have dragged Catherine from her deathbed and shaken her in frustration, anger and sorrow.
In the book, Heathcliff clutches his dying lover to his breast (and undoubtedly hastens her death) with his unbearable grief and desolation. On stage, Heathcliff unfathomably stands across the room from Catherine when he implores her to haunt him for the rest of his life and never let him rest.
The outcome of this physical and emotional distance is that the play’s momentum crashes at the very moment it should have climaxed.
Unfortunately, the dramatic energy never recovered, as the death scene was immediately followed by a flat ending that sees Heathcliff’s demise happen off stage.
Since three-quarters of the play is so entertaining, it deserves a better finale — and I’m sure Thiessen will eventually give us one.
In the meantime, this moody new version of Wuthering Heights is definitely worth seeing — not only by fans of the novel, but by anybody (over 14 years) who loves high drama, passion — and a good ghost story. (Lana Michelin)

The Globe and Mail asks several readers about their favourite/memorable/satisfying, romantic novel:

Charlotte Gray, whose most recent book is a biography of Nellie McClung
No contest. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights: howling wind, wild lover, breath-taking passion and, of course, an unhappy end. Also, the best descriptions in literature of one of my favourite landscapes, the Yorkshire moors. (...)
Elizabeth Abbott, author of A History of Marriage
For me, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights is the gold standard for literary romance: Its raw eroticism, intensity of passion and obsessive concentration of all energy on the beloved, the elusive, unattainable desired one – Cathy, Heathcliff – have never been bested.

And the Irish Times makes a list of romantic "heroes":

It’s extremely difficult to square the behaviour of so many of our fictional romantic heroes with the lusting reverence in which they are held. Take Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights – brooding and fascinatingly satanic. But most people tend to forget the moment where he is found to have hung his new wife Isabella’s dog from a bridle hook.
“Kind of hard to come back from that one,” a friend remarks when I mention it. And yet, come back he does, again and again, to dominate polls of Top 10 Romantic Heroes.
Then there’s Mr Rochester in Jane Eyre , another slightly satanic hero (also well endowed in the property department). He’s a good catch – if you can get over the fact that he keeps his mad wife locked in the attic. (Gemma Tipton)

Playback:stl reviews R. Sykoriak's Masterpiece Comics. Concerning The Crypt of Brontë it says:

The flattest entry here is surely “The Crypt of Bronte,” which is Wuthering Heights a la The Vault of Horror. At 14 pages, it’s a humorless encapsulation of the melodramatic classic that’s so literal it might as well be an issue of Classics Illustrated. That is to say, Sikoryak’s visual parody is once again pitch-perfect, but more cheekiness would be welcome. (Byron Kerman)

Novelist Dennis Lehane talks about his references/sources when writing Shutter Island. On FearNet:

What reference points did you find yourself drawing from in creating a gothic story?
There was a lot. If you find yourself looking at the checklist of gothic, it’s… cliffs – check, mansion – check, storm – check, woman in a cave – noted. That was something that I was definitely riffing on. I like to play in a traditional form. I like to respect it, but then I like to play with it, and get a little playful within its boundaries. So that’s what I was doing with Shutter in terms of the gothic. I was riffing off of the Bronte sisters and Frankenstein, and this guy Patrick McGrath – a neogothicist, he has a great novel called Asylum, among others; he has another one called Doctor Haggard’s Disease, another one called Spider. So I was riffing off that in terms of the gothic, and then in terms of the pulp was where I went into my ‘50s B-movies, like Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor; and arguably one of my five favorite movies of all time, The Manchurian Candidate. Not the book – I’m not gonna be a literary snob on that one. I’ve never read the book. I’m just a fanatic about Frankenheimer’s film. And Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man. Not the horrendous remake, but the original from 1973. (Joseph McCabe)

The St. Petersburg Times also talks with him:

Asked which gothic novelists he has been inspired by, Lehane says, "Oh, the girls. The Brontes, Mary Shelley," citing the authors of Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) and Frankenstein. Among contemporary gothic writers, he likes Patrick McGrath (Trauma). (Colette Bancroft)

Even the German Süddeutschen Zeitung insists on this connection.

The Financial Times interviews author Andrea Levy who makes an unusual comparison:

Which literary character most resembles you?
At the moment, Bertha Rochester from Jane Eyre. I’m very jittery when I have a book coming out. (Anna Metcalfe)

Lyndall Gordon, biographer of Charlotte Brontë, presents her recent biography of Emily Dickinson: Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family's Feuds in The Guardian:

In a similar way she created a deathless love for the person whom she called "Master".
Biographers have sought meaning behind the bearded and married "Master", who appears in three mysterious letters from spring 1858 to the summer of 1861. Evidence remains thin, and biographers have taken their pick from an array of unlikely candidates. These letters race from one literary drama to another, including Jane Eyre's encounter with her married "Master" and deathless love in Emily Brontë – in 1858 Dickinson had acquired a copy of an 1857 edition of Wuthering Heights – and it seems likely that the "Master" letters were as much exercises in composition as letters addressing a particular person.

