I saw the DVD of the recent BBC adaptation of Wuthering Heights in the supermarket today. I watched it when it was first shown. It’s a good drama, but in my opinion it doesn’t merely miss the point, it goes in the opposite direction. I do so wish the world would stop treating that book as little more than a Mills and Boon romance set on the Yorkshire Moors.
Please, world, try to understand Emily Bronte; then you might understand her novel.
4 comments:
The last Wuthering Heights I saw starred Ralph Fiennes as Heathcliff which I found annoying then and even more so now. They've done the passionate love story thing again, I assume? Oh, boy. Mind you it isn't an easy book to get, the author's "voice" is so at one with the tempest of events, making it imperceptible – which is a good thing and genius I realize, but many readers want easier answers. I'd be curious to see this latest dramatization anyway, if only to complain about it ;)
I think it is a passionate love story, Della. The question for me, however, is what kind of love is driving the passion? Not the easiest sort to understand, I suspect.
For me the book on the one hand suggests that this kind of passionate relationship (Cathy-Healthcliff) cannot thrive in our society (their society which is also our society, full of the artifice of social hierarchy etc.). It's more a reflection of the natural world which the story shows should be tamed (in the "second generation" relationship with the young Cathy). So, yes although it is a love story – issues about society and nature are so intertwined with it, one cannot talk about one without the other. Still, I don't mean to suggest that it was the author's belief that nature/love should lose the battle against a materialistic society. I can't imagine that Emily was one to embrace such compromise. For me there is irony in her ending when she writes that it would be "hard" to imagine unquiet slumbers for those who are buried beneath all the busy fluttering life of nature. Huh? There's a smile on her face there, I think.
We'll never know, will we Della? Actually, the second generation romance intrigues me, since I see it as a conventional romance subtly stated. I'm surprised that Emily would have understood such a thing.
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