Brontëites around L.A., you have an alert from the New LATC:The New LATCLos Angeles Times provides more information:
Theater 3
November 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th
Thursday, Friday, Saturday - 8:00PM
Sunday: 3:00 PM
Rosanna Gamson / World Wide
ravish
Created and Directed by Rosanna Gamson
Dancers include Michael Gomez, Sarah Goodrich, Marissa Labog, Lilia Lopez and Carin Noland; Dr. Flavia Sparacino provided the interactive visual effects; and Rob Bailis conceived the score.
Inspired by the creative hothouse in which the Brontë sisters wrote intensily romantic fictions (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, etc.) without the benefit of any real-life experience. Ravish presents - through cutting-edge interactive media - the rapture of passionate friendships and shared imagination.
[W]ith her latest work, "Ravish," premiering this week at the New LATC, Gamson has embarked on what might be her most ambitious effort at page-to-stage transformation. Based on the lives of the Brontë sisters, the hourlong multimedia piece blends movement, text, video and an interactive floor linked to computer software that generates images by tracking the motions of the dancers. If all goes according to her plan, "Ravish" should "engage the audience in the way you are engaged when reading a book," Gamson says. "With some dances, you can just watch them and let the movement wash over you. In this case, there's the added complication of technology, text and image. The audience is going to have to do some decoding."Well, not really six books ... not counting the Poems, the Brontë sisters opus contains seven novels, but only six were published when they were alive.
In other words, do not expect a story ballet, the dance equivalent of a biopic or the kind of movement piece that might feature extensive monologues adapted directly from "Jane Eyre" or "Wuthering Heights." Rather, if a recent rehearsal was any indication, Gamson has chosen a more abstract and allusive approach to the Brontës, their prodigious literary output and their tragic deaths. (All of them died from tuberculosis before the age of 40.)
In one section, Gamson's cast of four women and one man mutter barely audible, often unintelligible sentence fragments as they perform rigorous movements that alternate between frenzied and labored, ecstatic and foreboding. Often, they dance apart from one another, spinning in circles and looking like children who lose themselves in games involving imaginary worlds. Sometimes, they wrestle and play variations on Follow the Leader. Frequently, they crash to the floor and at certain moments scream in horror.
To this, add video projections of young girls at bedtime, poetic texts written by Gamson and the interactive floor designed by Flavia Sparacino, which creates the effect of letters forming words that appear to follow the dancers as they move across the stage.
"I wanted to capture this moment in adolescence before you become socially inhibited but when romantic love is in the picture -- the time when girls feel like they can do anything, when they form these intimate, passionate friendships and play elaborate games," says Gamson. "The Brontës and their stories happened to fit what I wanted to communicate." (...)
With "Ravish," Gamson doesn't think she's going to fail. "But this is a hard piece for me to put up," she acknowledges. "It's as if I'm dancing in my living room and I've invited people to watch. In many ways, this piece is really about me and my childhood."
At her Echo Park home, Gamson alternates between pure conversation with a visitor at her dining room table and using her home office computer to show off some of the text and imagery that will be part of "Ravish." She's a tall, lanky and highly articulate woman who frequently cracks jokes and claims to always be "changing my hair." (This day, it's short and two-toned, white on top and black on the bottom.) She can be disarmingly self-deprecating yet at the same time projects seriousness and confidence about her art.
"I would love it if people just saw my work as theater," she says of her long-standing zest for creating multimedia performances. "I wish we could all just get past putting each other into boxes, and I don't really like the term 'multidisciplinary' -- something about it sounds evil. So if you're going to use a catchall phrase to describe me, then I guess it's 'choreographer.' " (...)
Gamson's ideas for "Ravish" also came from watching her own daughters, now 10 and 12.
"They would play all these elaborate games, the dressing up, the setting of rules. . . . It was all so super-theatrical," she says. "It got me thinking about the Brontës, about femininity and creativity and how, to me, there's nothing silly or weak about that passionate, emotional feminine voice of the Romantic period. I think it's a heroic voice."
In addition to reading the six [sic] books by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, Gamson read several biographies, did a bit of Internet surfing and familiarized herself with such subjects as Victorian mourning rituals. She also gave her performers assignments to help them develop "hybrid Brontë characters" and a sense of intimacy with one another. "I made them wrestle a lot," she says. "I wanted my dancers to communicate not so much the Brontës' words but more their isolation from the world, their physical condition and their ability to communicate."
Marissa Labog, one of Gamson's dancers, had the task of researching Charlotte Brontë and says she loved the "homework" Gamson gave the troupe. "She really got us to understand who we are within the work and where the movement is coming from," she says. "Rosanna's always coming from a very intellectual place, where it's never movement just for movement's sake."
Sparacino, who heads a Santa Monica-based interactive technology and digital art firm called Sensing Places, similarly observes that Gamson was unlike the many people who ask her to "just do something cool" for them. "Rosanna had a well-defined vision," she says. "She was very clear that she didn't want the technology to dominate the dancing, and she knew what she wanted to express."
Gamson concedes that the various elements of her production, viewed separately, do have an "Oh, cool" factor. "I guess part of me comes from the 'God forbid you should bore the audience' school of choreography," she says. "But I also just love big theater. The little, sensitive productions that people do in lofts never moved me."
Ultimately, Gamson wants things her way but wants the audience to like them too.
Above all, she hopes she has effectively communicated "an imaginative world, where the people in it never move into growing up. That period right before I was 13, that's when I felt most myself. And I still have this vivid imaginative life. That's why I made this piece. I don't want to be alone with it. I want everyone to come visit me." (Susan Josephs)
You know the story: Girl meets boy, boy locks girl in attic, boy promptly moves on to the next bit of stuff that comes along. Next year marks the 160th anniversary of the publication of Jane Eyre, and if the recent BBC adaptation is anything to go by, she's lost none of her ability to fascinate those who encounter her.Check the comments on the blog. It's an interesting discussion. However, we must step in and say that 2007 marks the 160th anniversary of Jane Eyre, not next year!
Furthermore, Charlotte Brontë's seminal novel refreshed the formula for gothic romances, with a spate of copycat triple-deckers soon following "Currer Bell" on to the book market. No popular romance was complete without a fragile heroine in dire need of a good rescuing, a brooding, potentially bad boy but ultimately damaged-soul hero and a vixenish, scheming rival for his affections. A taste of exotic stuff from overseas? All the better. A house, possibly haunted but certainly in possession of a few spine-chilling adornments? Perfect.
Since then, the romance novel has undergone a few significant changes. The mysteries of the strange, foreign land have now been unlocked by Ryanair; as for being haunted by ghosts of your husband's past, all you need to do is hack into his email account. Jane herself, meanwhile, has been magically transformed into a sussed, streetwise single mum/high-powered career woman/girl-about-town with a midlife crisis and a sexy neighbour. Chick lit has taken over.
It would be a mistake to dismiss gothic fiction's offspring as trashy, insubstantial fluff, however. In recent years, romantic fiction has turned into the bully of the literary playground, snapping up more than 25% of the UK fiction market. Around the world Mills and Boon, that powerhouse of heaving bosoms and throbbing manhood, sells a staggering two books every second.
These figures are astonishing, but are as nothing to the true crimes that they conceal: behind a veneer of harmless pap, romantic fiction is gradually offing its progenitor. These days, chick-lit heroines aren't allowed to be damsels in distress; while critics claim that Jane Eyre reproduces patriarchal paradigms, the ladies of escapist literature are busy balancing their successful careers with finding a man. (...)
Following the template of the best gothic romances, the grande dame of melodrama has been made redundant by a younger and more alluring rival. It's a sad passing, but it seems that the fact is we can relate to chick lit in a way that we no longer can to gothic fiction. Who knows, maybe the chick-lit novel will one day have its own head cut off by the next big movement in women's writing. But for now the gothic romance is an inaccessible madwoman locked up in fiction's unvisited attic.
The premise behind "Ravish" is, in itself, the stuff great theater is made of - except that in this case, the story translates itself into an interactive dance piece. It is a modern spin on a classic tale. The production revolves around the lives of the five Bronte sisters, all of whom died of tuberculosis prior to the age of 40, and the dichotomy that existed between their own isolation and the rich, romantic lives of the characters they created.The Journal Live publishes David Almond's top ten books:
Rosanna Gamson, the creator and choreographer of "Ravish," said that though she drew inspiration from various sources, the root of her piece is embedded in her life - the integration of disparate artistic elements a reflection of her own unique experiences. (...)
"Ravish," despite its literary influence, is the next step, a progression into something far more conceptual in both its writing and its execution. The dynamic motion of the five dancers is set off by a 24 square-foot stage, but the physical exterior of the space by no means limits the range of influence the performers have on their environment.
"I'm trying to make movement that has a certain awkwardness, that's very hard to do in terms of stamina," Gamson said. "There's a struggle in it. Imagine trying as hard as you can to find movement that you've never seen before. It's a short show - only one hour. I need the production to feel dense, like a jewelry box. Everything in the box should be unique and flashy and essential to the production."
What Gamson said she wanted, more than anything, was to have a show that fully engaged the audience, allowing viewers to be a part of the show, as opposed to being passive observers. This is where the technological component of "Ravish" came into play.
For the production, Gamson teamed up with former Massachusetts Institute of Technology fellow and researcher Flavia Sparacino to create a completely new form of dance theater, integrating modern know-how into traditional movement to create an ethereal realm of dancing words and a dramatic interplay between the performers and the stage itself.
"One of the great things about working with Rosanna was that she is a choreographer with a vision," said Sparacino, who is the founder and director of Sensing Places, an interactive architecture firm. "A designer is a designer and will always have his or her unique artistic tastes. But with Rosanna, we agreed on a vision, and as a choreographer, she was open to ideas. I see technology as being at the service of art, not dominating it."
The point behind interactive media, Sparacino explained, is examining the relationship between people and the space they are in - and perhaps more importantly, how the people can influence their environments. In "Ravish," the dancers are at once controlling their surroundings and trapped by them: Their movement dictates the direction of the lighting and the way the stage reacts to their actions. It is motion sensors without the markers, special effects in real time.