And another Brontë biographer, Stevie Davis, reviews also for The Guardian Where the Serpent Lives by Ruth Padel:

Only Emily Brontë, to whom nature was "an inexplicable problem, existing on a principle of destruction", has embraced Padel's radical and sympathetic inclusiveness of creaturely life. For all its flaws, Where the Serpent Lives is a novel you will not lightly forget.

A really easy one from The Mirror's Weakest Link:

13. Who wrote the novel Shirley: Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte?

The English reads of the North Korean future elites seem to include Jane Eyre... or maybe not. On BBC News:

I asked one student who his favourite English authors were.
He hesitated and then said "Shakespeare... and Dickens".
I asked him if he had read anyone more recent. There was a long embarrassed pause and then he replied: "Um… Jane Eyre... or Hamlet…"
The government wasn't only keeping a close eye on their reading list. (Paul Danahar)

The Denver Westworld interviews Annie Clark of St.Vincent who talks about Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights:

WW: I read somewhere that you were compared to Tori Amos and Kate Bush, and I didn't think that was very accurate.
AC: I love Kate Bush, but I don't necessarily feel like I'm trying to carry on her tradition. I think she's amazing. I was probably more influenced by Stravinsky on this record than I am by Kate Bush. That song "Wuthering Heights" is so weird. Harmonically, you sound like you're a musician, it's so bizarre. There's a bar of fifths in the chorus, and then she sings, and it's so high in the chord progression. It's angular and it's out and it totally works and it's such a cool song. (Tom Murphy)

Associated Content publishes an interpretation of Anne Brontë's poem Dreams:

Dreams by Anne Bronte is a sad poem. For Anne Bronte died very young, and much of her young life was spent in dreaming dreams that would never have time to come true. This sad audio poem speaks of the dreams a young woman is likely to have, and of the deep loneliness that follows when the dream departs. The dream is a dream of motherhood: The love that an infant feels for his mother, and the protective cherishing the mother feels in turn. Indeed, the dreams that Anne Bronte dreamt two centuries ago are still the dreams young women dream today; such is the common thread of humanity that surpasses time.

The New Straits Times (Malaysia) considers Wuthering Heights a book that we know but haven't actually read, The Buffalo News recommends a Brontë novel for a very Victorian Valentine (whatever that means), Pop Syndicate talks about the ConDFW Convention with a bizarre Brontë mention:

Shanna Swendson jumped in at the last moment and the panel was all that much meatier (and fun - Jane Eyre with ninjas?) with Swendson’s input. (Amanda Rush)

Divirta-se (Brazil) reviews The Wolfman with the compulsory Brontë mention:

Para quem gosta de livros como Frankenstein ou O novo prometeu (Mary Shelley) ou O morro dos ventos uivantes (Emily Brontë), a nova versão de O lobisomem é um verdadeiro achado. (Marcello Castilho Avellar) (Google translation)

Letras Libres publishes an article about the recent Spanish translation of Wide Sargasso Sea:

