This guest entry from CarrieS is in honor of Charlotte Bronte's birthday, which was last weekend, 21 April.
OK, Bitches, this is it. In honor of Charlotte Brontë's birthday (April 21, 1816), it's time to fulfill my long-time goal of establishing what I believe may be a universal truth:
You cannot passionately, deeply, own-multiple-copies-of, take-to-a-desert-island-as-your-one-book, love both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Love one, hate the other. That's the deal. You may appreciate the quality of the writing in both books and their historical significance, but on a visceral level you will love only one.
How have I come to this conclusion? Well, to start with, I currently own at least three copies of Jane Eyre, one of which is wrapped in plastic and stored with my earthquake survival kit (along with a copy of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in case you're wondering.). Jane is my role model, my friend, my faithful companion and guiding light. On the other hand, I've read Wuthering Heights three times out of a perverse sense of duty to Literature, and I can't stand that whiny, nasty Catherine with her tantrums or Heathcliff, also known as the king of collateral damages. I have also noticed that when I sell books at our Library's Annual Jane Austen Tea (check it out if you live in Sacramento, CA) people mention liking either Wuthering or Jane, but not both. This is scanty evidence towards my theory, so I turn to the Bitches to expand my sample size. Prove me wrong, so we Brontë fans may live in harmony!
Jane and Wuthering are both gothic novels, set in England, written by sisters Charlotte and Emily, respectively. But despite the shared atmosphere and setting of the books, they could not be more different. Jane is a romance novel (best one ever, says me). Not only does it provide an HEA, it provides an HEA that is complex and earned. Jane (the character) goes through many challenging circumstances but she never loses her sense of who she is – a human being worthy of respect. She holds to this sense of self as an abused child, as a shy young woman with a painful crush, as a vagrant and dependent, and ultimately as a woman of means, a wife, and a mother. Her relationship with Rochester is ultimately defined by mutual respect, affection, and love. Until he respects her autonomy, no amount of him swooning over her can win the day. Even when she is most powerless, or when she is at her most romantically passionate, she holds to saying, “”I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being with an independent will.”
In contrast, Wuthering Heights is all about people who are so obsessed with each other that they have no sense of self as individuals. Catherine famously says, “Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” Heathcliff says of Cathy, “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” Wuthering Heights is not a book I enjoy, but the fact that I loathe it on a visceral level is not actually a criticism of its fine (if somewhat hyperactive) use of language. If anything, the fact that it inspires such passionate dislike is almost as much of a complement as the fact that I so passionately adore Jane Eyre. A book that inspires deep feeling must hit a nerve and must strike something in the imagination. Lord knows I can't stand the book, but it certainly is packed full with vivid atmosphere, gothic psychological horror, desperate passion and, in Heathcliff, the ultimate Byronic Asshat Hero. It doesn't get broodier than Heathcliff, and emotions don't get any more raw than his do. If your thing is tragic people wandering the moors wailing in heartbroken anguish and concocting terrible vengeances in gloomy halls, while swept away with consuming passion and being mean to each other and every one around them, then it doesn't get better than this.
As a long-time defender of Jane Eyre, I'm always having to remind people that the point of the book isn't that the poor governess gets the rich guy to marry her. I hate Wuthering Heights because the characters are universally loathsome with the exception of a few who are simply spineless, and yet I'm constantly hearing about their great love. I'm thinking maybe I (and, ironically, many of Wuthering's admirers) am missing the point – maybe the whole point of Wuthering Heights is not to glorify the Catherine/Heathcliff relationship, but rather to point out the destructive quality of romantic obsession (in addition to, and arguably as a result of, generations of abuse).
So tell me, everyone, if you are a huge devotee of either or both of these novels. Is there room in the human heart for both, or, they say in the movies, can there be only one? I am desperately curious as to whether my theory is true. Happy [belated] birthday, Charlotte, and thanks for providing me with a character who has reminded me to stay true to myself from the day we, two ten-year old girls who liked to hide away from the world and read, became best friends.
“I can live alone, if self-respect, and circumstances require me so to do. I need not sell my soul to buy bliss. I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all extraneous delights should be withheld, or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.”
“I am not an angel,’ I asserted; ‘and I will not be one till I die: I will be myself. Mr. Rochester, you must neither expect nor exact anything celestial of me – for you will not get it, any more than I shall get it of you: which I do not at all anticipate.”
Jane forever and ever.
So true. I love Jane Eyre, HATE Wuthering Heights – although I *did* enjoy “Here On Earth,” Alice Hoffman’s modern retelling of Wuthering Heights.
The only thing I like about WH is that it caused this quote:
“It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It’s like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting ‘Cathy’ and banging your head against a tree.”—Bridget Jones’ Diary
Everything else about WH I find unbearably depressing. Seriously, the last time I read it (for a grad school class), I had to read something happy just to cleanse the palate.
