Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

I fucking hate Wuthering Heights

Oh God, me too!  I don’t know whether kids still have to read that one in school, under the guise of it being a “classic”, but I think if they do I might try to get my daughter out of it (though they might get a little suspicious about my mental stability when I also ask to strike from her curriculum Robinson Crusoe, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Pamela and a few other painful ones I can’t recall at the moment).  I mean, they let kids out of sex ed or dissecting frogs due to the possible offense to the kid and/or their parents, so why not let them out of reading painful literature that offends my sensibilities?  Personally, I don’t see why something like Code of the Woosters isn’t assigned instead - which students might actually enjoy reading and which is also considered a “classic”, just of a different kind.

But then, this is a biiiig sore spot with me: so-called classics that are painful to read and that we inflict on our kids, thus ensuring that they think reading is supposed to be like the mental version of joining the Army for basic training while 50 lbs. overweight: agonizing.

I’m so glad I’m not the only one who hates “WH”.  The only version I can stand is the semaphore(sp?) version in “Monty Python”.  And the thing is, I never had to read it - I read it in high school because it’s part of the canon and I’m a nerd.  But I hated everyone in it.  I wanted Heathcliff and Catherine together because I couldn’t stand either of them.

Does that make sense?

Now when a book annoys me that much, I just stop reading it.  I have learned that much from life!

I didn’t mind Wuthering Heights so much. Or Robinson Crusoe, but oh, I Hated anything John Steinbeck. I’ve never been a big fan of “KaKa happens and then you die” books.

I’m kind of with you, Candy, on The Historian. It took me all of last week to read the thing—I bought it on Monday, and finished it Sunday—and usually I can finish a book in a day, day and a half at the outside. This puppy took me all week because it. Was. So. Freaking. Slow!!!! And all that scenery and—well, exactly the things you mentioned.

I felt like she held the violence and horror at the same distance she put the sex, as if anything that smacked of emotion or the non-intellectual needed to be carefully sanitized and then tucked behind closed doors. I didn’t like that intellectual distance or the memoir-ish, prattish, musing feel of it.

It was impossible to read while sitting in the den while the fella watched TV—I kept reading the same damn line over and over and over again. But it did hold my attention overall, so that I was able to come back and read it day after day after day. (After day.)It wasn’t my favorite, but it was pretty good.

I think it will make a better movie than book. Because actual actors whose faces we can watch can portray that submerged, throbbing passion I think she was trying to get across much better than her prettified language. And the horror will actually be horrible.

Wuthering Heights hater here, add me to the list.

About The Historian: I managed to keep my impatience with pace, tone and approach in check until about half way through. Then I started skipping great chunks until I came to the Big Revelation…

and then I laughed out loud for at least five minutes.

This woman got millions for making Dracula (1) boring, and (2) silly.

I loved Wuthering Heights.  But then I read it when I was about 12, so maybe that has something to do with it.  It was an old, circa 1930’s volume, with woodcuts, yellowed pages and a musty scent.  To this day, if I catch a whiff of that odor, I think ‘Heathcliff’.  And someday, before I smell musty, I want to go to England and see the moors, with the big rocks and the heather.  Or was it gorse?

They’re talking about The Historian on one of my email lists - all published people - and it’s running ten to one in favor of either outright dislike, or merely a meh.  Hell, I’ve yet to read DaVinci, or The Kite Runner, or The Time Traveler’s Wife, all of which I plan to read, just as soon as I have a life.  I think I’ll leave The Historian alone for a few years.  Anxious to hear your thoughts when you’re finished, Candy.

Interesting comments about The Historian. It’s gotten very good press locally, and the audio book store where I work can’t keep a copy in stock. I haven’t talked with anyone who’s actually listened to it yet, however, so I don’t know anything about the recording or the book itself.

This woman got millions for making Dracula (1) boring, and (2) silly.

It’s already been done to vampires in general, so I guess it was inevitable that the Big Guy would eventually suffer the same fate. ;-)

I loved Austen—still do—but loathed pretty much everything the Brontë sisters ever wrote.

Stef, I loved WH, too - it remains one of my favorite romantic classics. I wonder whether it has something to do with the fact that I also read it when I was 12-13ish, instead of later in my teens. I’m still a sucker for a love-hate-passion-hurt-each-other fucked-up-couple love story.

HATED the first few chapters, though!

Count me as another one who loved Wuthering Heights.  I don’t remember how old I was the first time I read it, but I think it might have been around that early teens timeframe.  I later reread it again at 19 for a college class.  Loved it both times.  Every angsty, melodramatic page.

—LFL

I know what you mean, Bonnie.  I think the story appeals to me because it’s the age-old ‘can’t have your cake and eat it too’ dilemma.  Cathy wanted the good life - comfort and fine things - and she blew off Heathcliff so she could have it.  He was the ultimate scarred hero - a bad boy of the finest kind.  If WH was written today, I think it would deal a lot with sexual repression (hers), and sexual frustration (his).  She married Edgar, aka Mr. Nice and Rich, but Meh.  And of course Heathcliff married Edgar’s silly twit sister, then treated her like dirt.  What a pair.  Heathcliff and Cathy deserved nothing better than each other because neither of them were very nice people.

Nevertheless, I adored both of them.

Hm, I’m one of a very few who enjoyed The Historian [even though I had some problems with her writing style], mostly because of *mumbling*. So there. Oh, all right, I enjoyed it because it has soooo many Easter eggs, trivial references and such such.

Yes, she does take her damn sweet time getting there, making so many digressions, which at time annoyed me, and the ending is a let down, but - while I am one of a few who don’t believe Stoker based Count Dracula on Vlad Tepes [the only association is the name itself], so I disagree with her take - it’s a fun mish-mash of travelogue, history lesson, a literature tour, and a slow-paced caper. Or rather, a porn book for fact checkers.

off topic, but I’m desperate: Is anyone else’s blogger freakin’ the funk out?