"There are three components to interactive media: The input, the output and the glue that holds the two together," Sparacino said. "In this case, the dancers' movement provides an input and the reaction of the computer software to this movement is the output. It's everything that happens in between that is the hard part."
At one point in "Ravish," letters projected onstage follow the dancers, seemingly chasing the performers tirelessly as they spell out poignant words. Though Gamson choreographed the dances well in advance, the letters' reactions happen in real time, so there is an interactive component that immediately draws the viewer in.
"My vision is to have art generated as the body moves," Sparacino said. "Just like how skin reacts to how we feel on the inside, I want the environment and the stage itself to react to how the dancers move throughout the stage.
"This is releasing power to the people. This is about allowing dancers to create dynamic art with just their movements, and that's something that I think will appeal to people, this augmented reality." (Joyce Chen)
6. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte: It’s the atmosphere and passion she creates but also the northern moorland setting that appeals to me. Also, the poetic language is extremely powerful. It’s certainly one of my favourite English novels and, like all of these books, has had an influence on my writing. (Paul Loraine)Twilight is not good for maidens has a couple of posts of interest: a review of the current exhibition of Cornerlia Parker at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham that we have previously reported. Her attention was driven to the Brontëan Abstracts pieces:
My attention was particularly caught (unsurprisingly) by Brontean Abstracts, her work which came out of the artist’s time at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth. The exhibition guide talks of Parker’s "forensic interest in the stuff of the Brontes’ lives", and this section of the exhibition features photographs taken through an electron microscope, displaying in the most minute and scientific detail a pin hole made by Charlotte Bronte, the hair of the three sisters, their nibs and needlework. I was fascinated by the level of detail, presumably representative of a "never ending" search for the essential, real Brontes, the people behind the novels, because that seems to be what we, whether as literary critics or the reading public, want. One might assume it’s a modern obsession, this consuming interest in celebrity, wanting to be close to those in the public eye, but as I have previously mentioned in the case of Tennyson, this has been going on for a long time now. And, of course, wanting to know every minutiae of the life of the Brontes is arguably a very different proposition to wanting to know who Kate Moss is going out with and which moisturiser Victoria Beckham wears; this, one can argue, is a "literary" interest, one for the erudite, the well-read. It isn’t, really, though. I wonder if Parker was really suggesting that we are trying to get too close, that the scrutiny of biography and reworkings of history is all a bit much, extraneous, almost. What impact would that image of the pinhole have had if it had been made by Mrs Jones of Cardiff who lived and died in obscurity? But then, what material value would be placed, at auction, say, on Mrs Jones’ nightdress, for example, when compared to Charlotte Bronte’s? It’s all about association, and Parker is making us question, uncomfortably, if we have over-emphasised these associations – it’s cynical, but celebrity sells; is it right that these anonymous pictures become more interesting because of their associations? (...)The other post covers the recent Victorian Memories conference that we reported some time ago:
What particularly caught my eye here, however, was a framed series of photographs, twelve in all (I think) of deleted words from the manuscript of Jane Eyre. Only academics tend to look at manuscripts in such detail, so it’s thought-provoking to see these deleted words turned to their own use, as art. The materiality of the text is thrown into relief here, as words become meaningless as signifiers, taken out of their context (and some barely legible) but exist purely as pictures, the lines of handwriting becoming strokes of paint on a canvas which exist for the purposes of decoration only. The frames seem to break up the continuity of the text, until one recalls that since these are random, deleted words, they had no continuity and little textual status anyway. It forces the viewer into a different relationship with the text, and provokes discussion about the place of text-as-object, and, in the context of the exhibition as a whole, the object-as-text, in which an inanimate object provides a "text" for the viewer to "read". (Serena)
The panel on ‘Charlotte Brontë and Memory’ lent a psychological focus to the darker, more disturbing facets of memory such as trauma theory and repressed memory. Speakers offered compelling accounts of Villette and Jane Eyre with astute examinations of Brontë’s use of the autobiographical form in rendering experience. (Nazia Parveen)Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Brontëites, Dance, Jane Eyre, Scholar
But how much, except at the margins, can each new version add? Two years ago Bleak House broke the mould by becoming a “soap”, going out in twice-weekly half hours; Oliver Twist will follow its frequency. There are reinterpretations to make. Sandy Welch adapting the BBC’s Jane Eyre last year emphasised more than is usual the heroine’s time away fromThornfield Hall and had Jane eventually succumb to Rochester only after first giving the MCP a good ticking off. Davies’s A Room With a View revved up the class war latent in Forster’s novel and strongly hinted that Cecil Vyse was not the marrying type because he was, well, gay.We certainly hope this new version of Wuthering Heights will bring good things. However, we have our doubts that there are such things as definitive adaptations, seeing as how these largely depend on the spectator's taste and appreciation, not uniquely on its merits as far as the film is concerned. Of all the many versions of Jane Eyre, for instance, people widely differ in which is their 'definitive' adaptation for them after all. By the way, the most recent version is aired next Sunday November 25 and December 2 in Australia, on ABC.
We may harbour hopes, too, for ITV’s Wuthering Heights since it has been written by Peter Bowker, who, with great originality, wrote the BBC’s musical thriller Blackpool. But Bowker must know his main job is to deliver viewers and prestige to ITV. As Laura Mackie, ITV’s new head ofdrama, says: “I would struggle to point to a definitive TV version of Wuthering Heights, in the way you can with Andrew Davies’s Pride and Prejudice. That’s a challenge for us, to try and do the definitive version.”
In 'Ravish,' the Brontës are thrust into the tech ageThe UDaily (from the University of Delaware) reports a recent lecture given at the University by Maurice Corrigan, author of Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading!:
The one-hour piece, choreographed by Rosanna Gamson, is heroically performed, but gadgets steal the focus.
By Lewis Segal, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
The floor is the star of the hourlong dance drama "Ravish" at the New LATC through Sunday. Sometimes it's outlined in intense golden light, but it's just as likely to turn into a giant dining room table or sketch-pad or bed, thanks to Barnaby Levy's video projections. At one point, it even becomes a phantom ballroom with ghostly dancers whirling across it.
But in the most innovative effects, interactive technology from Flavia Sparacino's Sensing Places LLC makes the floor into a moving grid or web reflecting every step by the five dancers in the locally based company Rosanna Gamson/World Wide.
And there's more: As Carin Noland begins to dance early in the piece, single letters appear under her feet, spelling "Burnt" over and over. The letters, words and full texts also periodically appear on the back wall, often as mere flashes, punctuating the choreography, bombarding the audience.
The dancers don't stand a chance against the onslaught, though they performed heroically at the work's premiere Thursday. The novel visual spectacle is too commanding and Gamson's choreography too un-relievedly flung out and unmodulated.
Performed in an intense flail-and-sprawl modern dance style, "Ravish" is especially unconvincing as a collective biography of the Brontë family, doomed literary lions of the 19th century in England. In Gamson's action plan, there's no room for the life of the mind, so what we read from or about the Brontës on the wall or floor never conceptually connects with the dancing we see, and it's impossible to believe that these hyperactive, volatile people might have written those words, any words.
Although Gamson does construct group passages that convincingly unite everyone as a family, the characterizations remain rudimentary, and only when the Brontës begin to die off, one by one in furious solos followed by slow walks into the Great Beyond, does the narrative assume a coherent shape.
Russian choreographer Boris Eifman ran into similar problems recently with his ballet "The Seagull," emphasizing over-the-top physicality to the point of narrative confusion. But he was portraying mediocre artists and Gamson is depicting great ones -- so implausibly, as it turns out, that "Ravish" is best viewed as an abstraction or company showpiece.
As such it never bores -- not with the cast's skill and commitment. The sweetly lyrical Marissa Labog is perhaps the company's most astute dancing actor and Michael Gomez its greatest asset when space-devouring virtuosity is needed. Watch them shine in solo after solo.
Other expressive colors enrich the work through a sunny portrayal by Noland, a withdrawn one by Lilia Lopez and a manic depressive one by Sarah Goodrich. Gamson may never reveal which of these Brontë women supposedly wrote "Jane Eyre" and which "Wuthering Heights," but no matter. As dancers, they're all faultless and often surprisingly versatile, as when they suddenly turn up in toe shoes, executing bourrées in a circle while whirling chiffon capes.
Don't ask what it means. It's picturesque and distinctive while it lasts, and that's the most you should expect from "Ravish."
Rob Bailis created the collage of sounds and varied musical excerpts (all uncredited) accompanying the piece. Ted Mather designed the equally changeable lighting effects, Lopez the once elegant but mostly torn and shabby costumes the Brontës wear in decline. This is one event where choreography takes a back seat to nearly every other component of dance theater, so the excellence of Gamson's collaborators accounts for most of the excitement in Theater 3.
Maureen Corrigan, National Public Radio (NPR) book critic, author and lecturer on literature at Georgetown University, addressed an audience of approximately 100 UD students, faculty and members of the Newark community Thursday night, Nov. 8, in her lecture, “Ain't No Mountain High Enough: Women's Extreme Adventure Stories,” given in the Trabant University Center Theatre.Lorna Luft, actor and singer, chooses her favourite things for The Scotsman:
Sponsored by UD's Women's Studies Program, Corrigan's lecture, the second in the Mae and Robert Carter Lecture Series, focused on women's adventure stories, particularly those written by late 18th-century and early 19th-century authors Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë‘. (...)
