Not many films are panned even before they’ve gone into production. Such has been the fate, though, of yet another version of Wuthering Heights. Already derided as melodramatic trash, some reviewers are wondering whether the director, Emerald Fennell, has actually read the book.
Whether she has or hasn’t, you can’t pluck the tormented love story of Heathcliff and Catherine out of its complex context without inflicting some serious damage on Emily Brontë’s fiction. The novel is about a lot more than love. In its intensely materialist way, it also concerns the conflict between nature and culture, labour and gentility, power and rebellion, struggles over property and inheritance, the relations between the English landowning class and the small farmers or yeomanry, and a good deal more besides.
How do you put these issues on screen? You can’t. You can tell a story entitled “Cathy and Heathcliff”, but it isn’t what Emily Brontë wrote. Our own civilization is obsessed by sex but bored by yeomen and landowners. The background to the Brontës is the world of poverty, political repression and smouldering social rebellion known as the Hungry Forties. The sisters would have seen a good deal of destitution on their own doorstep, and were alive to the turbulent times in which they lived. They were shrewd, hard-headed, lower-middle-class Yorkshire women, not three weird sisters lost in erotic fantasy in the moorland mists.
Nor is Wuthering Heights what you might call a romance. In fact, you might even call it an anti-romance. The relationship between the two lovers, if you can call it that, is implacably impersonal. There’s a relentless, elemental, even brutal quality to it, which lies much deeper than mere feeling. We are no longer in the mannered world of Jane Austen. Heathcliff is no Hugh Grant but a pitiless exploiter. Beneath his flinty exterior beats a heart of stone. If some readers have been seduced by him, it is because everyone likes a rogue. In his dealings with Catherine, what Freud calls eros and thanatos, sexuality and the drive for extinction, are impossible to disentangle. Like Jane Eyre, the best-known work of Emily’s sister, Charlotte, the novel is shot through with sado-masochism. If this is love, then there’s nothing in the least pleasant or affable about it. One can’t even speak of it as sexual. It’s more like a fight to the death — an absolute, remorseless, inhuman need for each other with a fierce undertow of violence, one which has little to do with tenderness or affection and perhaps refuses to be placated even in the grave. Almost uniquely, we have a Victorian novel which doesn’t end on a genially upbeat note with that magical solution to all human heartache: marriage.
This is an important milestone in the evolution of the English novel. With the exception of Samuel Richardson’s great 18th-century work Clarissa, which few have read because it’s a million words long, hardly any English novel before Wuthering Heights ends on a tragic note. Even Wuthering Heights is ambiguous in this respect: do Catherine and Heathcliff find fulfilment beyond the grave or not? Then, from the fiction of Thomas Hardy to our own time, the norm becomes a tragic (or at least non-comic) ending. There are a number of reasons for this seismic literary shift, among which is the fact that the Victorians (who lived in perpetual fear of revolution) saw a link between gloom and political disaffection. Part of the purpose of art was to edify its audience, and edified audiences were less likely to tear up the paving stones to build barricades. Charlotte Brontë conforms to this demand in Jane Eyre, blinding and disfiguring Rochester in order to punish his bigamy and bring him, chastened and repentant, to a marriage in which Jane is definitely the boss. Emily bravely refuses this conventional strategy.
Wuthering Heights may tacitly suggest a reason for the strangely asexual nature of the bond between its protagonists. Heathcliff is brought home one night by Cathy’s father and dumped unceremoniously on the family, but he might be “family” even so. He may be old Earnshaw’s bastard child, in which case he and Catherine are half-siblings, and their non-sexual relation springs from an unconscious incest taboo. It’s hard otherwise to see why this gruff yeoman farmer, who doesn’t seem given to spontaneous acts of charity, should give house-room to such an unprepossessing little brat. We shall, alas, never know. Anyway, the intense unity of selves which Catherine and Heathcliff feel, which is hard to speak of as a relationship since relationship implies otherness, works even without this incestuous subtext.
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SubscribeWhat’s wrong with a handsome, strong-jawed hero for the ladies to flutter over? My next question: Is Terry Eagleton wrong about everything? That has been my reading experience so far.
Actually, I thought this was much better than Eagleton’s usual tosh, because he’s writing about literature, which is the field he’s qualified in, whereas usually he writes about something else.