Please Candy, let us know when you finish ‘The Historian’ and we can all have at it. I can usually get through a book that size in a couple of days - that thing took me a week. Slow does not even begin to describe it.

On the positive side, I thought the structure was a bit like Stoker’s ‘Dracula’ what with the letters and all those different points of view, so that was fun.

All in all, I thought it was a good book, but not a great book.

Bam: mine was freaking out for a while then started working again, but Beth’s is shot for viewing and, so she tells me, for posting as well. So you’re not alone.

Celeste: seems like Austen v. Bronte is a taste thing. I found P&P so bland that the only thing I remember about reading it is when I read it. On the other hand, everything Emily & Charlotte is fresh for me 13 years later. It’s entirely possible that 13 year olds totally get angst, but don’t really get regency humor, though :)

I’ve been noticing informally for awhile now that it is generally Austen vs. Bronte.  Meaning, people seem to like one or the other, but not both.  It’s kinda’ like the literary version of that Quentin Tarantino proposition (in Pulp Fiction? Reservoir Dogs?  can’t remember) where people can be classed into one camp or the other: Rolling Stones or The Beatles.  No one loves both equally.  I see here that a few people mentioned reading WH at around age 12-13, which I think is about when I read it, but I don’t remember for sure.  Heathcliff just seemed like such an asshole and I just couldn’t forgive him making other (innocent) people pay for his pain.  Reading that plus a few romance books featuring forced sex (at best)  had me convinced through my teen years that all men were jerks and all romance books glorified men who were assholes.  Thus I avoided the genre for a good many years.

Bonnie, when I first read Austen back in junior high, a lot of the Regency humor was completely over my head. :-) I liked the books well enough back then, but it wasn’t until adulthood that I really started to love them.

fiveandfour, I had the same reaction to Heathcliff and many other moody and/or overbearing romance novel heroes back then. I really just didn’t get books like The Flame and the Flower, but all my friends loved them. It almost pains me to say it now, but I think the books that kept my interest in the romance genre alive during that time were Barbara Cartland’s. Gah!! :-)

If it’s Austen vs. Bronte—which Bronte?

F’r ex, I’ve been a rabid Jane fangirl from the age of 19 when I first read Persuasion. I don’t mind Wuthering Heights (though I agree the framing narrative is useless) but I love Charlotte & Anne Bronte. Villette is one of my favourite 19C novels.

“It almost pains me to say it now, but I think the books that kept my interest in the romance genre alive during that time were Barbara Cartland’s. Gah!!”

Be warned! All those who disrespect la Cartland are doomed to face unspeakable torment from hordes of vengeful Long Megs. These are hideous screeching monsters with the lower body of a wicked guardian, the torso of a pekinese dog and the head of a wanton, overly-made-up doxy, created by a horrifying gypsy curse. They can turn a person to pink blancmange with just one piercing look of their kohl-lined eyes.

Sorry ‘bout that, it’s been one of those weeks where work is both difficult and dull. Something had to break loose…

My favorite interpretation of both JA and the Brontes must be Jasper Fforde’s, who actually got me reading & re-reading many classics, if only to get all his jokes. But I favour Jane Austen, probably because I can still hear Dad doing all the voices when he read it to us at bedtime.

Besides, surely I can’t be the only one who cannot even think of the title “Wuthering Heights” without hearing Kate Bush warbling her ballad of the same name? All together now, “Heathcliff, it’s me, it’s Cathy, I’ve come ho-ome now….”

Kate Bush warbling her ballad

For me it’s Pat Benatar singing the Kate Bush song…and the exact part you quoted :).

To those of you who love WH, is your experience of reading it in your teens the same as your experience reading it as an adult?  Because I also loved it as a teen and found it kind of scary as an adult, largely because of Heathcliff’s sadism (which seemed sexily romantic to me at 14) and Cathy’s completely antagonistic relationship with sexual maturity (which I must have resonated with at that age).  It fascinated me to watch the world of that novel be destroyed to where it was, driven there by Catherine and Healthcliff’s total inability to cope with all the grown-up implications of their mutual passion. 

I know that everyone makes the comparison between Austen and Bronte, but the comparison between Bronte and Bronte is pretty interesting, too, IMO.
Jane Eyre, for example, is reigned in so tightly by Jane’s morality, her absolutely steadfast hold on the moral high ground, that she gets the happy ending (at least for her, anyway), but she gets it by being the uber-adult—spiritual shepherd, moral guide, literal guide during Rochester’s blindness, teacher, wife, mother, and almost incidentally, lover.  Jane’s passion seems to be for morality more than Rochester.  IMO those two books are like two sides of the same endlessly flipping coin.  Both, I think, deal with sublimating sexuality (which is linked directly with passion); in one case, it becomes explosive and in another, subordinated and diminished. 

Austen, it seems to me, is on a totally different track, one that conceptualizes passion in a whole different way.

I haven’t re-read WH since the first time. I have this thing about reading books or watching movies that particularly strike me more than once, for some fear it’ll be ruined the second time around. However, I’m beginnig to formulate a Between Semesters Classics plan of action for mid-December through mid-January, to re-read WH and read a JA novel. Maybe also track down Vilette because I’ve never read it.

I read Jane the first time when I was 13-ish, and then again for a class when I was 17, and what struck me about them both times was how utterly unfulfilling the actual romance bit of it was. The story was interesting, the setting intriguing, the insanity fascinating; Rochester’s passion and Jane’s conflict with her family were interesting too. But the Jane-Rochester relationship? Gah, I wanted to tell her to show him her boobs, for chrissake, or something, stop being such a goddamned prude.