“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed you–haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers. I believe–I know that ghosts have wandered the earth. Be with me always–take any form–drive me mad. Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
I had pre-purchased a set of family tickets for Wuthering Heights (now, apparently ‘Wuthering Heights‘ in scare quotes), but a spate of mediocre-to-bad reviews has scared everyone else away.
I tried to give the tickets away to students who need to do a reviewing assignment. They were too smart for that.
So I’ll be attending alone, which is not the worst way to spend Valentine’s Day: slumped into my coat in the aging, too-cold theatre that will soon come tumbling down so that yet another condo building can go up.
For many years now, Stephanie Zacharek has been my favourite film reviewer, as well as the one most likely to predict my enjoyment of a new film. Here’s Zacharek’s take on the new adaptation:
“[Emily] Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a bleak book, but it’s not an ugly one: beneath its cloud cover of misanthropy, there’s feral, wildflower grace. Fennell has tossed all of that out, substituting her own unimaginative vision, plus a bunch of crappy dresses. A pretty dismal Valentine to a book a filmmaker ostensibly loves, this Wuthering Heights is hate-reading in movie form.”
Oof.
The funniest line in a review, however, was penned by The New Yorker‘s Justin Chang: “A dining table overflows with jellied extravagances; I’ve never seen a film with a greater aspic ratio.”
The past weeks have been difficult ones, and my nightly re-reading of a few pages of Wuthering Heights, along with my reading of a new Emily B. biography, Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night (out in May; with thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the preview), has been a tonic.
But you can safely stay at home and watch Olivier as a magnificent Heathcliff, if you’re in a Brontë mood. Merle Oberon is also well cast; and her life story, which included passing as white, is fascinating.
Or try Villette, for something nearly as weird but less dangerously romantic. Modelled on the author’s own passion for a (crucially, married) teacher in Belgium, it’s a love story that focuses on how having one’s dictées and composition exercises critiqued can spark passionate devotion.
What I wouldn’t give to be able to read the entire correspondence exchanged between Mlle Brontë and Monsieur Héger.
With thanks to Wikipedia, because my books are elsewhere this morning, from a letter Charlotte wrote to a friend: “he is a professor of Rhetoric a man of power as to mind but very choleric & irritable in temperament – a little, black, ugly being with a face that varies in expression, sometimes he borrows the lineaments of an insane Tomcat – sometimes those of a delirious Hyena – occasionally – but very seldom he discards these perilous attractions and assumes an air not above a hundred degrees removed from what you would call mild & gentleman-like …”
What a catch.
Well, at least two women thought so: his wife and the dangerously obsessive young English governess who sought further instruction in the modern languages at the Brussels school.
Both The Professor and Villette draw inspiration from this painful, unrequited passion. While the plot of the latter is re-written so that the Belgian teacher is not married but merely Catholic (with a prior, painful attachment), Lucy Snowe’s unhappily ambiguous ending is to run a school after losing her beloved in a storm. An actual storm? A metaphorical storm?
In general, it’s fair to say that the tempestuousness of life on the moors led to a lot of fantasizing about passion that is only partially captured in the fiction (the poetry is a different matter).
Tenant of Wildfell Hall? Helen moves on from a wife-beater, and that’s a good thing. Next year’s Valentine’s big picture: Helen, instead, goes full Housemaid on her abusive husband in a gory revenge pic.
Jane Eyre? Jane moves on from a bigamist, but then goes back to him after he loses his sight and the use of one hand in a fire set by the wife he’s kept imprisoned in the attic. There’s a lot of inherent gothic horror in J.E., so the trick here would be to turn it into a hearts-and-flowers film.
In short, the fiction of the three brilliant but doomed sisters is not going to be adapted for Hallmark films anytime soon, notwithstanding the romance plots included in their novels.
One would have to forage further into their childhood stories for more conventional romance. The young siblings did two notable collabs, and they’re fascinating.
But the real romance, and the pathos, is in Charlotte’s letters to her teacher (his infrequent responses were later destroyed; his wife was a force to be reckoned with,by all accounts).
“Neither by day, nor by night can I find rest nor peace: even if I sleep, I have tormenting dreams, where I see you, always severe, gloomy, angry with me. Forgive me, Monsieur, if I am driven to take the course of writing to you once more. How can I endure my life, if I am forbidden to make any effort to alleviate my sufferings?”
I submit to all the reproaches you may make against me; if my master withdraws his friendship from me entirely, I shall remain without hope; if he keeps a little for me (never mind though it be very little) I shall have some motive for living, for working.
Monsieur, the poor do not need much to keep them alive; they ask only for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table, but if these crumbs are refused them, then they die of hunger! For me too, I make no claim either to great affection from those I love; I should hardly know how to understand an exclusive and perfect friendship, I have so little experience of it! But once upon a time, at Bruxelles, when I was your pupil, you did show me a little interest: and just this small amount of interest you gave me then, I hold to and I care for and prize, as I hold to and care for life itself….
… I will not re-read this letter, I must send it as it is written. And yet I know, by some secret instinct, that certain absolutely reasonable and cool-headed people reading it through will say:—’She appears to have gone mad.’ By way of revenge on such judges, all I would wish them is that they too might endure, for one day only, the sufferings I have borne for eight months—then, one would see, if they too did not ‘appear to have gone mad.’
One endures in silence whilst one has his strength to do it. But when this strength fails one, one speaks without weighing one’s words. I wish Monsieur all happiness and prosperity.
Haworth, Bradford, Yorkshire, 8th January.
That breaks my heart.
The Landscape of Canadian Women's Crime Fiction 
Leave a comment