Still, it was disappointing that he was too lazy to spend two minutes online to establish whether Emerald Fennell is Irish or not (the answer seems to be No).
I’m amazed that people read this book as a love story, unless their idea of love is a folie à deux between two narcissistic, cruel, manipulative sociopaths. They are a ghastly pair.
I do, but then my love life tends to be a bit like this. I haven’t hung any puppies lately tho
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lascar
I would expect Mr Eagleton to know that ” lascar” was a term used as a generic for most dark skinned sailors, from Asia as well as Africa.
I am sure he wouldn’t disbelieve his Leftist echo chamber( Wiki) on this
The rest of his diatribe on WH and assorted issues are too ridiculous to respond to!
I think that ‘lascar’ meant Asian, and not African. Obviously, people will have used the word to mean anything. Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books used it a lot and it meant people under the sway of the Chinese, not Chinese but from those countries near to China.
Funny, I had always understood that a lascar (the word is French) originated in Napoleonic times, in Egypt, and was used to refer to lazy, often treacherous local mercenaries, who would be a liability if they actually saw combat. The word is somewhat dated in French, but still exists. It has roughly the same meaning as the equally dated American word “yardbird”: a useless, uncooperative soldier who is always in trouble.
I certainly accept what you say. Language is like that, isn’t it? A word is borrowed, the meaning and sometimes spelling changes over the years and then new generations grow into a completely different concept. I guess that different authors at different time have adapted the word to suit their purposes.
“ Surely, though, ethnicity is too important an issue to be bracketed off. And actors from minorities have been cut a rough deal for far too long. So we should aim for a situation in which ethnic minority actors can play white individuals, which means having their actual skin colour temporarily disregarded by the audience without this constituting a put-down. And, indeed, without the audience thinking they are being told that, say, Julius Caesar or Elizabeth I really were black. It also means white actors being able to play black or brown individuals without the audience seeing imperial overtones.”
Hang on: isn’t this a pretty exact description of “the audience temporarily bracketing off” the actor’s ethnicity? Which is it to be? Brackets or no brackets?
If an actor trips and falls over, is it an accident? Or is it required by the script?
It might have been Brando. Did he do it on purpose or not? Apart from that not much depth in this piece.
“…an important milestone in the evolution of the English novel… hardly any English novel before Wuthering Heights ends on a tragic note.”
Much of the air of numinous mystery which surrounds the genesis of Wuthering Heights is disspiated if one accepts that Emily Bronte drew heavily both in form and content, not from examples drawn from the written novel but rather from the Traditional Ballads of the British Isles.
The Douglas Tragedy (Roud 23), for instance, or The Maid and The Palmer (Roud 2335) both provide potential thematic material but the novel most most obviously resembles the the Scottish Border Ballad -The Raggle Taggle Gypsies (Roud 1) which begins –
“Three gypsies stood at the castle gate.
They sang so high, they sang so low.
The lady sate in her chamber late.
Her heart it melted away as snow.”
Walter Scott had the decency to always include snippets from the ballads on which he drew as prefaratory couplets to his chapters. Not so with the Brontes.
This also, to my mind, clearly locates Heathcliffe’s ethnicity, and clarifies his obscure parentage, as a Romany.
In about 1988, someone should have installed a nice little polished bell, emitting a particular tone, such that when you rang it, someone came to politely usher Terry Eagleton away.
Your last sentence corrected … “And the signs, as the Western world continues to rise throughout the Western world, are not propitious”.
Terry Eagleton sounds as if he hasn’t read ‘Wuthering Heights’ any more than has Emerald Fennell. Why else would he say that the book ends unhappily when in fact it ends with oblivion for the destructive love/haters, reconciliation between the warring houses and, yes, a marriage?
Agree with his points about Heathcliff, though. It’s beyond idiotic that pundits are going on as if the role is a heart-throb or role model that’ll provide ‘positive’ representation for an actor of colour, instead of what he is, one of literature’s great monsters.
Nice article Tezza, but you couldn’t help yourself at the end there, could you?
This essay seems foolish to me. Many traditionally white characters of the Western canon are being “re-imagined” now as people of color, but if a white person attempts to adopt any elements of a non-white culture, they’re excoriated for “cultural appropriation.”