I don’t like either of them, actually.
To grossly paraphrase Mark Twain, I want to dig up the Bronte sisters and beat them over their skulls with their own shin-bones.
I’d rather read Nathaniel Hawthorne, and that’s saying something. 😛
I agreed with this entire column, so much so that I wondered if maybe I wrote it. Am I a split personality? But your comment makes me want to read Wuthering Heights again and see if there’s more there than I saw 15+ years ago…
Put me down for “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” I never understood why Charlotte Bronte prevented its reissue after Anne died.
BUT… if we’re comparing Bronte sisters, I’m going with Anne.
Good choice. I enjoyed Agnes Grey.
Love Jane. Hate Wuthering Heights.
But to be fair, I read Jane as an adult and WH as a teenager. It’s possible that if I read WH as an adult, I might understand it better and appreciate it more.
The important, secondary, question: which book has inspired better creative parodies?
I give the slight edge to Wuthering Heights for inspiring Hark! A Vagrant comics http://www.harkavagrant.com/in… and Monty Python’s Semaphore Version of WE
.
That said, Jasper Fforde’s The Eyre Affair is also pretty awesome.
I didn’t vote; I’m too much on the fence on this one. TBH, it’s been years since I read either one, but there are things I both liked and disliked about both.
Strangely, I find WH to be more realistic and modern. Everyone is so totally unlikeable and dysfunctional. There’s obsessive, violent, stalkerish love. There’s selfishness and cruelty. Spineless enabling. Necrophilia. Abuse of every kind. You name it. At minimum, everyone needs psychiatric help, or maybe even long stints in institutions. I feel guilty being so mesmerized by their awfulness, but I am. I absolutely despised WH the first time I had to read it for school, but on subsequent readings came to appreciate it more and more. Oddly, I think every screen adaptation I’ve seen has been utter crap.
I didn’t read JE until I was an adult. I saw a screen adaptation (don’t remember which one now, but surely a PBS offering) that I liked, so decided to read the book. I didn’t really expect to like the book, but I did. Jane was a wonderful character and, despite disliking Rochester, it was a terrific love story. But, while it was pleasant, it wasn’t earth-shattering or life-changing. Not even all that memorable. That said, I think I’ve enjoyed every single screen adaptation. The story just lends itself to that kind of experience.
Maybe I need a re-read of both now that I have a few more years on me and can view them with a different perspective.
I think I always have a big soft spot for Wuthering Heights. It was the first ‘grown-up’ book I read and the first time I’d encountered characters that were not plucky kids who solved mysteries with their bunch of sidekicks or spent all their time mooning over horses, so it made a huge impact on me. I still love it and reread every couple of years it seems. I had to study Jane Eyre in school under a teacher I particularly hated so…
I love JE but I don’t dislike WH I just never expected it to be a romance. I think if I did read it wanting that warm fuzzy romance feeling I’d HATE it ALL CAPS!!! but it never occurred to me that it was. Maybe, this is because I saw WH in movie form on TV before I read it.
I’d love to vote (and it would certainly be for Jane Eyre), but it won’t let me; tells me “missing data” every time I try.
One of my favorite bits in the Thursday Next books is when we see the characters in Wuthering Heights in anger management class.
Is death an option?
I’m defenitely in the minority, which is fine with me. In truth I tried to read Jane Eyre few years back, but found it, well, boring and couldn’t get past second chapter. (I know, I”m missing out on a lot…) I think its the passion that I love about Wuthering Heights. I’ve read it multiple times since I was a teenager, and I’m always curious and heartbroken by a cruel love that Heathcliff and Katherine experience. (I also love Gone with the Wind, maybe a connection?) Its honestly difficult to explain, but I see glimmers of genius in this novel, and perhaps it also appeals to me because of the whole interracial couple. There’s something about it that I enjoy re-reading it, something that holds tightly to me.
http://sveta-randomblog.blogsp…
My personal review of Wuthering Heights.
I haven’t voted yet, because I adore both of them. I think it’s easier to love Jane Eyre, because it has characters (or one character, anyway) that you can identify with and root for. Mr Rochester is kind of insane and lacking in integrity, but there is still serious chemistry there and you’re happy when the pair get their HEA.
WH is powerful and terrifying and chilling, and you can’t really love and identify with any of the characters, though you sympathise with all of them at some point. You’re outraged by Cathy and Hindley’s treatment of Heathcliff and are totally rooting for him… until he starts hanging puppies. I find it hard to articulate my love of WH. It’s the language, I suppose, and the passion, horror, destructiveness and unconventionality of it all. I will never forget reading the early dream/ghost scene for the first time. It’s very hard to find books you can compare WH to. It’s unique.
