Keeper's Wuthering Heights

Andrew O'Hagan talks about fiction's talking animals in The Guardian and he proposes a curious approach to Wuthering Heights:

It's also arguable, the other way, that Wuthering Heights is essentially a novel about the power struggle between Emily Brontë and her dog, Keeper. The connection between stifled women and animals is striking in British fiction, and its literary effects have been central to the education of many generations of children.

Which reminds us of Anne Mozley's description of Wuthering Heights in her Christian Remembrancer review of Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë:

If the respectable bull-dog Keeper could have been endowed with the ambition and the power to describe graphically the passions of this race - if you could put a pen in his hand and thell him to delineate the springs and impulses which prompt the displays of dog nature, with the outer workings of which we are alone familiar - if he could tell us the secret causes of every yelp, bark, and snarl, and spring, and bite, which we know now only in their effects - he would write precisely such a book as Wuthering Heights; and as 'Life in the Kennel', it would be a very striking and clever performance. (Christian Remembrancer, July 1857, XCVII, 87-145)

Lucy Mangan makes another reference to Wuthering Heights in her Guardian's column:

"Oh God," says Toryboy as he enters the sitting room to see me surrounded by tissues, my eyes puffed up from a good afternoon's weeping, softly hiccuping my way back to normality. "What is it this time? Wuthering Heights or diseased carcasses?"
He knows me too well. Left to my own televisual devices, I like to do one of two things. Commune with Laurence "Heathcliff hewn from the living rock" Olivier and Merle "My eyes glitter fabulously when either maddened or dying, so make me Cathy" Oberon in William Wyler's 1939 film – which involves clutching my handkerchief to my mouth as he berates her on her deathbed ("Oh, Cathy, what right to throw love away for the poor fancy thing you felt for him? For a handful of worldliness!") and then bawling like a baby as he delivers his final speech and sinks to his fabulously be-britched knees in grief. "Haunt me then! Haunt your murderer! Take any form, drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this dark alone where I cannot find you! Oh, Cathy, Cathy – come back! I cannot live without my life! I cannot die without my soul!" Aaaand... scene.

Elizabeth Renzetti discusses in The Globe and Mail the castings of Jane Eyre 2011 and Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights movie:

When the rumour went around that Ed Westwick, of pouting and Gossip Girl fame, might be cast as Heathcliff in a new film version of Wuthering Heights, it seemed the report should be accompanied by a warning: Emily Brontë has just spun free of her grave and can be found walking the hills, yelling, “Really, people. You’re killing me here!”
Fortunately, the Westwick rumour (widely reported by many, including me, last year at Cannes) has proved false. We are saved from the Abercrombie & Fitch foundling. We will get a new version of Wuthering Heights, even if we need one like the Yorkshire moors need more rocks. But at least this one is in the hands of the great British director Andrea Arnold, who made Fish Tank and Red Road, and who understands something about casting[.] (...)
Now, to find Heathcliff, she and her casting team are reportedly scanning the farthest corners of Britain, going so far as to visit Romany camps in their search for someone capable of playing one of literature’s great beasts (a character described by Brontë as looking like a “gypsy”; hence Ralph Fiennes’s shoe-polish dye job when he played Heathcliff.) Finding the right actor to play a beloved character – even one as unredeemed as Heathcliff – has got to be the movie-industry equivalent of working in bomb disposal. Cast the part poorly, especially if it’s a book that’s deeply ingrained in the culture and embedded in readers’ hearts, and the whole thing can blow up in your face. (...)
Take the case of the other Brontë: Yes, there’s another film adaptation of Jane Eyre in the works (more rocks to the moors!) In Cary Fukunaga’s upcoming movie, the key roles of “plain” Jane Eyre and really-not-handsome Edward Rochester will be played by the very pretty Mia Wasikowska and the even prettier Michael Fassbender.
I will grant that Fassbender is a terrific actor, and when he played Bobby Sands in Hunger you couldn’t take your eyes off him, much as you wanted to. But Mr. Rochester? Let’s put this in shoe terms: Rochester is an orthopedic clog, and Fassbender is a Louboutin with a peep toe and a six-inch heel. It’s our fault, really, not the casting director’s. We’re addicted to beauty onscreen. There’s a reason we never saw Ernest Borgnine’s Mr. Rochester, even if it would have been perfectly apt.