Corrigan went on to examine how heroines from 19th-century literature--even heroines from such different authors as Jane Austen, with her social satires, to Charlotte Brontë‘, with her gothic gloom--“took emotional adventures of endurance.” And though these adventures, she said, might have taken place in parlors and kitchens and bedrooms and involved the care of sick parents or the terrors of the marriage market, they nonetheless “were devoted to a woman quietly keeping her nerve, day after day, year after year. Climbing Mount Everest looks like a snap compared to the quotidian pain of caring for a sick parent,” Corrigan said. (Becca Hutchinson)
IF IT'S Sunday and raining out, I want to watch Rebecca. If I really want to laugh I'll watch The Producers, and if I want to cry I'll watch the original Wuthering Heights.On the blogosphere today: to the lighthouse briefly comments Claire Boylan's Emma Brown. We have discovered this new blog: Austen and Bronte and Gaskell, Oh My! Its description promises interesting posts in the future:
If you ask any of my friends or anyone that knows me at all, then you would know that I am obsessed with Jane Austen, especially Pride and Prejudice. By looking at the female protagonists from works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell, I will explore the strengths and weaknesses that make them classics and revolutionaries.Categories: Books, Dance, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Sequels, Talks, Websites, Wuthering Heights
Festival 3: October 8-12, 20082. A talk in the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia:
OFF BOOK: Stories that Move
Friday – Saturday, Oct 10-11 at 8pm: A Bay Area Premiere!
Sunday, Oct 12 at 7pm
Rosanna Gamson/ World Wide in Ravish
ODC Theatre
Ravish is an evening-length dance theater piece for five women (one played by a man) inspired by the Brontë family. Featuring an integrated video projection by Barnaby Levy, Ravish reimagines the creative hothouse in which the Brontë sisters wrote intensely Romantic fiction without the benefit of real-life experience (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). "an erotic fever dream that merged dance, theater, music and literature." -The Wall Street Journal.
The Aesthetics of Anger: Style and Colour as Sites of Contested Meaning in Nineteenth Century Fiction3. The first of a series of talks at the Bettendorf Public Library, Bettendorf, Iowa: Visiting the Brontës:
Mari Webb - MPhil Candidate, EMSAH
Friday 10 October
1 - 2 pm (can extend to 2:30pm if required)
Level 4, Room 437
Michie Building
St. Lucia Campus, University of Queensland
This paper examines some of the social and moral connotations of women’s colour and style choices for clothing, and the metaphorical use of the colour red, in nineteenth-century fiction. It will specifically examine several texts that subvert such connotations in different ways. Hester Prynne flaunts her categorisation as a ‘scarlet woman’ in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter by turning the ignominious scarlet letter she is required to wear into an elaborate fashion statement. Lucy Snowe is accused of superficiality and lack of taste in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette because she wears a pink dress. It becomes evident, however, from the byplay about this dress which occurs between M. Paul Emanuel and Lucy that she rather enjoys knowing one person who doesn’t assume she is the model of prim governess correctness. ‘Good taste,’ in the British society of Brontë’s time, is specifically attached to soberness in colour and style of clothing for women of Lucy Snowe’s social position. The meaning of the colour red is even more metaphorically significant in Jane Eyre, the novel Brontë published before Villette. The colour red is persistently associated in these texts with inappropriate expressions of passion, whether this is sexual feeling expressed outside the bounds of marriage or uncontrolled anger. Brontë uses irony to undercut this connection, and Hawthorne’s validation of Hester’s humanity, apart from the crime she has committed in the eyes of her community, causes the reader to question the meaning of the scarlet letter she is forced to wear. Indeed, the meaning of the letter changes by the end of the text as a result of Hester’s own actions. By writing such novels, Brontë and Hawthorne contest the accepted idea of the time that anger and sexual passion are inappropriate feelings for women to express.
Bettendorf Public Library will host a four-part book discussion series featuring classics written by Charlotte, Anne and Emily Bronte led by Augustana professors Ann Boaden and Laura Greene. “Jane Eyre,” will be the topic of the first discussion at 3:30 p.m. Friday.Categories: Alert, Dance, Scholar, Talks
Books are available at information desk on a first-come, first-served basis.
Visiting with the Brontes is sponsored by the Bettendorf Public Library Foundation.
We read in The Daily Bruin about an upcoming dance piece inspired by the Brontës:Hothouse 2007, the world arts and cultures residency program for choreographers and performance artists from the L.A. community, begins today at UCLA’s Glorya Kaufman Hall. The program runs for three weeks of intense artistic creation. (...)We beg to differ with the concept of 'steamy romantic fiction', though.
“I would have people come in and say to them, ‘Tell me this isn’t completely stupid.’ I didn’t want my work to be this weird thing made individually in my workspace – I wanted to see what other people thought of it,” said Rosanna Gamson, founder of the dance theater company Rosanna Gamson/World Wide and part of last year’s Hothouse.
The program provided an important testing ground for the creation of her dance theater piece “Ravish.” The project examines the creative environment that impelled the Brontë sisters to write steamy romantic fiction like “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights,” a fitting subject for the Hothouse program.
On the last day of the program, Gamson and the other participants shared what they had completed in front of everyone. Gamson gained important feedback when she showed them the beginnings of “Ravish.”
“You can tell how much an audience is listening just by how they look or how the room feels,” she said. “They raised questions about what I was doing.”
Gamson's next project, RAVISH will preview at REDCAT August 30th as part of "Performance West" during the Western Arts Alliance Conference. (...)And now for some other form of art. Do you recall July was The Tenant of Wildfell Hall's month at Knit the Classics? Though we don't have a winner yet, members of the group are already uploading pictures of their finished projects. See them here.
Project Description: Ravish is an evening-length dance theater piece for five performers with interactive media by Flavia Sparacino and video by Barnaby Levy. The piece takes as its inspiration the creative hothouse in which the Brontë sisters wrote intensely Romantic fictions (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, etc.) without the benefit of real-life experience.
The final installment, OFF BOOK: Stories That Move, represented a collaboration with Litquake. So, it seemed logical to turn over the lion’s share of the weekend to a dance work inspired (but not dominated) by the written word. That would be Rosanna Gamson’s Ravish, a curiously moving and luxuriantly produced meditation on the Brontë clan. True, Martha Graham treated the subject in Deaths and Entrances back in the 1940s, but Gamson, a Los Angeles resident, who made her Bay Area debut on Friday (Oct. 10), attempts something less cosmic and more intimate. By and large, she succeeds in evoking a household, so far from the literary mainstream that it forces itself to remake the rules on artistic creation.The environs of Haworth - or the Brontës' lives - were not so cloistered, actually.
How the Brontë siblings built their own universe in the cloistered environs of Haworth Parsonage in the early decades of the 19th century is a matter of much speculation and I must roundly chastise Bailis and his team for not supplying even an iota of background matter for this dance in his handout material. He should know that is not how you draw audiences to dance or make them sit through it, either. (Allan Ulrich)
In any case, history records that there were five Brontë sisters, only four of whom survived into maturity, and they are represented here, along with brother Branwell, at best a person in a fragile psychological state. (Allan Ulrich)Alright, that IS confusing. It's true there were five Brontë sisters, but only four SIBLINGS (three sisters and one brother) survived into maturity.
It is hard to tell the extent to which Gamson drew on the historical record for her 55-minute opus or how much she has opted for speculation and metaphor. Certainly, Branwell’s frequent spinouts, drops and rolls do not suggest mental health, and Michael Gomez’s volatile performance in a shirt that seems to be crumbling from the dancer’s body only fortifies the impression. Best not to think Heathcliff or Mr. Rochester. That way lies a literary fallacy, and Gamson refrains from assigning the women distinct characterizations.On a sad note, The Times publishes an obituary of actor Peter Copley. He made a Brontë connection in his acting career when he played John in Jane Eyre 1970.
What you notice first is the family’s fragmentation. Two of the women hover on the periphery, whispering. Another dons pointe shoes and tries them out. Branwell exults in his instability. Not till half way through do these siblings join hands (in an unstable circle, need I add), and the moment seems like an epiphany. Later, all the women switch to pointe shoes; I guess the source of literary creation is mysterious and unfathomable, but you do get the idea that we carve our careers from what we experience in our environment.
The idea isn’t profound, but Gamson’s dancemaking skill is rich and varied. Her phrasing, extended and voluptuous, or short and pugnacious, never fails to support a mood. The dancers are a splendidly attuned lot. The women were Sarah Goodrich, Li-Ann Lim, Lilia Lopez and a fireball named Carin Noland, who corkscrewed across the space with startling abandon.
Ravish has been sumptuously mounted. Texts are projected on the rear wall, and Barnaby Levy has devised a series of ingenious projections for the floor. One of them shows us a dinner table, two place settings, two bowls of soup and two pair of hands consuming it. Bailis has compiled a deft sound score comprised of music that was popular during the Brontës’ heyday, like Beethoven’s “Moonight” Sonata (to accompany the soupy visuals), Schumann’s Piano Concerto and some lugubrious parlor songs. In a modern dance scene notable for neglecting the imperatives of theater, it’s odd and refreshing to encounter in Ravish a work that’s almost overproduced. (Allan Ulrich)
The Parsonage website is down at the moment due to a problem with the provider. We are making every effort to put it back up - so apologies! It should be available very soon. (Jenna Holmes)EDIT: The website seems to be up and working now.
Writers can't dance, but that doesn't mean writers will shut up about it. The fact is, we don't live in a perfect world, and writers never hesitate to tackle topics with which they are wholly unfamiliar.The Bromsgrove Standard (and The Redditch Standard) covers the on going Wuthering Heights Two Hats UK tour:
It's only fair, after all. Dancers overstep their bounds, too, and trespass into the territory of writers. It happens all the time.
The latest example is "Ravish," an hour-long dance program that purports to tell the story of the Bronte sisters and the several novels they wrote during their short lives in 19th-century England. "Ravish" had its premiere a week ago in Los Angeles.
I can tell you that the dancing in the show was utterly sublime. I also can tell you that if the show was to be presented with no descriptions or cues to the audience, as to the subject matter, not a soul would have a clue that it is about the Bronte sisters.
You could pack the room with experts on the Bronte sisters, who are trained to appreciate even the most subtle references, and they would never make the connection.
I'm not a dance expert, but I know what dancers are capable of, and what they are not capable of.
I'm just saying, if you want to put on a dance that attempts to convey some literary meaning, it needs to be of the most painfully obvious sort.
I'm just saying, if you want us to understand that you are retelling the story of "Moby Dick," for example, you better drag a particularly fat dancer onto the stage, and stick a harpoon in him.
