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 have a heavy like for Jane which I read several times through the years, but I first tried WH in high school, and I don’t even recall whether I finished it. Probably faked it. I later read WH as an non-traditional (older) student in college. It definitely repaid discussion in an engaged classroom, but like it? No. I am now (in late middle age/early old age) trying to read the occasional classic that I blew off as a teen, and I am continually amazed by how ill-considered some of these books are as a choice for the classroom—especially when teachers try to lay on the guilt if you dare to dis a “great book.” There was so much stuff I just didn’t get when I was 16, and, while I think today’s teens are generally more sophisticated than I was at that age, I also think that it takes more than 16 years of living (and reading) to understand all the nuances of a truly great book. So maybe I’ll station Heathcliff and Cathy in the bathroom and give ‘em another shot.
I did notice that most of the people who like both, like them for totally different reasons. I’ve observed that a lot of readers (mostly women; that’s who I observe) seem to turn to their favorite books for comfort or catharsis, and these qualities are often found in very different types of books. Even an intellectual appreciation takes very different form when applied to JE or WH. Whether we love books that make us smile or make us weep seems deeply rooted in individual personality. So, not a weeper here, and I like Jane.
I can appreciate WH for the master work it is, but the fact remains: The entire time I was reading it I felt the overwhelming need to bitch slap someone.
Jane, however? It wasn’t the romance, it was Jane, true to herself unwavering Jane. Who needed to be beautiful (and I wasn’t), when you could be smart and independent and honorable?
I like them both, but for different reasons. I see Jane Eyre as a romantic story of a relatable heroine finding her way. I like Jane, I like Rochester. Wuthering Heights, on the other hand, I see as a horror story about how inhuman people can become. I hate Heathcliff, I hate Cathy, but I love WH.
Can I vote neither? Both these books make me cringe. Yuck. I’ll take Jane Austen any day.
Read Jane twice, found her prissy, liked Jean Rhys’ take on the story much better. I’ve read WH several times, enjoyed greatly, very romantic in the old sense of the word, leaves you wondering what they were really like, could the mess have been avoided, etc. So much to think about.
Can we have a 3rd option? I HATED BOTH books!
I confess to a weakness for British tabs, and the Daily Mail seems to have something or other on the Brontes with great regularity. Recent articles about Charlotte have dealt with long lost love letters, as well as long lost “novel.”
Charlotte’s Lost Love Letters:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem…
Charlotte’s Lost Novel:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem…
That said, Emily holds Britain’s heart—topping polls as their favorite “romance” novel. (Go figure.)
(Hope those links come out OK.)
Couldn’t finish WH, a recent pick for my book club. Every time I picked it up I said to myself “Come on, you can do it, this is one of the most beloved classics in all literature…” but only got half way and asked my clubbies to just tell me how it ended.
Haven’t yet read JE (though from this thread sure sounds like I should) but really liked the most recent cinematic version.
I didn’t love Jane Eyre, but I liked it, and on a later reading when I played with it as being a more subtle parody of Gothic than Northanger Abbey is (which is doable if you read The Mysteries of Udolfo before re-reading both of them), I liked it more. But I don’t love it with rainbows and unicorns.
I do however, hate WH.
I read Jane Eyre in high school and I hated it so very, very much that I can’t bring myself to read it again as an adult to see if I like it any better now. I really, seriously, HATED that damn book. I’ve never read Wuthering Heights, though, so I also can’t supply any data points for your theory.
Amusingly, I finished reading this and then immediately found that one of my friends had shared this link on FB: http://sarahtales.livejournal….
I do love Jane Eyre (though I still found the above link hilarious), passionately. From like… waaaay back. And I don’t know if it counts, but I also enjoy WH… just in the same way that I love buying tons of really old, really bad romances from the thrift stores so that I can yell and rant at the characters as I read.
Wuthering Heights, all the way. Since I was a teenager, I’ve loved the grand soap opera of it all: the over-the-top passion; the needless misunderstandings and tragedy; the interwoven, generational melodrama. And on a technical level, the complex structure and multiple unreliable narrators always blows me away. But mostly, I love it BECAUSE most of the characters are such awful people. Heathcliff and Cathy are fascinating because they’re equally selfish, cruel train wrecks. If just one of them were actually a good person, it would be horrible; if both were good, it would be boring. But they’re both drama llamas who deserve each other utterly. That’s what makes it work. And just when you’ve had your fill of the emo tragedy, the second half comes on and hits you with a little bit of hope for the future in the next generation overcoming the mistakes of their parents! (Plus, in my head, Hareton is super hot.)
But as others have said, I don’t consider it a romance, in the traditional genre sense. It’s an epic story *about* romance, but I’ve always read it as a very self-aware warning about the dangers of obsessive, all-consuming love. You’re supposed to be horrified by Heathcliff and to think Cathy is a brat. It’s no mistake that the only two people who get a happy ending in the story are the ones who learn to relate to one another as people rather than objects. The magic of WH for me is knowing that Hareton and Catherine will break the cycle of abuse by learning to moderate their passions, compromise, and treat one another with respect. Healthy adult relationship models FTW!
