Brontë Odyssey: Part Two

Attention everybody: Jane Eyre is really good.

I knew it was better than Wuthering Heights literally by the time I finished the first sentence. Charlotte Brontë's narrative style is very direct, clear, and evocative. (The only part that gets too wordy, I think, is the dialogue; it's odd to me that that's the least briskly written aspect of the book.) Furthermore, in Wuthering Heights, the narrator is two steps removed from the real story most of the time; in Jane Eyre, the narrator is the story. And it's a more interesting story, too. In fact, I'm not even going to synopse it here, because it has SURPRISES! and MYSTERIES! and if you haven't read it, I hope you will, so I don't want to spoil it.

I will address two things, though:

First, there's the feminism, which (at least as far as I can tell from Wikipedia that one episode of Friends) Jane Eyre is pretty well known for. And yes, it's in there. There's a fairly impassioned passage about a fourth of the way through the book arguing that women need something fulfilling to do just as much as men do. There's also (as my friend Wikipedia points out) a continuing theme of Jane's efforts to assert her own personality in the face of efforts of particular men to dominate her--and the man she loves is the one who loves her for being herself, not what she could be under his tutelage. But on the other hand, she keeps calling the man she loves her "master" even when he's not her boss anymore, and that skeeved me out. Nobody's perfect.

Secondly, perhaps you might ask, "Whither the unintentional humor?" As you may recall, the unintentional humor in Wuthering Heights derived from Emily Brontë's apparent uncertainty about where babies come from. (I'm still hoping, although not 100% sure, that some of the foibles of the characters in Wuthering Heights fall under the category of intentional humor.) Charlotte could perhaps have shared a thing or two with Emily, as the seedy past behavior of Mr. Rochester shows that she had at least the general idea of man-and-lady-special-private-time. So we must look elsewhere! And we find it in that trusted standby, making fun of the French. The little girl for whom Jane is governess (the little girl that Jane governesses?) is French, and this is clearly a handicap. There's not a whole lot of this in there (it turns out that the little girl is not very important in this book), but there is a line near the end that cracked me up: "As she grew up, a sound English education correct in a great measure her French defects . . . ." She used to be a flibbergibbet, you see, but English boarding school blasted the silliness right out of her. And made her "well-principled." Awesome.

On my Brontë enjoyment scale, I'm giving Jane Eyre a 9.2 out of 10. For those of you keeping track at home, that means Charlotte Brontë has taken a commanding lead!

Click here to read more . . .

Brontë Odyssey: Part One

Wuthering Heights

On a scale of one to ten, I'd say I enjoyed Wuthering Heights in the amount of 6.5. The good: it was entertaining and original. The bad: it went slowly at points, including the last several chapters. The crazy: it was CRAZY.

Why didn't I know that Wuthering Heights was totally insane? Also, I always thought it was supposed to be a love story, and it is not. It's a hate story. It's a story where the main character loves one person passionately, but spends more of his time hating everyone else. Each of the characters is horrible (in their own individual ways, which is interesting) and almost everybody dies and everyone is crazy.

Quick summary: we meet our official narrator, and I don't remember his name, because he is in no way important. He's a pompous twit, even in his own private thoughts. He meets Heathcliff, whose company he enjoys because Heathcliff is more horrible than he is. Pompousy McTwittington wonders what the deal is with Heathcliff and his messed up household, so he asks his maid. It turns out that his maid knows everything there is to know to about Heathcliff. It also turns out that she is our actual narrator.

So Ellen/Nelly/Mrs. Dean tells Pompousy McTwittington all about Heathcliff, and how he loved Catherine and hated everybody else, and how Heathcliff was creepy and Catherine was a spoiled harpy. But then Cathy married some wimpy dude, so Heathcliff hated that guy. So Heathcliff starts spinning elaborate plots to punish everyone who has wronged him--but not in a Count of Monte Cristo way. Heathcliff operates on a much smaller and pettier scale.