I'm just saying.
But remember I'm a writer. The only thing I know how to do, with either foot, is to put it in my mouth. (John Weeks)
This new adaptation of the Emily Bronte classic has been written by Jane Thornton.
A mysterious orphan who sets two families at odds. A conflict passed down across generations. And a love that lasts beyond death.
Cathy and Heathcliff grow up on the remote Yorkshire moors, soulmates and fellow victims of Cathy's brother. But when a chance mistake sends Heathcliff away, Cathy marries the wrong man..
Blanche McIntyre directs a cast featuring Two Hats regulars Chris Dobson, Emma Cooper and Nick Marshall and newcomers Matt Dudley and Krisha Harman in an intimate evening of story-telling that's suitable for all ages.
And award-winning local composer Darren Scott provides an evocative original score for this production featuring the Coventry-based choir Ensemble 1685. (Andrew Powell)
The Australian premiere of Jane Eyre 2006 is commented on The Sunday Times:
Charlotte Bronte’s romantic novel, Jane Eyre, has been brought to life in this lavish, complex and sexy BBC production.And...
Georgie Henley, who played Lucy Pevensie in The Chronicles of Narnia, plays the young Jane and newcomer, Ruth Wilson plays her later in life.
Rochester is played by Toby Stephens (the son of Dame Maggie Smith) who brings smouldering good looks to the role.
The all-star cast includes Francesca Annis as Lady Ingram, Christina Cole as Blanche Ingram,
Lorraine Ashbourne as Mrs Farifax, Pam Ferris as Grace Poole and Tara Fitzgerald as Mrs Reed.
Producer Diederick Santer is immensely proud of this adaptation filmed entirely on location at the historic medieval castle of Haddon Hall, owned by Lord Edward Manners, and other locations across Derbyshire.
“We do one or two of these huge BBC productions every year,” he says.
“The last one was Bleak House and it was a case of what are we going to do next.
“Jane Eyre hadn’t been done well for a while – there was an old fashioned version in the 80’s."
“We decided to tell the story from the beginning when Jane is young and growing up with her mean aunt and being sent to a strict boarding school.
“That is often left out from films.”
Santer explains that the moment they met newcomer Wilson, they knew she was right for the role – they struck gold with her he says.
“Ruth has this composure, this look,” he explains.
“Jane describes herself as plain, but she has to have a look that lures Rochester.
“One moment Ruth has this look that is quite ordinary but then she has moments of extraordinary beauty.
“Ruth just understood the character and became Jane in every way.”
Wilson was cast first as Jane and then the cast producers saw The Chronicles of Narnia and realised that Henley who played Lucy in the film looked life a young Ruth Wilson.
“Finding an actor to play the 35 year-old Rochester, we knew we needed an actor with experience,” says Santer.
“Toby had it all.
“Rochester is every woman’s dream, he has that blend of strength; is an open book of emotions which are raw, he is strong and has warmth and humour.
“It is interesting when you go back and read the book, how funny Rochester is.
“I remember the brooding, broken man which is there – but there is also this man who is a raconteur who can hunt – he is a rounded character.
“We got a lot of flack from people saying that Toby was too young – but in reality Toby was older than the character he was playing.
“He is meant to be so much older than Jane – she is19 to his mid-thirties character.
“It is an incredibly difficult part and a huge challenge for Toby who nailed it.”
There were critics in the UK when it aired a year ago, but settle in for two hours of exceptional viewing over two consecutive Sundays – you’ll be hooked. (Helen Ganska)
Don’t artists allow the mystery of genius to work its magic without questioning it too much? Now, it is impossible that Emily Bronte sat down with Freud’s The Ego and the Id before embarking on Wuthering Heights since he was born ten years after she had died. Rather, this quiet introvert had apparently observed and understood human nature in its extreme forms and the result are the terrifying, delightful, alluring characters of Heathcliff and Catherine. Now we get the fun of unpacking and exposing just how great she was — whether unintentional (as her sister believed) or not, and the fun of placing modern “lenses” on the psyche of her characters. I guess the point is — does it matter? We should just appreciate her genius and be grateful!!We couldn't agree more.
AUGUST 25More information on this previous post.
RAVISH - Benefit Preview
Bootleg Theater
2220 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, Ca 90057
5:00 - 7:00pm
Rosanna Gamson / World Wide, in association with BOOTLEG, presents a benefit preview of RAVISH, a new dance theater production inspired by the Brontë sisters, at Bootleg Theater. Expect lavish hors d'oeuvres, fabulous cocktails, demonstration of interactive media by Flavia Sparacino and, of course, excerpts from RAVISH. Admission is $20. (Save the Date Central)
The show is a music and dance performance about the five Brontë sisters, and their brother, all of whom died of tuberculosis before the age of 40. The figurative depiction focuses on the hugely creative works of the entire family, while also weaving in their reclusive nature. The L.A.-based dance theater company is assembled with artists from an array of backgrounds and countries. And hey, one of the sisters is played by a man. (Downtown L.A. Scene)
Jane EyreMore information on this previous post.
Written by John Caird, based on the
novel by Charlotte Bronte
Music by Paul Gordon
Lyrics by Paul Gordon & John Caird
WA Academy of Performing Arts.
Directed by Leith Taylor
Choreographed by Jenny Lynnd
Musical Direction by David King
By arrangement with Hal Leonard Australia Management Pty Ltd Exclusive agent for Music Theatre International (NY)
When: 7.30pm: Saturday 25 August, Monday 27 August,Tuesday 28 August, Wednesday 29 August, Thursday 30 August, Friday 31 August, Saturday 1 September 2.30pm: Saturday 1 September Location: The Geoff Gibbs Theatre Price: $35 Full, $29 Friends/Concession
The Telegraph & Argus gives the chance to see the results of Dominic Clare's work with the Parsonage's cyprus pine tree that was felled last January:The “black sheep” of the Bronte family was chosen as the unlikely subject for the latest piece of artwork to commemorate the literary family.A video can also be watched here.
Chainsaw artist Dominic Clare spent a day carving a sculpture of Branwell Bronte from a tree felled at the Bronte Parsonage Museum earlier this year.
Fascinated visitors to the Haworth museum were able to watch Mr Clare in action as he drew the outline of Branwell’s face onto the wood, then used a chainsaw to cut the lines.
The tree, which had become diseased, was one of a pair of Cypress pines believed to have been planted in the Parsonage garden by Charlotte Bronte and Arthur Bell Nicholls as part of their wedding celebrations.
A seedling from the tree was taken before it was felled and has been replanted in the same spot.
The sculpture of Branwell is set to be displayed at the museum throughout the summer.
An information panel inside the museum explains to visitors that Branwell is seen as the black sheep of the family. With that in mind, why was the artist so keen to make him the focus of his work?
“I was taken by the self-portrait that Branwell did and I used that for inspiration to carve a larger version onto the panel,” said Mr Clare, from Beddgelert, in North Wales.
“I just like the marks Branwell makes on the paper – he was an artist himself obviously,” added Mr Clare.
Jenna Holmes, arts officer at the museum, said: “It’s a fantastic thing for visitors to see. It’s quite a dramatic sight to see an artist working with a chainsaw.
“It was a tree that was believed to have been planted by Charlotte Bronte on her wedding day in 1854 and unfortunately it had to be felled this January because it had become diseased. We thought it would be a lovely way to commemorate the tree and create a fun event for visitors.
“A sapling was taken from the original tree so something will, hopefully, grow back in the same spot as the original.”
A description of Branwell, displayed on an information board near the museum entrance, said: “The popular story is that he was an alcoholic drug addict who wasted his talents and held his sisters back.
“As a young man, Branwell showed great promise as an artist and writer. His family were very proud of his talents. His poetry was admired by experts and was published five years before any of his sisters’ work. He also played an active part in Haworth life.
“Branwell did abuse drugs and alcohol in the last years of his life after a failed love affair. But Mrs Gaskell exaggerated Branwell’s downfall in her biography of Charlotte, and later writers have followed her lead.” (Will Kilner)
The raucous literary festival Litquake teams with ODC Theater for a slate of dancer-writer collaborations. On opening night, gymnastic stuntman Scott Wells teams with the spunky Michelle Tea; other matchups include Katie Faulkner and Tess Uriza Holthe, and Alejandro Murguia and Erika Shuch. The later nights of the festival present Los Angeles choreographer Rosanna Gamson's "Ravish," a dance-theater piece about the Bronte sisters. Oct. 8-12. Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida St., San Francisco.The Times has an article about animal protagonists in adult literature. Sam Savage's Firmin appears:
His first meal is Finnegans Wake - the “big one”. Firmin subsequently develops (literally) a taste for high literature. Lettuce, he discovers, “tastes like Jane Eyre”. Flaubert is “salty and tart”. Firmin becomes subtle as Proust in the books he devours. (John Sutherland)TravelWeekly might push metaphors too far:
Of the many people I have got to know well in the travel industry, it’s a fair bet none would describe me as anything like a character from a classic English novel.More reviews of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight saga:
No, the stress of writing this column hasn’t tipped me over the edge. And no, I’m not about to start flouncing about like Keira Knightley.
But I do have an admission – I’m starting to feel a bit like Jane Eyre. You see, the trade has a nasty secret almost as shameful as having a mad relative locked up in the attic. (Julia Lo Blue-Said)
Although Meyer tries to portray this pair as a modern Romeo and Juliet or Heathcliff and Catherine (references to whom are glaringly frequent), Bella and Edward’s relationship is more like that of predator and prey. For one thing, the scent of Bella’s blood tortures Edward, who drinks animal blood to keep from killing humans. (Gina R. Dalfonzo in National Review)And of Irina Reyn's What Happened to Anna K.:
To others, Anna's blend of beauty, elegance and mystery embodies "the Russian soul." But Reyn shows that the romantic siren song of her favorite novel, "Wuthering Heights," explains her missteps as much as any Old Country mystique. After a few years, she will seek her Heathcliff in her cousin's former beau, David, a Queens College adjunct and aspiring novelist. (Dan Cryer in Newsday)The Book Smugglers interview author Susan Holloway Scott:
The Book Smugglers: Who (or what) are some of your influences? Any favorite authors?Categories: Books, Branwell Brontë, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Dance, Haworth, In the News
Susan: If we’re talking influences, I’d have to say all those grand old historical writers that I devoured as a teenager.(...) I also read tons of older books that weren’t strictly “historical”, but the contemporary novels of their time, like Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Alexandre Dumas, the Brontes, and Henry Fielding (though as speedy a reader as I was, I didn’t finish any of those in a single day!)
Mrs Gordon came to Haworth to speak of how the lives and characters of the Brontës, most especially Emily, and Emily Dickinson follow a very similar pattern. There are so many similarities between the Brontës and the Dickinsons, for example strong fathers, both imbuing their children with a demand for learning. (...)The San Francisco Chronicle briefly mentions Rosanna Gamson's performances of Ravish at the Litquake Festival:
Lyndall Gordon delivered an informative and enjoyable lecture a few hundred yards away from where Emily Brontë lived and wrote one of the greatest works of literature in the English Language and I am sure the lecture left those who had heard it wanting to learn more about the parallel of these two writers, separated in age by a decade and in location by the Atlantic and thousands of miles, but whose lives ran in parallel courses from childhood to death both trying to put the ‘unsayable’ into language. (Isobel Stirk)
The shame about "Page to Stage" was that it ran only one night, with JoAnn Selisker's one-woman show "Off Leash" opening the Off Book festival Wednesday, and Los Angeles choreographer Rosanna Gamson's "Ravish," about the Brontë sisters, closing out the weekend (and repeating tonight and Sunday). ODC Theater Director Rob Bailis should trust more in his commissioned talent. (Rachel Howard)Valerie Martin's Trespass use to be a frequent visitor on BrontëBlog's newsrounds. It's no suprise then that she includes Wuthering Heights among her favourite books as can be read in The Week:
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (Penguin, $7). Rich, innocent Edgar Linton pays the price for putting himself in the line of fire between the famously passionate Catherine Earnshaw and her beloved Heathcliff, the revenge-driven prototype of the romantic hero. The big question: Did Cathy and Heathcliff actually have sex?The Age talks about the the shortlist for next Tuesday's Man Booker Prize. One of them is Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole which is described like this:
Steve Toltz's A Fraction of the Whole, which came charging out of the great unknown to collect quite a critical cheer squad during the months since the longlist was first announced, is regularly described as "anarchic" or compared to John Kennedy O'Toole's modern classic of the marginalised, A Confederacy of Dunces. A lover of Victorian swashbucklers would, however, find plenty here to warm the cockles.Also in The Age, Andrew Stephens talks about connections both personal and creative and the concept of otherness. Cathy and Heathcliff make an appearance:
Martin Dean is a conflicted young misfit obsessed with his missing uncle, a psychotic murderer and local folk legend. The story is told, pace Wuthering Heights, in a series of impossibly detailed diaries kept by Martin and his madly erratic father, relating their picaresque adventures. (Stephanie Bunbury)
It is an intriguing aspect of humanity: our desire to "only connect", as E.M.Forster's epigraph announced in Howard's End. Some lovers misconstrue this desire as a need to be "as one", to take union - coital or emotional - to its extreme and to actually merge. I think of Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights or the medieval myth of Tristan and Isolde.Los Angeles Times highlights some recent paperback reissues. Including House of Mist by María Luisa Bombal:
"Wuthering Heights" and "Jane Eyre" are both recalled, although the style isn't gothic, but mesmerizingly clear. The jacket of this new edition reworks George Salter's original cover art from 1948 -- appropriately haunting and dream-like. (Richard Rayner)The New York Times has an article about parrots (!) in literature. And there's a Brontë (via Rhys) connection:
And in “Wide Sargasso Sea,” Jean Rhys’s prequel to “Jane Eyre,” the life of Rochester’s first wife is saved by the death of her parrot. (Anthony Gottlieb)Casting Call Pro is looking for a Cathy and a Heathcliff for a still photos session.
A trio of American actresses has been cast as Haworth's literary sisters for a Hollywood movie called Bronte. Here's how it might look...We're rooting for Act Two , Mr Barnett :)
A bird's eye view camera shows grey-skies and an even greyer landscape. We swoop towards a little hamlet perched on the side of a hill.
Voiceover (in portentous, growly American accent): "Merrie England in the 19th century. Dinosaurs still roam a land that has only recently been united as one country by King Arthur. Toothless serfs gain their only pleasure from smoking dried mud and watching the plays of William Shakespeare. But in York Shire, three hot babes with all their own teeth are about to loosen old Bill's iron-like grip on the literary habits of the country... and their name is... Bronte!"
A cave dug into the hillside. Outside is parked a horse-drawn carriage in the shape of a Mini Cooper. Within, the cave is sumptuously decorated in the style of Buckingham Palace. Three gorgeous young women with heaving bosoms are seated around a long table, with Donald Sutherland at the head of it, the sisters' dour father, Patrick.
Charlotte Bronte, played by Michelle Williams, stands and tosses her hair.
Charlotte: "God damn it, Dad! Potatoes again? This is doing nothing for my attempt to get into that 00 frock for the prom, you know."
Patrick (seething): "Don't take the Lord's name in vain, missy! That's my Goddamn job!"
Charlotte storms out. Bryce Dallas Howard is Emily Bronte, absent-mindedly pushing a potato around her plate with her fork.
Emily: "Dad, I think I'd like to go for a walk on the moors. Get some inspiration from the blasted heath for me writin', donchaknow."
Patrick (glowering): "That's the worst Goddamn British accent I ever heard. That's worse than Dick Van Goddam Dyke."
Evan Rachel Wood plays Anne, the youngest of the sisters. She is gazing into the roaring fire.
Anne: "Worse than Renee Zellweger's?"
Patrick (roaring): "Much worse than Renee Goddamn Zellweger's!"
He draws a huge .44 Magnum from under the table and slides it across the table to Emily.
Patrick (whispering forcefully): "But if you are going out, take this. There's dinosaurs and Vikings and Goddamn knows what the hell else on those York Shire moors. And make sure you're back before Goddamn dark."
Emily: "Why?"
Patrick (whispering): "There's... things... on the moors. Flesh-eating things. Possibly from space. And they'd certainly wanna ravish a Goddamn hottie like you."
Charlotte has returned. She is now wearing an impossibly tight black leather catsuit and wields a vicious-looking Samurai sword. She stands behind Emily.
Charlotte: "No sister of mine is going out there alone. Not on the York Shire moors. I'm coming with you."
Anne also moves behind Emily and from under her skirts she pulls out a long-bow.
Anne: "Me, too."
Patrick: You girls still think you'll be safe?"
The camera closes in on the three sisters, who adopt a Charlie's Angels-style pose.
Charlotte: "It's not us who has to worry."
Anne: "It's them."
Emily: "That's because we're..."
All three (to camera): "The Brontes!"
End of Act One
The titillating trailers and method-dressed promotional tour appear to have paid off: early indications are that Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights will earn back its $80m (£59m) production budget on the first weekend of release.Projections estimate the three-day frame, which falls on Valentine’s weekend, should recoup around $50m (£37m) at the US box office – where it opens across 3,600 screens – and a further $40m (£29m) overseas. (Catherine Shoard)
As a Bradford-born Brontë expert, here’s my guide to what Fennell gets right — and wrong.1. No, Cathy wouldn’t have had a cut-glass accentCathy’s accent is a plummy throwback to Merle Oberon in the 1939 film adaptation of the Brontë classic, with Charlotte Mellington (as the young Catherine Earnshaw) and Margot Robbie voicing the heroine’s lines in RP. The queenly pronunciation serves to throw the Yorkshire voice of Heathcliff, played by Owen Cooper and then Jacob Elordi, into suitably lower-class relief.This is Fennell’s idea of “othering” Heathcliff — swapping Brontë’s layered examination of his “dark-skinned” outsider status for simply making him sound different from Cathy and his “betters”.Brontë’s heroine lives in an isolated house on the moors. She calls her dad Father, not “Papa. In a mellow moment he asks: “Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?” The Earnshaws do not speak in cut-glass, prewar BBC English.While Elordi says he practised his admittedly good accent in the bath, his fellow Australian Robbie told British Vogue that she was disappointed to find she didn’t need to. “I was very excited to have a crack at the Yorkshire accent,” she said. Fennell soon put her straight.2. Mr Earnshaw wasn’t a brutish drunkMartin Clunes plays Cathy’s father, Mr Earnshaw, as a drunken, upper-class brute who brings the street waif Heathcliff home from a trip to Liverpool. More ruined blue blood than gentleman farmer, he’s the best thing in the film but nothing like his character in the book. In the novel, the kindly Mr Earnshaw protects Heathcliff, while it is Cathy’s brother, Hindley, who hates the “beggarly interloper” and mistreats him horribly after his father’s death.With no Hindley character, the film skips the origin of the true malice and mania of Brontë’s Heathcliff. He hates Hindley and plots to humiliate him by taking Wuthering Heights, wielding power though dispossessing his childhood nemesis. So we’re left with a screen Heathcliff with none of Brontë’s “imp of Satan” about him.True to 14-year-old Fennell’s vision, he follows Cathy around like a puppy, happy when they are having it away, hangdog when they aren’t. Elordi’s glowering from beneath gorgeous eyebrows can only achieve so much.3. Nelly is pivotal to the plot, but she’s not poshThe film gets Ellen “Nelly” Dean’s crucial role right. The faithful rural Yorkshire servant who lives at the Heights is the chief, if unreliable, narrator of the tumultuous novel. She knows everyone’s secrets and is the witness and storyteller who relays it all later to Lockwood, who rents Thrushcross Grange.Unfortunately the film’s most laugh-out-loud liberty also comes with her reinvention as the secret illegitimate daughter of a lord. She is a local woman, often referring to “bairns”, and deemed “a cant lass” (feisty female) by Mr Earnshaw. Instead, a ludicrous Mills & Boonesque backstory makes Nelly — played by an excellent Hong Chau — a refined lady’s “companion” to Cathy.4. Cathy doesn’t have a sexual awakening in the stablesIn the book Joseph is a servant and religious zealot whose utterances are written in broad Yorkshire dialect. He is a horrible and “very old” man hated by Cathy and Heathcliff for his evangelical fervour and puritanical wrath.In the film, step forward the handsome young actor Ewan Mitchell to unwittingly give a fornication floorshow involving a horse bridle and a maid as Cathy sneaks a peek through the floorboards and later repairs to the moors to, ahem, relive the moment.There is no sexual awakening in the book. Cathy and Heathcliff’s devotion is entirely chaste — there is no evidence of a sexual relationship. And the only thing Joseph bangs is his Bible.• Wuthering Heights — by the stars who tried to sex it up before5. Isabella Linton does marry Heathcliff — but isn’t into BDSMThere are no aristocrats in Brontë’s novel, only suggested ones in Fennell’s film. When Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) marries Cathy he lives in a stately home more suited to a Jane Austen flick. Thrushcross Grange is an old manor house, a step up from the Heights but not by much. And Linton’s sister (not ward) Isabella, played by Alison Oliver, is not a simpleton who shares Fennell’s fascination with BDSM.“There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism in this book,” Fennell has claimed. Well, there’s a great deal of sadism, certainly, meted out by Heathcliff to Cathy’s sister-in-law.In the novel Isabella elopes with Heathcliff, learning too late that she is part of his twisted revenge on Linton. Heathcliff hangs her dog in the book but Fennell has him chaining Isabella to the stove like a dog.Brontë’s naive Isabella was conned into a brutal marriage — she did not go knowingly into an abusive relationship or come to enjoy it, as she does in the film. She calls Heathcliff “a monster, and not a human being!” and is a victim of horrific domestic abuse, making her willing submission on screen a titillating travesty.6. The ghosts have vanished into thin airWhere are all the ghosts? Brontë conjures the supernatural on the South Pennines, with Cathy’s ghost pleading “Let me in!” at the window in the novel (and in Kate Bush’s enduring song).Fennell ignores the entire second half of the novel after Cathy’s death, when the next generation suffer Heathcliff’s warped grief and unquenchable thirst for revenge. Surprising, when the necrophiliac potential of him digging up Cathy’s corpse should have appealed to the film-maker, given she had Barry Keoghan’s character in Saltburn humping his beloved’s grave.If depravity is what you’re after, it happens when Cathy is gone and Heathcliff visits his cruelty on her daughter and his son. But there can be no “after Cathy” in Fennell’s fantasy.The novel ends with the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff glimpsed on the moors. The film ends in a pool of Cathy’s deathbed blood and a montage of their romantic moments.