Jane Eyre, on the other hand, left me cold. I read it for the first time as an adult and although Jane is a great heroine, the appeal of Rochester utterly, utterly escaped me. Like, seriously, at least Wuthering Heights knows that Heathcliff is a bag of dicks? But Jane Eyre thinks this lying, condescending, manipulative *bigamist* is a prize! Yes, yes, I know: he was repentant at the end. Still. Jane could do better. CHOOSE YOURSELF, JANE!
Heathcliff is a d*bag. that is all there is too it. I am also no fan of Rochester – but have to hand it to Jane for the crazy lady in the attic that has inspired so many soap operas …
I feel kind of “Meh!” about both. If I were forced to choose, it would be Jane. To me, WH is like reality tv: historical edition. “Let’s throw these horrible people together and watch to see who gets set on fire first!” I hate melodrama, I hate characters that are irredeemable jerkholes, and I hate characters who don’t grow/improve after dragging me through all the drama.
P.S. I hate reality t.v.
I’m the Jane Eyre fang girl. I was forced to read WH 3 times during HS and college and I think it got worse every time. I remember my 12 grade AP English teacher quoting “Heathcliff is like the moors” part and sighing “Isn’t this romantic?”. I wanted to puke. So when it came time to write my paper I may have compared Heathcliffe to certain sociopathic criminals citing his penchant for hanging puppies off of chairs. Mrs. Hennan was not amused.
I love Wuthering Heights *because* it is filled with awful, terrible characters. Flawed humans doing what we do best—messing each other’s lives up with our selfishness, our posessiveness, and our arrogance. The characters are not larger than life, they are life. It is a romance of humanity.
I am not a Jane Eyre fan girl. The book took me five years to read—every time I tried, she would annoy me to hell and back and I would end up throwing it across the room only to persue it a year later. I could not find any appeal in her as a heroine, or identify with her at all—I found her weak, wishy-washy, and underwhelming. And Mr. Rochester! Couldn’t find anything romantic about him at all, and he lies to her—keeping a crazy wife upstairs in the attic who eventually burns the place down leaving him blind and dependent on good ol’ Jane.
So I suppose you are right—really is one or the other!
Lol!!! Never thought of it this way—I like, if not love, Jane Eyre (and the from-a-different-angle telling, Wide Sargasso Sea), but have never been able to tolerate WH despite giving it more chances than I really believe it deserves! However, I do have to say that Tom Hardy was SUPER hot in the recent BBC version of WH, and that rendered the entire production quite tolerable.
Really? I hated him in the book! Also I am a Wuthering Heights girl ALL the way! I read it first in third grade and didn’t get it, but it made an impression! I know Heathcliff is awful, but I love hate him passionately. Honestly I just think Rochester is creepy and skeevy!
This article is soo true. Love Jane hated Cathy. For Christ sake, Heathcliff is one rung below the sniveling ninny, Hamlet IMO.
Too funny. Thanks for sharing.
Jane Eyre, all the way.
A top 5 book of all time for me, and I have a life dream of visiting the Haworth Parsonage.
I only have one copy though, the version illustrated by Dame Darcy.
I don’t hate Wuthering Heights. I’ve read it a few times and I’ll read it again. I just don’t love it.
I’m a nineteenth-century British literature professor. I’m bound by law to like both of them. (Okay, if that were actually true, I would also like Great Expectations, but I *revile* Great Expectations.)
I always tell my students that I’m one of 5 people in the world who genuinely loves Wuthering Heights. But I love it b/c it is so wildly fucked up beyond all imagining. It’s Breaking Dawn with actually good writing and sans sparkling vampires. It’s the beautiful “love” story of two sociopaths who destroy the lives of everyone around them.
And I love Jane Eyre. I’ll even defend Rochester locking his wife in the attic (though not his attempt to marry Jane). He’s actually not cruel to Bertha at all. Given that the other choice is a 19C asylum? Bertha is getting the best possible care.
Here’s the *real* truth. You cannot be a passionate devotee of both Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte. Ultimately, you prefer one over the other. And I definitely prefer me some Austen.
Killing the italics. Bah.
The Blue Castle!! OMG. I love that book so much. I think every young woman should read it, along with Gaudy Night.
Villette is so awesome that its awesomeness cannot be described. I love how you get to the end and you’re like, “Holy crap. I just realized I know NOTHING about Lucy Snow. Who IS this woman?”
I’m guilty of perpetuating the Austen/Brontes thing below. Some of it is b/c Bronte was so bloody snarky about Austen, so Austen fans have been getting their own back ever since.
I do love the Brontes. And Anne’s a lot closer to Austen, stylistically, than she is to Emily (or at least I think so). But…Austen is Austen. I will love her forever, and if I had to choose between meeting her and meeting Charlotte Bronte, I’d choose Jane Austen every day of the week and twice on Sundays.
I was also about 10 when I first read Jane Eyre, and since then have read it … oh I don’t know about 100 or so times, I know exactly on which page Jane first meets Rochester:). It has been one of my favorite books a very long time.
I remember in high school I had passionate fights with boys in my literature class, whether Jane Eyre could be seen as realistic or not :). Well we agreed to disagree :):).