Ok, I think I’ll go vote for WH.
This is a tricky question. I feel like the two books are incomparable because they’re just so different and make such different points. I like both, but I love Wuthering Heights on a much more visceral level. It’s just one of those books that when I read it, I felt totally consumed by it. I found myself thinking “this is my life” even though there was nothing in it that really related to or compared to my life. With Jane Eyre, I enjoyed it but had no trouble disengaging from it. It didn’t leave me shaken or altered, like WH did.
First, I’ve never read WH. I tried when I was about 12 but never really got past the first chapter. I have read JE, though, and I loathe Roschester as a hero. Not totally sure why though. But later this term at uni I’ll be reading WH so we’ll see, huh?
I hate Wuthering Heights—hate, oh so much hate. Jane Eyre is the strangest book, when you start to unpack it, and I get really angry at how Jane is only allowed to marry a (damaged) Mr Rochester when she’s finally an heiress. Grrrr.
Give me Agnes Grey any day!
Has anyone else read the book about how Charlotte’s husband was actually poisoning everyone at the parsonage with antimony? It makes a lot of sense, in a conspiracy theory sort of way.
I’m in the “love them both” camp. As many have already said, I appreciate them for very different reasons, but my affection for them is roughly equal. =)
Well.. I will defend wuthering heighs. As I am a deeply romantic person, I like romance in all its forms. Jane Eyre is the correct and happy love story.. there is difficult parts but they are all put behind. My passion to wuthering heighs is that what it could be but it wasn’t. Catherine is immature and Heatcliff is wounded. How many people you know is like this? I can name a lot. And the thing is they COULD help each other. They COULD live a wounderfull love story.. but they didn’t. This also happens in real life. Everytime I read Wuthering Heighs I mourn their love but I also am happy with the love of their sons , that are much more mature than their parents ever were.
It’s Jane all the way for me. Though the group therapy session with the characters of WH in Fforde’s “The Eyre Affair” is quite funny.
I actually love both of them, perhaps Wuthering Heights a little more. I understand the original poster’s criticisms of Wuthering Heights and can respect them, but if the test is which one of the books you love on a visceral level, I have to say both.
I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve owned both books for years, and still haven’t got around to reading either of them. I prefer dark stories, so I suspect I’ll eventually end up liking WH more.
I love Jane Eyre, and actually loathed and detested WH for the same reasons as many other commenters – unnatural obsession and manipulative behaviour. But recently (my OH gave me a copy at Christmas) I watched a Yorkshire Film adap of WH which, whilst not being *completely* faithful to the book, gave some insights into both Cathy and Heathcliffe. I ended up in tears, feeling for both of them. Now I just have to re-read…
It’s Wuthering Heights all the way for me. Because they are all douchnozzles and hateful. Much more interesting. Although I would agree and say, it’s NOT a love story. It’s a grand soap opera a la Dallas/Dynasty! LOLOLOL
This is how you tell me and my mother apart. Me: Jane Eyre and Jane Austen. Mom: Wuthering Heights and Gone with the Wind. Oddly, personality-wise, she’s the cool and composed and I’m the blithering weepfest. I guess the “opposites attract” trope works for book-loving, too.
I’m in the camp that hates them both. I just don’t see the appeal of either—the hateful characters of Wuthering Heights and the creepy relationship in Jane Eyre. *shudder* I’m very glad the days of having to read either of them are long behind me.
(On another note, love the idea of having books in the survival kit. Must steal that idea!)
I’ve read Jane Eyre several times as a kid and Wuthering Heights only once as an adult. Given the opportunity to reread either one,my pick would be Jane Eyre. WH was like eating fiber;it was good for my intellectual health but there are tastier alternatives out there and I prefer to shop around.
My mother admitted to stashing both of these along with Forever Amber under her mattress. Apparently they were considered a tad racy in her youth. (1930s)
Jane, Jane, Jane! I love the part where she is fighting her impulse to just go with Rochester anyway, and she conjures up the whole seductive, luxuriant “southern” image of them in some love nest somewhere. But she knows she would be betraying her deepest principles, and then she hears the moon spirit:
“My daughter, flee temptation.”
“Mother, I will.”
Jane’s steadfastness has been a model for me in many a tough time (although I certainly never had to make the kind of choice she did.)
I read WH as a teenager and was bewildered by the fuss over it. What was to like? I should probably give it another try though, with some of these comments in mind. I could appreciate its literary elements, even if the characters are horrid.