Depending on who you ask, Brontë’s Heathcliff is supposed to be Black or Brown, since he’s described in the novel as a “dark-skinned gypsy in aspect” and a “dirty, ragged, black-haired child.” Another description: “as dark almost as if it came from the devil.” In a piece for Vulture called Is Heathcliff White?, Jasmine Vojdani writes that, “The idea that Heathcliff might be of African descent first entered academic discussion in the 1950s and gained momentum as postcolonial studies became more popular in the ’80s and ’90s. Scholars have argued that the proximity of Liverpool — one of the biggest slave ports at the time in which Wuthering Heights is set — to the Brontës’ home in Haworth cannot be overlooked.” Vojdani interviews scholars and tries to get to the bottom of this mystery surrounding one of literature’s most famous leading men. One scholar says, “He is both based on the boy of an Indian ruler who’d been orphaned because of the East India Company battles. But he’s also based on an Ashanti warrior’s son.” Another: “The feeling that he should be of African heritage, I think that is interference coming in from [Brontë] sister’s book. Because we do know that in Jane Eyre, Bertha Rochester is born in Jamaica.” Ultimately, Vojdani decides, “By Victorian standards, he’s definitely not white — and likely by ours as well. Is Heathcliff Black? Maybe! It is both historically and textually viable, but he isn’t necessarily Black.”We can debate Brontë’s intentions for decades (and clearly, scholars have), but what’s true in this adaptation is that a white Australian man (Jacob Elordi) and a white British boy (Owen Cooper) play Heathcliff. After watching the film, honestly, it’s for the best. I am not encouraging whitewashing, which let’s be clear is exactly what this adaptation and many before it have done, but aside from what implications could be drawn from a movie starring a Black man opening with a lynching, I just don’t think this love story is one I would want to see, or engage in the discourse, if it was a man of color seducing and obsessing over a white woman in this way.When they are grownups, Heathcliff and Cathy (Margot Robbie) have a tumultuous and toxic relationship. Heathcliff is surly, cruel, and vindictive. He emotionally terrorizes Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver) because he can’t have Cathy. So much so that at a certain point, Isabella crawls on the floor like a dog as he holds onto her collar and makes her bark. While Isabella seems to enjoy this roleplay, it’s uncomfortable to watch. It would take skill, care and precision to pull off this kind of sexual deviance and kink between a consenting couple, let alone between one with a problematic age gap, and power imbalance. I like how female desire is depicted through Isabella, but throw race into the mix and to be frank, I just don’t think Fennell has the range.Based on what scholars have deduced and what Brontë wrote, Heathcliff was probably Brown, which is interesting considering Fennell cast Pakistani-British actor Shazad Latif as Edgar Linton, Cathy’s husband, who was definitely white in the books. His race is not mentioned in the movie. And neither is Hong Chau’s Nelly (played in youth by Vy Nguyen), Cathy’s live-in maid and best friend, also a white character who is now reimagined as Asian. There’s a brief mention of Nelly’s race, when Cathy’s father says something that implies she should be grateful he took her in. Otherwise, the way race would factor into their volatile friendship is never explored. In another writer-director’s hands, this story would be rife for mining the racial and class tensions of the era. With the right storyteller, I’m all for showing flawed characters of color in toxic relationships. They don’t have to be perfect representations of their race. But, again, I don’t think Fennell has any intention, or the competency, to tackle all of that in her work.You realize early on what Fennell is doing. And that this Wuthering Heights is not a straightforward adaptation; it’s her own personal fantasy. She said as much on the red carpet for the LA premiere: “Everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only kind of ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” In Fennell’s fantasy, Heathcliff couldn’t possibly be anything but a tall, white man that looks like Elordi. Heathcliff is an object of desire and Fennell’s desires cannot extend beyond her worldview, and clearly, that world is very white. Which is fine, actually. She can make the movie she wants to. And I’d rather not watch a story told by a rich, white woman about the twisted proclivities of a Black or Brown man. I wouldn’t want to see it, and I wasn’t holding my breath waiting for it. And it's telling that in Fennell's fantasy, the only people of color, Nelly and Edgar, are characters who Cathy uses and discards at her pleasure.I’m not trying to be condescending, I just genuinely didn’t expect a nuanced rumination on class, race, desire, and abuse from this movie. I watched the trailers, heard Robbie and Fennell talk about the movie, and I’ve seen Fennell’s previous films (which I didn’t hate!). I knew what they were trying to do with Wuthering Heights. It’s the spiritual equivalent to the genre of toxic white mess that unfolds in TV hits like Succession and The White Lotus. It’s a continuation of the recent trend of modern, magically race-bent, colorblind retellings of beloved literary works, like Netflix’s Bridgerton and Persuasion, and Apple TV’s The Buccaneers. It was never going to be that deep. But all art is political, so yes, while white filmmakers should know better and do better, I would rather spend my time championing original work from Black and Brown filmmakers and storytellers than wish for a non-white Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. I think that’s a waste of time. There is inevitably going to be an onslaught of thinkpieces and TikTok rants dedicated to chastising this casting. Sure, let’s call out whitewashing, but instead of expending all our energy on begging for scraps from white Hollywood, let’s support our own. [...]When I settled into Fennell’s Wuthering Heights world, and got over the unnecessary shock tactic of that opening scene, I started to enjoy myself. I was entertained. Elordi and Robbie (who the internet also swore was miscast because of her age) are electric together. I think their chemistry makes the whole thing worth it.In the story that Fennell is telling, their chemistry is the one thing that needs to work, and it does. I believe that these two people would tear the world — and themselves — apart to be together. I also believe that they want to tear each other’s clothes off. They are so down bad for each other, inanimate objects that are slightly sexual set them ablaze. Chemistry often feels like a lost art and it was refreshing to see good, old-fashioned, horny-ass onscreen attraction. And for the first time, I understood the global thirst for Jacob Elordi. While Robbie’s Cathy is spunky, stubborn, and independent, Elordi’s Heathcliff is brooding, desperate, and clingy. He’s a real yearner and this may mean that I need some serious therapy, but I was into it. [...]The audiences who show up to the theater on Valentine’s Day hoping for a feel-good romance may leave a bit traumatized (just like I was when I first read Wuthering Heights in high school), but they’ll also buy into the splendor and pageantry of this movie. And they’ll understand why Elordi and Robbie are two of the most in-demand talents of their generation. I do wish that a Black-led, Black-directed film — or one made by and for people of color — was getting the same over-the-top treatment, star-making potential, and budget, but until we start yelling more about why we aren’t seeing those stories greenlit, funded, and released, we’ll be stuck in our own fantasy. Fennell’s warped, whimsical, white-as-hell fever dream may be a compelling watch, but it’s her imagination come to life. I want to imagine a world in which the weird whims of Black and Brown filmmakers are able to be awakened too. (Kathleen Newman-Bremang)
‘There is always a strong response to modernised adaptations, but this is a book that was bold and audacious in its time and upset a lot of people, so it is quite fitting Emerald Fennell is doing the same. There is an awful lot of sexual and emotional energy in the source material, so having a film that is filled with the same kind of energy seems fitting to me. I feel Emily would approve and would just let us get on with tearing ourselves apart over it,’ says Dr Amber Regis, senior lecturer in 19th century literature at the University of Sheffield. [...]Regis was equally engrossed and befuddled when she read Wuthering Heights for the first time at a similar age.‘My parents loved the Kate Bush song [of the same name], so I thought it was just a love story, but it is a complex novel with all these strange characters who are awful to each other. I’m not sure I knew what to do with it,’ says Regis. [...]‘There is this notion of a love so powerful it can’t be contained, no border or boundary it can’t cross. A love that will endure everything is very compelling as a fantasy and that is the version we are most comfortable with when we think about Cathy and Heathcliff. But the book also recognises the power of that love can be destructive and mixes in acts of violence that we are less comfortable acknowledging. In the case of Heathcliff, we are told he is an outright domestic abuser, so it will be interesting to see how Emerald Fennell handles the representation of Heathcliff as a love interest and antihero,’ says Regis, whose understanding of Emily, and sisters Charlotte and Anne, has evolved with age.‘I had an image of them as these passionate, windswept moorland creatures, but I’ve discovered they were radical businesswomen who wanted to upset their readers and the critics and shake up the literary establishment. And I really admire that gumption and that ambition.’Of the four siblings (there was also troubled brother Branwell), Emily, who died from tuberculosis a year after Wuthering Heights was published, remains the most enigmatic as she left so little behind that allows firsthand insight into her life.‘If Charlotte is to be believed, it was Emily who wanted to use pseudonyms, to do everything cautiously and protect their privacy. But we know from her artwork and biographical accounts that she had a great love for the moorland around Haworth and Charlotte creates this image of someone who would wither if you took her away from the moorland, that she had to be restored to life by being restored to the moors,’ says Regis.‘It’s clear the wildness of the natural world inspired much of her poetry and setting in Wuthering Heights,’ says a spokesperson for the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, where the Brontë sisters lived and wrote.‘Of course we’d recommend the museum first, but if you want to feel as though you’re stepping into the world of Wuthering Heights, get out onto the moors around Haworth. There is the walk to the Brontë waterfall and a ruin of a farmhouse called Top Withens, and the fairy cave at Ponden Kirk is thought to have inspired Penistone Cragg in the novel.’ (Susan Griffin)