Ella ya se llamaba a sí misma Jean Rhys, pero no sería Jean Rhys realmente hasta la publicación de El ancho mar de los Sargazos (1966), la reescritura cómplice de la novela Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brontë que la elevó a los altares de la narrativa inglesa contemporánea, el mismo coqueteo narrativo con el estilo de la novela victoriana que veinte años más tarde consagró a A. S. Byatt con su novela Posesión. (...) Apenas alcanzó a saborear el éxito de ventas de El ancho mar de los Sargazos, su obra maestra, que casi no se encontraba en el mercado español porque la traducción de Andrés Bosch para Bruguera, de 1982, estaba agotada. La nueva traducción, que Lumen le ha encargado a Catalina Martínez Muñoz, hace brillar el estilo lírico y sumamente psicológico de Rhys, aprendido de la prosa a un tiempo psíquica y simbólica de D. H. Lawrence, y contribuye a atestiguar que el estilo de la autora británica es, en cierto modo, el resultado de trasladar el realismo victoriano de Brontë al marco exótico de Jamaica. De modo que la dramática trama de la novela, que mucho tiene de folletín porque las tribulaciones de Antoinette Cosway no parecen conocer la mesura –ruina física y moral, constantes fantasmas en el horizonte mental, padre adúltero y alcohólico, encierro conventual y sospechas de perversión que arruinan su matrimonio y la arrojan a la locura, a la misma locura que enajena a Antoinette Bertha Cosway de Rochester, la mujer criolla encerrada en el desván de Thornfield Hall, en Jane Eyre, con la que juega Rhys construyéndole un pasado en esta metaficción titulada El ancho mar de los Sargazos– aparece atemperada por la endulzada fragancia de la exuberante naturaleza caribeña: “Allí estábamos, cobijados del aguacero bajo un mango muy grande”, “un naranjo silvestre cargado de frutos”.
La historia visible aquí de Antoinette es la historia escondida de la Antoinette de Jane Eyre, la de una mujer desarraigada porque nació en la periferia del Imperio colonial y porque nació mujer, como la propia Jean Rhys. O como Elizabeth Smart, la escritora canadiense, de Ottawa, autora de En Grand Central Station me senté y lloré (1945), otra trotamundos intelectual de aquel tiempo pasado en que, siendo mujer, ser trotamundos y ser intelectual era sinónimo de ser excéntrico, y ser excéntrico el presagio de ser proscrito. El ancho mar de los Sargazos, una de las novelas más brillantes de la narrativa inglesa de la segunda mitad del XX, que influyó en Byatt tanto como en Lessing y en John Fowles cuando estaba ultimando la redacción de La mujer del teniente francés, trata, como la novela victoriana a la que mira de reojo, del matrimonio (se evoca y reescribe el del señor Rochester con la enajenada Bertha en Jane Eyre, trasladado de la campiña inglesa a las Indias) y de la condición femenina, de los prejuicios morales y del exilio a la vez geográfico e interior. Se asemeja a una gran novela del XIX, que es lo que pretende ser. En realidad juega a ser una gran novela del XIX, si bien el lector atento advertirá que, efectivamente, se trata de un juego: en primer lugar porque el narrador tradicional en tercera ha perdido autoridad, debido a que se ha visto escindido en dos narradores en primera persona (el punto de vista es el de Bertha en el primero y en el último capítulo, y el de Rochester en el resto) y ya va de vuelta de algunas de las convenciones narrativas; en segundo lugar porque el estilo ya no es natural, ha perdido ingenuidad para ganar en tácitos guiños a la novela victoriana, en jugosos sobrentendidos, y finalmente porque se diría que la narración urdida por Rhys pretende ser un ejercicio de estilo en forma de elaboradísimo pastiche, de modélico simulacro de novela decimonónica, con sus excesos melodramáticos, sí, pero narrados ahora desde una perspectiva teñida de ironía, nacida del juego con la tradición literaria –la narrativa victoriana observada desde la atalaya crítica del modernism en el que fraguó la autora su convulsa personalidad literaria–, y teñida al mismo tiempo de una sombría melancolía que nace de la inequívoca condición autobiográfica de la propia novela: Antoinette, como Ella, tuvo una infancia exótica y colonial pero infeliz, y vivió como desheredada y como víctima de la enajenación, la expatriación, el conflicto conyugal permanente y la soledad, como mujer atrapada en una jaula morbosa para el lector, insufrible para el personaje. ¿Por qué no releer Jane Eyre y comenzar a leer después El ancho mar de los Sargazos como si también hubiese sido escrita por Charlotte Brontë, eso sí, después de haberse quitado misteriosamente de encima los prejuicios sexuales y sociales de su tiempo? Borges, con ese impagable juego suyo de las atribuciones erróneas que nos propuso en Ficciones, sin duda nos empujaría a hacerlo. (Javier Aparicia Maydeu) (Google translation)

Carlos Catania publishes in El Litoral (Spain) his admiration/adoration for Emily Brontë in a remarkable article:

El día en que me enamoré de Emily Brontë, llovió por la tarde. Oigo aún esta lluvia en los techos y en algunos truenos premonitores. Yo era apenas un adolescente y al caer la noche rompí mi pacto con el Absoluto y quedé a la intemperie. Desde luego, no lo pensé entonces en estos términos, pero la pulsión de sentimientos encontrados arrastró mi mente hacia límites irracionales: yo era Heathcliff y acababa de perder a Catherine Earnsshaw. Tal espinosa inocencia continúa inquietándome con dosis equilibradas de rabia y ternura. (Read more) (Google translation)

Les inrocks reviews the French edition of T.C. Boyle's The Women:

Le penchant de Wright pour la mise en scène de son propre personnage est égalé par celui de sa première maîtresse, Mamah, qui se verrait bien personnage d’un roman de Victor Hugo, puis éclipsé par l’incroyable numéro d’actrice de sa seconde épouse, Miriam – laquelle, bien qu’originaire d’un Sud aussi profond que celui où Scarlett O’Hara fit chavirer les coeurs confédérés, contemple dans son miroir une héroïne d’Emily Brontë. (B. Juffin) (Google translation)

The Gazeta Wyborcza presents the Polish TV production Namiętna kobieta with a Brontë reference:

[Kay] Mellor bawi się mocno zakorzenioną w brytyjskiej kulturze, opisanej i zdekonstruowanej przez pisarki feministyczne, figurą "szalonej kobiety na strychu" (znanej z powieści gotyckich i klasycznej lektury, np. "Dziwnych losów Jane Eyre" Charlotte Brontë). (Joanna Dercaczew) (Google translation)

MinnPost lists Rochester and Jane Eyre among literary romantic couples and the readers of Cyberpresse (Canada) select both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights on a list of romantic books, Simon's Book Blog and Fervent Reader review The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Simply Books posts about Jane Eyre, a book that can be read on a Berlinale queue according to Die Welt, Horror Magazine (Italy) insists on the Jane Eyre-Twilight connection.

Categories: Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre, Music, Poetry, References, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights