Heathcliff: a woman's point of view

The Village Voice features Wuthering Heights 2011 as part of its Fall Arts Guide 2012 and interviews Andrea Arnold.

Literary one-hit wonder Emily Brontë's doomed-love classic Wuthering Heights has been adapted countless times—by William Wyler and Luis Buñuel, on MTV, even in Semaphore for a Monty Python sketch. But it has never before been done as frame-for-frame gorgeously and earthily as by celebrated British auteur Andrea Arnold. The Red Road and Fish Tank director's boldly immersive new version, shot in the Yorkshire moors with a scrupulous attention to detail (Catherine's unshaved armpits!), is as elemental in its sensory impressionism as it is in its aching emotion. I spoke with Arnold about her first and—according to her—last adaptation.
Prior to this endeavor, did you have any relationship with the Brontë novel? When I was small, I saw the famous Laurence Olivier film with my mum and granddad. I must have been eight or nine, and I remember thinking about it for days and feeling a bit disturbed. In my teens or early twenties, I decided I was going to read it, expecting this traditional love story. But it was much more dark and complex, one of those things that will always hold a fascination because no one can master its wildness and refusal to be harnessed.
Why did you omit the second-generation romance from the original story? You're never, ever going to capture a book so rich in all its details. You have to make an awful lot of compromises unless it's a six-hour film. I cared most about the childhood element because it was important for Heathcliff, the thing he tries to capture. That is the place he was happy, and there's something very human about that. All of us probably have a yearning to go back to a time when things seemed more straightforward. I don't think I was as lucid as that, to be honest. All I did was try and capture an essence. [...]
This is the first time a black actor has been cast as Heathcliff. When I read all his descriptions, I felt it was quite clear he wasn't white-skinned, and wondered why people hadn't done it before. He gets described as a little lascar, which means "Indian seaman." Nelly says something like "Was your mother an Indian princess and your father a Chinese emperor?" He's described as a gypsy a couple of times, and I think the Romany gypsies were originally from Asia.
So why didn't you hire an Asian actor? We did start looking to cast somebody like that, but then I realized that what was really important was his difference, not the actor we choose. Emily Brontë felt different, and I think Heathcliff is really Emily. People say: "You're a woman. Why did you choose to do Heathcliff's point of view?" In a way, it is a woman's point of view. (Aaron Hillis)

Examiner also mentions the film in its Fall Movie Preview 2012.

Speaking of Brontë adaptations, The Atlantic Wire seems amazed at the fact that Michael Fassbender will be taking up a funny role.

Michael Fassbender can be funny! That's what everyone hopes, as he'll soon be appearing in a comedy. Sure some of you might have found Jane Eyre a laugh riot (crazy lady in the attic!) or thought Shame was a hoot (that dude sure loves doin' it!), but now he's going to do a real, honest to goodness comedy. The movie is called Frank and Fassbender will be playing the leader of "an eccentric rock band." So it'll still be a lot of intense actor work, maybe like Tom Cruise in Rock of Ages except not, you know, deeply unsettling. One hopes, anyway. (Richard Lawson)

Anni Louie's take on Jane Eyre is briefly mentioned by LA/OC Arts Examiner.

One benefit of a soft economy is an upturn in imagination. Unlike the costly production of “Jane Eyre” that torpedoed FCLO Music Theatre a few years back, the Counter-Balance Theater production of the Brontë classic previewed at UC Irvine this past weekend has been stripped to the minimum, like a marathon runner wearing the least bit of fabric legally allowed.
Anni Louie’s vision isn’t for all tastes—not everyone will be able to wrap their heads around a “Jane” that’s akin to a piece of dance theatre, with fragments of narration and dialogue punctuating the constant movement—but adventurous theatergoers will be richly rewarded. I don’t know if everything’s up to date in Kansas City, but St. Louis (where the show performs this coming weekend) is obviously pretty hip. E tu, So Cal? (Jordan Young)

The Guardian looks at the 'spoof period drama' Hunderby:

The plot is a little convoluted, and Hunderby gets far cruder than Du Maurier's books ever do; she never wrote any sex scenes. It's interesting that [writer Julia] Davis has borrowed on another person's writing for inspiration, since Du Maurier did, too. Her novel The Long Spirit is very much in the Brontë style – and Rebecca is really a 20th-century version of Jane Eyre. (Laura Barnett)

And io9 lists the '10 Most Epic Love Stories in All of Science Fiction':