When Warner Bros. released the poster for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the visual language was unmistakable. Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff are locked in a tempestuous, back-arched embrace. Her head is thrown back, and he is gazing down at her upturned mouth. This pose—known colloquially as “the clinch”—is not merely a promotional still, but, also, a genre signal. For decades, this clinch posture visually identified mass-market romance novels known as “bodice rippers” of the 1970s and ’80s: promised readers explicit passion, historical spectacle, and a very specific fantasy of male dominance and female surrender. Cementing this 19th-century gothic novel pivoting into the genre of a commercial “bodice ripper,” the new Wuthering Heights poster is also the cover image for the movie tie-in editions of the novel; Brontë’s text, therefore, is literally wrapped with the visual markers of mass-market erotic romance.The film’s trailer amplifies this branding, moving beyond the static image to feature anachronistic costuming, febrile scenes of the protagonists licking pink tufted walls, and transforming the mundane task of kneading dough into a sexual metaphor. The trailer declares the film to be “inspired by the greatest love story of all time” and an “epic tale of lust, love, and madness,” before culminating in a dramatic, non-canonical ultimatum: “So kiss me. And let us both be damned.”Rather than dismissing the film purely as an “inaccurate” adaptation, we can read it as a culturally specific interpretation that filters Brontë’s Victorian text through the lens of contemporary digital desire. In the age of viral BookTok smut and “spice,” Wuthering Heights is being reclaimed as the original “morally gray” romance. However, this transformation requires significant aesthetic and narrative renegotiations, specifically regarding race, age, and genre, that threaten to obscure the radical and anti-romantic core of the original text. Even the most “pitch black” dark romances fulfill the promise of a happily ever after for their main characters. This narrative certainty creates a safe container for readers to explore dark themes. Brontë was not writing within these constraints or offering readers such catharsis.It is simply a mistake to mislabel Wuthering Heights as a romance. To do so ignores the visceral horror that greeted the book’s publication in 1847: critics recoiled from its “vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors,” warning that it was a book that should never have been written. Unlike Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre—which satisfies the romantic contract with the famous declaration “Reader, I married him” and the eventual softening of its Byronic hero—Emily Brontë’s text functions as a staunch anti-romance, explicitly devoid of a happily-ever-after or a redemption arc. In the original novel, Heathcliff is not a misunderstood lover, but a domestic tyrant: he hangs his pregnant wife’s dog, physically abuses the younger generation, and exhumes Cathy’s rotting corpse in a frenzy of necrophilic obsession. Meanwhile, Catherine’s “love” is depicted not as desire, but as a grotesque madness, a terminal slide into delirium, pillow-biting, and self-starvation.The novel charts a descent into hell rather than a path to the altar. And this, ultimately, is what makes its repackaging as a Valentine’s Day date movie so perverse, a cynical distortion of a text where the only union is found in the dirt of a shared grave. (Shawna Lipton) (Read more)
The hotly anticipated film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has led to a surge in sales of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. Bookshops shifted more than five times as many copies last month (10,670) as in January last year (1,875), according to publisher Penguin.Many of the books have been bought by young people eager to understand the story of Cathy and Heathcliff before Emerald Fennell’s big-screen version hits cinemas on Friday. But if stories circulating online are to be believed, many of these newly bought novels are being left largely unread.Social media is awash with Gen Z readers who claim to love literature but lament that they find Wuthering Heights – a book regularly taught at GCSE and A-level – too difficult.“Guys, this is testing me for real. I feel so stupid,” says Grace Deutsch, whose profile goes by the name Grace’s Mini Library, in a typical TikTok post about Wuthering Heights. “And I have a theory that anyone who says that they absolutely loved this book only says that to sound smart. I’m so serious, because, like, what do you mean?!”Another TikTok user, who goes by the alias Wagesylie, has put together a popular five-part plan to help readers tackle Brontë “if you’re overwhelmed and don’t know what’s going on”. It includes alternating between chapters and study guides – a “gut check” to see if you are “understanding the plot” – and listening to the audiobook while reading a hard copy. [...]These struggles are not confined to social media. A colleague reports that at a press screening for the film earlier this week, two women discussed their thoughts on the book. One, who was reading it for the first time, said her “brain rot” – a Gen Z term for chronic short attention span – had left her unable to grasp much of the plot or language.What is going on? There appears to be a growing consensus that the prevalence of smartphones has systematically eroded attention spans, particularly among the generation that has grown up knowing nothing else.Is it really so surprising that, as we enter what critics have described as a “post-literate” age, young people who have spent much of their lives scrolling through mindless videos might find a masterpiece of Victorian literature a struggle? After all, university professors in the UK and the US have reported that literature undergraduates are increasingly unable to get through a whole novel. That it may not be surprising, of course, does not make it any less depressing.Have smartphones ruined our ability to read long books?Gone are the days when literature students could move from discussing Pride and Prejudice one week to Crime and Punishment the next. [...]That so many people appear to be struggling with Wuthering Heights is no surprise to experts. Claire O’Callaghan, a senior lecturer in English at Loughborough University who has written extensively on the Brontës, tells me the novel is a “difficult text” with a “convoluted structure, multiple narrators and overlapping names. You have several generations and movement across time – you go backwards and forwards”.O’Callaghan, whose biography of Emily Brontë has been expanded and updated ahead of its republication in June, adds: “It’s a book that, in my experience, often takes quite a few reads to really get a sense of all those things clearly.”The corner of TikTok that has helped encourage young people to read – inevitably called “BookTok” – has largely been a boon for publishers of schlocky, unchallenging “romantasy” titles and thrillers rather than classics. Perhaps the marketing of the new film has led would-be readers to assume the source text was a romcom, rather than an at-times-harrowing account of unrequited love and generational trauma. That may be what a Valentine’s Day weekend release does to potential cinemagoers.The marketing machine behind the film has been in overdrive. Press tours have featured Robbie – practising “method dressing” in elaborate corseted gowns – and Elordi walking the red carpet together, embracing and swooning. Official merchandise tie-ins range from snacks to lingerie, bedclothes and massage oil. All are a far cry from the desolation of the Yorkshire moors.There is some self-awareness among those who now find themselves unable to get through Wuthering Heights about what has hindered their comprehension skills. “It has not taken me long to realise that there is some brain rot happening,” Mary Skinner, another bookish TikTokker, says in a recent video. “It’s actually been a wake-up call for me. I don’t think I’ve read anything other than books that were extremely easily digestible in… it’s got to be over six months. I’m finding this much more challenging than I would have a couple of years ago.”Declining literacy skills have also fuelled an explosion in AI reading apps, including Clippit, Reedy and Amazon Kindle’s “Ask” feature, which promise to simplify language (often by modernising it), signpost plots and explain characters’ intentions before they are fully fleshed out by the author. Don’t have time to pore over hundreds of pages before bed? Simply scan the text and get the gist of the story, without exercising your brain or stretching your intellectual capacities. How very dystopian.But how hard is it to get through Wuthering Heights, really? My recent re-read was largely trouble-free – and not because I am some sort of singular genius. There was the odd word to look up, such as when Heathcliff is described as “an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone”, or when the narrator says, “I had no desire to aggravate his impatience previous to inspecting the penetralium” – but Brontë’s language is, for the most part, fairly accessible (though the same cannot be said for her eccentric use of commas). This is hardly late Joyce.While the new film has been criticised in some quarters for straying too far from the source text, it includes plenty of verbatim quotations (think “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” and “I have not broken your heart – you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine”). “There’s just no better dialogue than Brontë’s,” Fennell said at a British Film Institute talk last week. “She’s got these extraordinary, extraordinary words.”One reason readers may find Wuthering Heights challenging comes down to expectations. Is the novel a love story? A tale of revenge? Some combination of the two? Or something else entirely? “We tend not to make people comfortable with ambiguity, and that requires deeper reading, more critical reading, and reflection on the multiple perspectives within a novel,” says O’Callaghan.That is all well and good – laudable, even. But if we really are entering a post-literate age, are people who struggle with a book such as Wuthering Heights capable of deeper, more critical reading? Or are we drifting towards a bleak future in which novels must guide readers by the hand? (Liam Kelly)
I spent what feels like eight years studying Wuthering Heights.It probably wasn't eight years; actually, definitely not, because it was one of my set texts for A-level English. It merely felt that long because I hated the entire thing. The characters, the setting, the language... the whole lot.You might think that means I'm not excited by the prospect of the new Wuthering Heights film adaptation, but you'd be wrong.I've not seen it yet, but by all accounts it does everything it can to take the best ingredients (Sex! Death! Adorable old houses! The Moors!), skate over the boring bits (everything else), and wrap it up in a movie that sounds like a sort of Inglorious Basterds treatment of Emily Brontë. And the best bit? I'll be able to watch the whole trashy mess in a fraction of the time it'd take to read a single chapter of Nelly warbling on about the Earnshaws and the Lintons. (Toby Keel)
