Wuthering Heights
Jan. 18th, 2012 08:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerKate Beaton’s been posting a fantastic (and cracktastic) series of comic strips based on Wuthering Heights, and I decided I should give the book a try so I could appreciate their awesomeness fully.
I’m about halfway through and it’s utterly beyond me how people read Wuthering Heights as romantic, let alone as a defining pinnacle of Romance. Heathcliff is so mean! He keeps wandering around raving about how he wants to paint the walls with his foster brother Hindley’s blood, or mourning the fact that he didn’t accidentally drop Hindley’s child to its doom -
- and admittedly Hindley has been quite awful to Heathcliff, kicking him out of the schoolroom and making him a plowboy and occasionally attacking him in drunken rage, so Heathcliff has reason to be angry. But then he starts nattering on about how if he married Cathy’s sister-in-law he’d beat her regularly because...because. Because? Her face annoys him? It’s not clear.
And as if Heathcliff’s bitterness and cruelty weren’t enough, his beloved Cathy is also a horrible, horrible person. Her aforementioned sister-in-law falls in love with Heathcliff, right, and Cathy is all "Hey, Heathcliff! My stupid sister-in-law is in love with you! Let's mock her!"
Which is even worse than it sounds, because she says this when her sister-in-law is standing right there, attempting to flee the room in mortification, except Cathy won’t let her because mocking people who aren't there is so much less fun than mocking them to their faces.
She and Heathcliff are both so horrible that they deserve each other. I suppose that might seem romantic from a certain point of view?
Never mind. It’s still worth it for the added depth it adds to Kate Beaton’s Wuthering Heights comics.
I’m about halfway through and it’s utterly beyond me how people read Wuthering Heights as romantic, let alone as a defining pinnacle of Romance. Heathcliff is so mean! He keeps wandering around raving about how he wants to paint the walls with his foster brother Hindley’s blood, or mourning the fact that he didn’t accidentally drop Hindley’s child to its doom -
- and admittedly Hindley has been quite awful to Heathcliff, kicking him out of the schoolroom and making him a plowboy and occasionally attacking him in drunken rage, so Heathcliff has reason to be angry. But then he starts nattering on about how if he married Cathy’s sister-in-law he’d beat her regularly because...because. Because? Her face annoys him? It’s not clear.
And as if Heathcliff’s bitterness and cruelty weren’t enough, his beloved Cathy is also a horrible, horrible person. Her aforementioned sister-in-law falls in love with Heathcliff, right, and Cathy is all "Hey, Heathcliff! My stupid sister-in-law is in love with you! Let's mock her!"
Which is even worse than it sounds, because she says this when her sister-in-law is standing right there, attempting to flee the room in mortification, except Cathy won’t let her because mocking people who aren't there is so much less fun than mocking them to their faces.
She and Heathcliff are both so horrible that they deserve each other. I suppose that might seem romantic from a certain point of view?
Never mind. It’s still worth it for the added depth it adds to Kate Beaton’s Wuthering Heights comics.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-01-18 06:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-19 01:18 pm (UTC)Actually, that explains it. Literary critics are always getting crazy ideas about books.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 07:04 pm (UTC)As for the idea of it being romantic, maybe they meant romantic in the capital R sense only? I thought it was a very Romantic novel, even if it wasn't particularly romantic. ... if that makes sense.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-20 08:25 pm (UTC)Oooooh, that makes sense, because it is very Romantic in the gothic sense. And then when the meaning of Romantic changed to modern romantic, people didn't realize that it didn't fit any more so they still call it romantic even though it no longer fit.
I haven't gotten to the second generation yet. Other books distracted me. Clearly I must delve back in!