3. Aral Vorkosigan and Cordelia Naismith (Shards Of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold):
It's a classic recasting of Jane Eyre, as Jurgen Wehrmann writes in the essay "Jane Eyre in Outer Space": Cordelia is a kick-ass commander of a survey spaceship who's unlucky in love, while Aral Vorkosigan has suffered from an epically bad first marriage. On an expedition to an uncharted planet, Aral captures Cordelia, but they're soon cut off from both their crews and forced to work together to survive. They fall in love, but when Cordelia returns to her feminist utopia on Beta Colony, her love for Aral is viewed as a mental illness or a sign of brainwashing — and the "therapy" for this turns out to be very nasty indeed. Cordelia survives a hostile planet, war, and the threat of mindfuckery to return to Aral's side — where she later proves herself his ideal mate by bringing the severed head of Count Vidal Vordarian into a meeting of her husband and several of the Count's partisans. (Charlie Jane Anders)

The Telegraph and Argus talks to local Mills & Boon writer Sarah Mallory.

With the runaway success of erotic novel Fifty Shades Of Grey, and even Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre getting a ‘mummy porn’-style makeover, are readers’ tastes veering towards the racier end of romantic fiction?
“I think there’s room for all genres,” says Sarah. “Mills & Boon titles range from tender love stories to the steamier stuff. Mine are somewhere in between.
“People have enjoyed romances for a long time, and historic romances in particular are booming right now. When times are hard we seek escapism. During a good day’s writing I travel back 200 years to a world that’s nice to visit for a while, before returning to reality. My characters are like children to me, I feel protective of them.” [...]
Sarah, who lives near Haworth with her husband and children, is inspired by the moorland that shaped the Brontës’ writing more than 150 years ago.
“I’m from the West Country but when we moved here I fell in love with the Pennine landscapes . Nothing clears the head, or gets the imagination going, like a walk on the moors,” she says. “I’ve drawn on the landscape for inspiration. There are so many bridleways here and a lot are the same as when they were 18th century tracks.
“I’ve set quite a few books in Yorkshire, including a Mills & Boon title, To Catch A Husband.” (Emma Clayton)

Pop culture explosion in the 3 News report on the NZ Fashion Week 2012:

Fittingly for a collection inspired by Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel The Marriage Plot, the show opened with Beyonce’s ‘Single Ladies’ – a cheeky nod to the confident woman who might just as easily be found on the pages of a Jane Austen or Charlotte Brontë novel. (Kim Choe)

Mmmmkay, yeah.

We have a similar reaction to this article on 'asexuals' in lrytas (Latvia).

Rašytojos Jane Austen ir Emily Brontë taip ir mirė nepažinusios kūniškos meilės. Tačiau tarp aseksualų nemažai ir vyrų: Friedrichas Nietzsche, Arthuras Schopenhaueris, didis pasakų kūrėjas Hansas Christianas Andersenas taip pat mirė nepraradę nekaltybių. Taigi, kas tie žmonės, galintys apseiti be sekso? (Translation)

The case for Emily's asexuality has been argued before, but - hopefully - with a more solid basis than just the fact that she supposedly died a virgin (as did many, many women in Victorian England).

Back to reading, though, as La Patria (Colombia) looks at what the students at the Universidad de Caldas like to read.

Marta Helena Pineda, jefe de bibliotecas de la institución, comenta que aparte de consultar los libros que competen a cada carrera, los estudiantes tienen gran interés por las historias de ciencia ficción de Isaac Asimov, Julio Verne y Paul Auster; suspenso y misterio de Edgar Allan Poe, Patrick Suskind; ensayos de Willian Ospina, Eduardo Galeano; poesía de Mario Benedetti, Octavio Paz; literatura en inglés de Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë; literatura clásica de Gabriel García Márquez, José Saramago, Jorge Luis Borges, Andrés Caicedo, Isabel Allende, y literatura épica de Homero. (Translation)

The National Catholic Reporter's blog On the Road to Peace is posting a journal from a trip around England and Scotland, which includes Haworth.

Arts and Youth Love writes about Jane Eyre, In So Many Worlds posts about Jane Eyre 1944 while This Morning, Will You Not Awake? wonders about the endurance of the story. bir hayaldir yasamak writes in Turkish about The Professor. 50 Year Project reviews Agnes Grey. Fotos & Livros reviews Wuthering Heights in Portuguese. Between the Grey posts about Wide Sargasso Sea. Abigails is selling a few gowns, including some of her Brontë-inspired creations.