My mother actually loved both novels, but I think people viewed things like gender roles and expectations about life and love a lot differently in the 40s. Growing up in the 70s, when women were finally being taught that yes life is full of crap and asshats but no, you don’t have to take them, you do have a choice, gave me a different perspective. I loved that Jane had the strength to walk out on Rochester, no matter how much she loved him, to preserve her own values and her sense of self. I agree with the assessment upthread that WH was really intended as a cautionary tale, much the way Alcott’s early potboilers were.
I’m sorry, but Wuthering Heights destroyed two weeks of my life when it was mandatory reading in high school. I can never get that time back, and it hurts, and when I see a copy of it I want to burn it.
But I find Jane Eyre respectable.
I’ve really enjoyed seeing all these posts here, even if, as a WH lover, I was beginning to feel a little protective of Emily. I was glad to see the handful of others who find Wuthering Heights as moving as I do. I was thinking, too, that there are several ways in which I do find Heathcliff sympathetic and even romantic. (Having images of Timothy Dalton or Ralph Fiennes in the role doesn’t hurt). But it also occurred to me that if there is another writer she reminds me of it isn’t Charlotte—it’s Emily Dickinson. An absolutely original thinker, another woman who seems absolutely, stubbornly, irrevocably herself with a mind that is like a blast of high mountain air. Passionate, brilliant, isolated, emotionally and psychologically extreme. Each using words whittled down to the bone. I’m not sure there ever was a place for either one of them to really fit in the world of their times, but they were themselves nevertheless. Emily Dickinson said, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” I think that is what I feel when I read either one of them—sheer visceral power.
And, as a side note, it never ceases to amaze me how personal books are, just how differently we each respond to them. So many people said here that they found WH incredibly boring, SO not my experience. Of course, more said they just hate the characters—but I don’t do that either. Wuthering Heights gives me so many things to feel and think about, but here’s one that’s of interest to me as the romance reader I am. I think she poses a question: Which is stronger, love or hate? She really gives that question a good run for the money and so when the answer is (I think) love, then I really, really feel it. And am deeply moved by it.
So *your* the one that liked Villette.
I was surprised about how boring it was, considering the dwarf romance, the ruthless headmistress who drugs, spies on, and makes free with other people’s belongings, and effete noblemen dressing up as ghost-nuns.
I picked Jane,even though I have read WH more times.
Wuthering Heights, to me, has never been a love story or a romance. It is a gothic moral tale, full of darkness and the ugly side of humanity. I am drawn to it like a moth to flame, simply because I can’t help but try and mentally redo the tale in order for there to have been a happier ending ( if that would even be possible ) .
Jane was and is a Romantic tale. And Jane is a smart, self aware, good person. You cannot help but admire her. Unlike Catherine who is just a complete and total selfish bitch with the emotional depth of a mud puddle.
I’ve never read “Jane Eyre”, so no opinion. I have read “Wuthering Heights” just in the last few years, and it was a delicious novel. However, where did anyone get the notion that Heathcliff was a hero? He’s the freaking villain! He’s a classic Gothic tragic villain, like so many of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s villains. Heathcliff and Catherine wasn’t a romance, it was a train-wreck of co-dependency between two obsessed, narcissistic sociopaths. The real romance was between their victims.
I detest Rochester. If there was ever an uglier hero, I don’t know…Put me down for Wuthering Heights. At least they’re loud, beautiful, and don’t give a f…
‘It must suck to be dead for 150 years and STILL be compared to your sisters.’
Seriously. And to constantly be held up to Jane Austen as the gold standard is beyond unfair – not that she isn’t pretty damn perfect, but because of it. And also because they were doing such different things, as in your awesome analogies. Although, wait, are you saying that Austen is the equivalent of the Sex Pistols and teapots, and the Brontes are Vivaldi and terrorism? Because while that makes no kind of sense to me I still love it.
I love Jane and am fond of WH, but I am well-aware that neither of them portray an ideal relationship. JE is just more subtle about it than WH. Spoilers below, just in case there’s an SB out there who doesn’t know the story(ies).
Catherine and Heathcliff: RUNNING WILD ON THE MOOR KILLING BIRDS LOVING EACH OTHER TO DEATH AND HATING EVERYONE ELSE AND HAUNTING EACH OTHER IN CREEPY STALKER DEATH WOO!
Rochester to Jane: Okay, yes, I call you a “dark fairy” and a “temptress” constantly, I pretended I was going to marry that other girl to watch your reactions, I dressed up like a gypsy and tried to find out if you liked me, and I’m keeping my mad wife in the attic because it was her own slutty fault she went crazy. But I love you! Want to run off to the Mediterranean and live in sin for the rest of our lives?
Jane: Please pardon me while I flee screaming onto the wind-haunted moors rather than forsake my independence and my values.
Rochester:…would you rather the South of France?
In short, there’s a few good reasons a friend of mine refers to him as Edward Fairfax Crazypants Rochester