On Authorlink, Rochelle Jewel Shapiro describes the merits of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea:

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’ revision of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, focuses on Bertha, the madwoman locked in the attic of an English manor. (...)
Rhys sets us immediately in an exotic world of danger and political and social strife. Again, she gives this world believability through the precise details: the names of places, the Caribbean language. “She was pretty like pretty self,” instead of “she was pretty as prettiness itself.” We can already see by the situation that Rhys is going to take us along on a thrilling plot. The speaker of the story and her mother are already characters as outsiders in a hostile place, a sure-fire way to grab readers’ interest.

Art&Seek announces the new season of the Dallas Children's Theater at the Rosewood Center, which includes:

Teens have their raucous comedy in The Curse of Castle Mongrew, a gothic horror melodrama in the style of Jane Austen/Charlotte Bronte meets The Addams Family. (Jerome Weeks)

Estrella Digital (Spain) interviews Sadie Jones, author of The Outcast who says:

También autora de Small wars, Sadie Jones reconoce que el éxito de El rebelde ha cambiado mucho su vida, puesto que gracias a la novela se ha convertido en una autora popular. Sin embargo, considera que a la hora de escribir, tengas fama o no, siempre es la misma rutina: "Me siento frente al ordenador y me olvido de todo, hasta de otros escritores", confiesa la novelista, que dice no ser muy original a la hora de hablar de sus influencias literarias: "Todos los peces gordos, desde Hemingway a Virginia Woolf, pasando por Nabokov, las hermanas Brönte (sic) o Steinbeck". (Esther Ginés) (Google translation)

La Vanguardia (Spain) reviews the Spanish translation of several short stories by Naiyer Masud, Aroma de Alcanfor:

En la estructura de los relatos se aprecia la influencia del autor de La metamorfosis,aunque al leer Aroma de alcanfor el zumbido que más rasca tu cerebro está en sintonía con Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë y la poesía persa y urdu contemporáneas, especialmente con la del escritor Intizar Husain. (Pepe Ribas) (Google translation)

El Comercio reviews the novel Mantis by Mercedes Castro:

[Mantis tiene] una atmósfera muy lograda, tan cercana a ‘Cumbres borrascosas’ como a la realidad cotidiana. (Google translation)

Clandestinoweb (Italy) publishes the ratings of Jane Eyre 1996 in the latest broadcast on Rete 4 (last Wednesday with the very tough competition of the Champions League football match Barcelona-Inter): 2.009.000, 7,79%.

Briefer news: The Guardian's Theatre Blog considers Polly Teales's Brontë (now at the Watermill Theatre, UK) 'wildly imaginative'; Commentary Magazine publishes an article about Francine Prose and mentions the numerous Jane Eyre references in her 2000 novel Blue Angel; Danielle Barnum's performance as Jane Eyre in the recent Seattle Musical Theatre production is described by Broadway World as 'stirring'; The Spoof! adds more Brontë to the recent events on Coronation Street; a reader and Brontëite in the Fort-Wayne News Sentinel; now that the Expo 2010 opens in Shanghai the Globe and Mail remembers how the first World's Exhibition was attended by, among others, Charlotte Brontë; La Crónica de Badajoz (Spain) reports that the runner up in the 9th Certamen de Relatos Cortos was Ángel Silvelo Gabriel who used the pseudonym Jane Eyre.

Finally, on the blogosphere Brandon's movie memory posts about I Walked with a Zombie 1943; The Squeee posts about the audio of several Jane Eyre TV adaptations and She Is Too Fond of Books reviews Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Music, References, Theatre, Wide Sargasso Sea, Wuthering Heights