The future's uncertain
and the end is always near.
The Doors
Last Sunday, rainy and cold, was one of those perfect days when it felt just right to be trapped inside with a turkey roasting in the oven, an apple pie cooling on the counter, and an old black and white movie on the television. At my father’s recommendation, I watched “Devotion,” a biography of the Brontës, although somehow, I doubt Charlotte Brontë was as gorgeous as Olivia de Havilland.
Although fictionalized, the movie did capture the individual personalities of the four siblings and what struck me the most is how practical Emily was compared to the somewhat passionate, tortured Charlotte. I had always assumed the opposite.
The film prompted me to investigate its accuracy and so I picked up Juliet Barker’s The Brontës: A Life in Letters, which is a chronological compilation of the Brontës letters and journal entries. Fascinating. And shows, except for fabricating a romance for Emily, that “Devotion” wasn’t too far off in describing the personalities and events of this brilliant quartet whose lives were tragic only because they ended far too soon.
The whole book was a delight, but the parallel between Charlotte and Branwell caught my interest. Both struggled with the desire to write. Charlotte, at one point, laments that she is thirty and has done nothing with her life. Her imagination is crippling, and she sinks into a deep depression. Likewise, Branwell is depressed and knows that writing would save him but “the almost hopelessness of bursting through the barriers of literary circles, and getting a hearing among publishers, make me disheartened and indifferent: for I cannot write what be thrown, unread, into a library fire.”
And what writer hasn’t felt like that? I know I do. But I also know it’s an excuse to be lazy. So Branwell drinks and causes trouble for his family. Charlotte, on the other hand, spies Emily’s poetry and rallies to work to get her writing published, despite rejection after rejection, and Emily and Anne did the unthinkable in literary circles – they paid to get published.
The saddest part for me was that Emily never knew that her “strange” work, panned by most critics, finally appreciated for its sheer genius two years after her death, is now once again on the bestseller list, beloved by “Twilight” fans everywhere. And yet another version of the movie is being made, although I am sure this one, too, will fail to capture the novel. So far, the best one, in my opinion is the 1998 Orla Brady version, although I love the mood of the Laurence Olivier film and the cruelty of the recent Tom Brady movie, despite the actor’s resemblance to Marilyn Manson.
One of my college professors claimed that Wuthering Heights is the most perfectly constructed book ever written. There are no mistakes. Stevie Davies Heretic corroborates this in that she shows the cyclical structure of the work: Wuthering Heights is the womb, Peniston Crag is the father – Heathcliff and Cathy are two halves of the being that is born to this union of man-made structure and nature. Free will separates them and as a result Heathcliff loses his center and Cathy loses her self.
Nature finally takes over at by the end and corrects free will by uniting Catherine Linton, Cathy’s daughter, and Hindley Earnshaw, Heathcliff’s foster son, establishing Catherine Earnshaw as she was meant to be. At least, that’s the essence of Davies’s criticism, if my memory is accurate, which is doubtful these days.
Whether or not my assessment of Davie’s theory is accurate, I maintain that Wuthering Heights celebrates true love, although not the romantic love of Jane Eyre or other romances celebrating Byronic heroes. Despite the happy coupling at the end, which is the natural course of the theme, Wuthering Heights is far from a romance novel. (Nor is Heathcliff, for that matter, a Byronic hero. If you read Alice Hoffman’s Here on Earth, you’ll see Heathcliff through modern eyes. He’s an asshole, pure and simple. )
The Emily Bronte that Charlotte describes, resolute and unflinching, was far beyond romantic love, or any human reflection of love, always transitory. Rather, Emily Bronte was on to the designs of the very universe, far above the surface concerns of humans. As Cathy herself puts it, her "love is as elemental as the rocks beneath the earth," or however that line reads. Humans are only subjects in her book, there because Nature put them there. Wuthering Heights is about the kind of love that fuels the universe and perhaps even made it.
Love, The-Power-That-Is, the natural order of the world, always wins out despite Hindley’s cruel subjugation of Heathcliff, Cathy’s self betrayal, Heathcliff’s violent and twisted machinations, society’s preenings. Ultimately, heather will bloom, the sun will peek out over the moors, humans will perish, leaving no ghosts to mar the present, and gentleness sand respect will destroy hate in the end.
On the iPod: "Theme from Wuthering Heights" by Alfred Newman’s followed by Kate Bush's ethereal "Wuthering Heights."
On the Nightstand: No, not Wuthering Heights. Not Twilight either.
Crush of the Week: Surprise. Not Healthcliff, but certainly not Edgar Linton, either. My husband caught my fancy for a while, but I’m on to a creation of my own this week. He’s not fully formed yet: a slow smile, a hint of trouble, a dash of vengeance, a scarred heart, and a pinch of music by Kings of Leon. Let's hope he springs fully formed from my forehead.
On Charity: Along with Smile Train, this is a link to my chosen cause, Feeding America. Thank you, Pearl Jam.Labels: Feeding America, Kings of Leon, Pearl Jam, romance, Smile Train, Twilight, Wuthering Heights