But Wuthering Heights – saw the movie, read the book – and nothing.
This may sound too simplistic- The characters in WH looked at life as glass, half empty and making themselves and others miserable by searching for the missing half, whereas the characters in JE looked it as half full and looking to top it up!
Hope it makes sense !
It depends on what you mean by “like.” I love Jane Eyre and that is a book I have reread often. WH I enjoyed when I read it and I certainly thrilled to the extreme passion and devotion that Heathcliff and Cathy felt for each other, but I really appreciated it after taking a class in the Victorian novel in college. The professor said that the book was complicated on purpose, with the same names recurring and the narrator having to figure things out from the testimony of Nelly. He also said that Heathcliff and Cathy had slept together in a bed that was kind of a little room, until Cathy broke her leg and had to stay at the Lintons’. JE seems to cover every day of her life, but WH is about chance and the unknowable. Who even is Heathcliff? Why did Cathy’s father bring him home? Could he potentially be her half brother? What if Cathy hadn’t been injured? What if Heathcliff hadn’t been listening or if he had stayed to hear Cathy’s declaration of love for him? What the hell did he do during those years he was away?
Thank you for vocalizing pretty much exactly how I feel towards both books. I first read Jane Eyre at age 13, shortly after the first time I read Wuthering Heights, and hated both. Then I reread both when I was a student, and a lot more mature, realized the absolute greatness that is Jane Eyre (for all the reasons you mention) and I had to study and analyze both books in detail (so I have lofty, literary explanations for the many varied ways in which I hate Cathy and Heathcliff and their psycho romance. I don’t I’ve met anyone who liked both books (although I’ve met people who disliked both).
I enjoyed bot books; but I hated the characters of WH. It’s a book I won’t reread. I loved the narrative but I hated in the story and characters
Jane Eyre, however, is my FAVOURITE romance ever. It’s a passionate, moving story about characters who actually GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER and take the time to fall in love. I can go on about it forever but that would make this too long lol
Love Love Love Jane Eyre. I read it first for my undergrad level and that was the only time I read all of it. Already own 2 copies of it and am constantly on a lookout for a lovely edition. I haven’t read WH; tried it once but couldn’t go beyond 20 pages and haven’t picked it up since; don’t know if I ever will.
I cannot stand WH. For serious. It paints a very detailed picture of an aspect of humanity that I would rather avoid by putting my head through a wall than examine closely.
Meanwhile, JE is my absolute favorite book of all time.
I am so isolated from people who read my flavors that I was completely shocked to know that my particular stance on these books is a norm. Huh. Who knew?
I’ve always wondered why so many feel that WH is this great romantic novel as it seems tortured. And honestly, for those who read romances, isn’t part of the joy of the story that you’d love to participate in it to some degree or at least hang out with the protagonist? I would never want to participate in WH. Jane Eyre, on the other hand, as noted in your post, stays true to herself and is someone I would be willing to have a cup of tea with. The story is romantic, even if it’s not my ideal romantic hero. Jane Eyre fan only here, proving your point.
I can honestly say i have read neither. But I did read Tenant of Wildfell hall in school.
The reason I haven’t read either book is quite simple. It’s like reading in another language to me. Sure I can read that language and understand it but it’s still another language and therefore most of my enjoyment is gone purely because I’m trying to translate everything.
I did however like dissecting and exploring the ideas in Tenant and so I would probably like studying these books but not reading them for fun. The fun part would be arguing with someone over whether one or both characters were insane and which characters were a**holes.
Which is why I didn’t vote.
I own one copy of Jane Eyre, it was free on my Nook from Barnes and Noble. I have not opened the file. I read WH in high school and thought Heathcliff was a creep. I never understood the other girls’ fascination with him. Give me the repressed Mr. Darcy any day, or Capt. Wentworth. *sigh*
Like others have mentioned, I prefer Austen, Pride and Prejudice has a perment spot on my nightstand, and Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters.
Jane Eyre over Wuthering Heights anyday. Wuthering Heights is over rated IMHO. However that said…Jane could have done so much better than Rochester & I am always disappointed when she goes back to him.
I love them both. Jane Eyre is awesome for all the reasons people have already enumerated. But Wuthering Heights is… Well, when I read it at thirteen (and I was the sort of teen who kept a journal brimful of suicidal ideation) I thought the romance between Cathy and Heathcliff was amazing. But now, as an adult, I see it more as a kind of anti-romance. To me, the novel isn’t about love at all. It’s about revenge. I read it when I’m in the mood to get my teeth into something off the wall and complex, or maybe for a bit of melodrama, but I’d never pick it up when I wanted something romantic.
I love both of them, but I love Villette more. Lucy Snowe is the bomb!
Yes! Villette is the best! The Hairpin has a great piece about JE vs Villette.
I have said this for years—people love one or the other. For me it is Jane and only Jane. Wuthering Heights befuddles me. Those people hate each other! It isn’t a love story. I end up wanting to slap them. Grrr. For Jane, I have a deep and abiding love that has continued from sixth grade on to now. She is strong and smart and herself with no apologies. I read that book at least once a year and never get tired of it.