The devoted lover. The toxic narcissist. The sex symbol. The chaste beloved. The perverted necrophile. The Other. The one who lives among us. The proto‑Marxist rebel. The idealistic lunatic. The unscrupulous psychopath. The victim of the powerful. Or perhaps their ultimate executioner. (Ianko López) (Read more)
But is Heathcliff the dashing, brooding hero we sometimes want him to be? Beyond the obvious toxicity of his relationship with Cathy and his violence towards almost every person in his life, Brontë’s leading man is first and foremost introduced to us as… a pretty terrible landlord.From the very first line, Brontë wants us to know that Heathcliff rents out property (and he’s not well-liked by his tenant, described as “the solitary neighbour I shall be troubled with”).Most adaptations ignore the fact that Heathcliff becomes a landlord by focusing on his and Cathy’s story, ending at the novel’s midway point. They miss key messages Brontë sets out, including Heathcliff’s arc from orphan to vengeful landlord. [...]Sam Hirst, a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Liverpool, explains that Heathcliff “takes this house, gets rid of the inhabitants and then uses it as an Airbnb, essentially”.“He’s hiring it for seemingly short periods on temporary leases to southerners coming to Yorkshire,” she adds. “His whole campaign is to dispossess local families, take over their houses and rent them out to southern people. And he lives in one of the houses that he owns.”According to Hirst, he “empties the local area of meaning” and “deliberately tries to disrupt the social structure of the area but not just in a positive way”.Heathcliff is described as a “cruel, hard landlord to his tenants” by villagers in the novel. Lockwood is attacked by Heathcliff’s dogs and haunted by the ghost of his landlord’s lost love.Simon Marsden, an English Literature lecturer at the University of Liverpool, says Heathcliff’s role as a landlord “gives us the chance to see the adult Heathcliff as this figure who is basically completely inhospitable”.“He’s almost willing to let Lockwood wander out into a snowy night where he may well not make it home alive. It gives us that sense of mystery about him, but it also allows us to see him as this very inhospitable figure. Maybe the fact that he is introduced as a landlord just makes that stand out more.”In a lot of adaptations of Wuthering Heights, the first time we see Heathcliff he is a penniless orphan – a character we pity rather than fear. Ruth-Anne Walbank, a PhD Candidate at the University of Warwick, says that “part of what makes Heathcliff so terrifying in the book is that he returns all the violence and ill-treatment he receives tenfold”. She explains that he takes the source of his abuser’s power, their land and the wealth it brings, and turns it against them.“If you’re looking to Wuthering Heights for guidance on how to be a landlord, look elsewhere,” says Walbank. “Heathcliff may not be a good landlord, but he doesn’t face many repercussions for his actions.“He dies a wealthy man, owning more property and land than any of his predecessors. Then again, he also dies a miserable death, alone and unsatisfied with his decades-long revenge plot. It really makes you question whether his pursuit of landownership and wealth is worth it.”Michael Stewart, director of the Brontë Writing Centre and author of Heathcliff-inspired novel Ill Will and Brontë memoir Walking the Invisible, says that Heathcliff’s property ownership comes from a desire for security.“There’s this need to be financially solvent – and not just solvent, but richer than anybody else,” says Stewart.“He manages to go from nothing – from a homeless child without even a name – to owning two properties. He’s had revenge on all the people he hates. He’s kind of got what he wants, but it doesn’t bring any peace.”Property ownership is something that Brontë was probably thinking about a lot when writing Wuthering Heights, Stewart says. The sisters lived with their father Patrick, a priest, in a parsonage and if he died, they would be homeless. Their brother Branwell was an addict and never managed to achieve his ambitions. So, the sisters became driven to find income for themselves.Stewart expresses frustration that Fennell’s version of Wuthering Heights is another adaptation that stops with the death of Cathy.“It completely misrepresents the book, doesn’t it? The whole point is that that’s the midpoint, and it’s about how we can escape the cycle of trauma and how man passes misery onto man, and how that spell can be broken. That’s only really evident if you tell the story with the second half of the book,” Stewart says. [...]“I’m really wary and generally distressed by representations of Wuthering Heights as a love story. And I think the advertising of this film as ‘the greatest love story ever told’… I don’t really understand how you read the book and get there,” Hirst says.“I don’t love presenting it as a romance, but I also think what happens when you present it as a romance is you diminish a lot of the other things going on in the story, including things about class and land ownership and race as well, in my reading.”Wuthering Heights is set at a time when Liverpool, where Heathcliff is found, was still actively involved in the slave trade. Brontë implies that Heathcliff has dark skin (which is why Elordi’s casting has been so controversial). And all this is vital to understand Heathcliff as a character – and a landlord.“You can look at Heathcliff and say, basically, he is a landlord who isn’t interested in his tenant and Lockwood is basically a source of income to him,” Marsden says. “There’s no sense that he’s looking for any kind of human relationship with his tenant, or that he’s even interested in kind of getting to know him at all. But at the same time, Heathcliff is a product of the social world he has grown up in. Very few people treat anyone differently to that.“I’m sometimes asked to talk about the romance plots in the novel and ideas of toxic romance, but whatever relationship you look at in the novel, it’s very hard to find a good example of that. That’s key to how we think about him as landlord. In a lot of ways, he’s not the problem, he’s an expression of the problem.”Landlords of today might claim they are the product of the cruel world they are living in too, but maybe they shouldn’t turn to Heathcliff as an example.When you watch “Wuthering Heights”, swoon over Elordi’s Heathcliff all you want, but remember that he grows up to be a pretty horrible landlord.“And while that’s not entirely his fault, we don’t want to inspire a new batch of Heathcliffs taking over houses for revenge and turning them into Airbnbs.So, to all the landlords out there, Hirst says, just ask yourself: “Are you Heathcliffing Cornwall?” (Isabella McRae)
Keane's excited for people to see the "visually stunning" film - which he says is "so dark and just so beautiful"."I hope when people hear the music, and they see it with the story that they feel really moved."I also hope they feel it's a different part of Charli's artistry, to see that she can make this kind of music as well as do something as incredible as Brat."Even if you've only seen the trailer, or clips on TikTok, you'll probably know two things about the film: it's gothic and it's raunchy.So if you're planning to go and watch it, Keane's got some advice."Go see it in the cinema, just don't go with your parents, take a date." (Eleanor Doyle)
Without giving away any spoilers, one of the most shocking turn of events in the movie is when a female character continues to say yes when another character promises to treat her badly.In no uncertain terms, the character explains they will treat her badly (even abysmally) and she agrees to it.It’s a huge plot moment, and it was met with laughter during the premiere as we all slowly continued to watch the scene play out.Even later, when the full force of the promise is fulfilled in a shocking way, the majority of the audience found it humorous – even as I was whispering “No!” under my breath.It left me questioning something I’m not sure was intended.At what length will women say yes when the promise of attention is on the table?Even in this movie, set in a time somewhere between Emily Bronte’s 1800s and modern-day, it seems like the answer is a lot. The scene and the reaction from the audience reiterated it.I’ve grappled with the decision because, ultimately, the character did consent. But the portrayal of a woman choosing to degrade herself, blindly eager to please, made me squirm.Not one person has mentioned the scene to me since. (Sophie Coghill)
I went back to the origins. I examined Brontë’s and Gaskell’s manuscripts, letters, and papers held in archives all over the world. I read the Victorian newspapers and every book written about the Brontës from 1857 to 1920. Speculation ceded to verifiable data, and a picture emerged that was different from the one history had handed down to us. Gaskell, rather than a gullible propagandist, was a diligent researcher who was unfairly caught in a narrative spun to discredit her and her defense of Charlotte.During the summer of 1857, the scandal over Gaskell’s book spread details of Charlotte Brontë’s life and death through British and American newspapers. Readers, primed by Jane Eyre, now wept over the suffering heroine Gaskell depicted Charlotte to be. By the end of the year, Charlotte Brontë, the woman, had been replaced by an alternate: a cultural figure who represented, for many readers, wider truths about resilience, suffering, creativity, and passion. In an English magazine published in the winter of 1857, one commentator described reports of her ghost on the moorland, hair undulating in the wind and eyes blazing.Charlotte Brontë, the myth, had been born.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte BrontëCharlotte Brontë’s breathtaking classic Jane Eyre sets the stage and then, well before the story is two-thirds over, pulls the rug out from under you. All seems to be going well so far: Jane, a naïve but fiercely intelligent young woman, has escaped her domineering aunt to work as the live-in governess at the grand mansion of the dashing Mr. Rochester, with whom she quickly falls in love. Before long, the couple is betrothed, and with Volume II of the story fast coming to an end, there’s at long last a wedding on the horizon. Let’s just hope no one at the wedding is harboring a terrible secret that could derail the rest of the book, then… (Paul Anthony Jones)
Jane EyreBy Charlotte BrontëIf you loved Wuthering Heights, you’ll surely enjoy a classic by another of the Brontë sisters—Jane Eyre.It follows the heroine through her coming of age years and well into adulthood—pining for the brooding Mr. Rochester, who lords over Thornfield Hall and, like Heathcliff, makes for an alluring Byronic hero.And like Wuthering Heights, it tactfully examines issues of class and morality, making for a thoroughly enticing read. (Archita Mittra)
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