About halfway through, Cathy dies of . . . being annoyed? But not before she gives birth to little Cathy, who is less annoying. And eventually Heathcliff kidnaps teenaged little Cathy and forces her to marry Heathcliff, jr., who is a snivelling sniveller. Junior dies almost immediately thereafter. But then about a year later, Heathcliff dies of . . . um . . . ghosts? Did he die of ghosts? And for whatever reason, everybody accedes to his wishes to bury him next to Catherine, even though he had bullied them and beaten them up and told them how stupid they all were and extorted all their property and done his best to make sure their fathers died miserable. That was the biggest mystery of the book for me--why didn't they bury him at a crossroads, or better yet, leave his carcass out on the moor for the dogs? Why didn't they do that?

I also would have liked it better if anybody had taken any action against Heathcliff while he was alive. Pompousy McTwittington kind of has a thing for little Cathy while Heathcliff has her imprisoned and enslaved (Emily Brontë didn't use those words, but that's what it was). So the best ending (and the way to make the narrator important in any way to the story) would have been if he had burst into Wuthering Heights with a pistol in each hand and busted her out. But no.

The most hilarious thing, I thought, was lack of sex. Not in the way I would have assumed the book would have lacked sex; not in a "I'm going to tiptoe around this and do my best to avoid implying it" type of way, but in what I suspect might be a genuine "I have no idea where babies come from" type of way. Three babies are born during the story. One is to original Cathy's brother and his wife--she's sickly but they actually like each other. That's fine. But the other two? O.G. Cathy is not pregnant until after she has a mental breakdown and becomes basically semi-catatonic. Either her husband was a total perv or little Cathy came about by magic. Then there's Heathcliff and his wife, Cathy's sister-in-law Isabella. Heathcliff entirely loathes her, and says so a lot. It really doesn't seem like he ever could have been bothered to so much as touch her. So again, I think the only answer here is magic.

So anyway, I mostly enjoyed it because I was fascinated by how awful all the characters are and because it was, at the risk of overusing the word, crazy.

Now on to Jane Eyre! Click here to read more . . .

Brontë Odyssey: The Beginning

I was inspired--inspired by a cartoon entitled "Dude Watchin' with the Brontës." (I can't get over it--dude watchin' with the Brontës. I swear, that girl could be my Canadian soulmate.)

Anyway, if you follow the link, you'll see that the cartoon is about the differences and similarities the Brontë sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne. Reading their Wikipedia articles (which I did just to make absolutely sure I was getting the joke [being unsure didn't make it any less funny, BTW]) piqued my interest further--what's the deal with those wacky Brontës?

Yes, I decided to read the works of each Brontë gal. "Have you ever read Wuthering Heights?" Neal asked me when I told him about this plan. When I answered in the negative, he replied, "Good luck," but not in the cheerful way. In the foreboding way.

Here's the thing: I don't feel like I suffered, educational-development wise, going to a public/ridiculously small school. I've done all right. But the one area in which I'm really lacking is in how many Serious Books I've read. For some reason, my high school did not go in for Serious Books. Or even "books anyone has heard of." In four years, we read two Shakespeare plays, Of Mice and Men, The Crucible, the first part of Beowulf (not even the part with Grendel's mother!) and then just a slew of pointless short stories and excerpts from non-famous/non-important books. They even stopped assigning the junior class The Jungle by the time I got to be that age. So no, I've never read Wuthering Heights and I've never read Jane Eyre, and I feel like I should. Also, The Tenant of Windfell Hall. Because why not?


So here's the plan: I am going to read one book by each of the Brontë sisters, in descending order by cultural relevance. In my time on this earth, collecting general knowledge, I have learned the most about Wuthering Heights, so Emily's up first. (Things I know about Wuthering Heights: Cathy, Heathcliffe. Babies. Death. The wildness of the moors reflects the wildness of Heathcliffe's character. It is best performed in semaphore.)


(Sorry, my choices were "embedding disabled by request" or "apparently actual Norwegian subtitles pasted on.")

Coming in second, we have Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. (I know there's a nanny, and kids and also a brooding dude. Like The Sound of Music with fewer chilluns? And no Nazis? Definitely no robots.)

And the third book I will read will be Anne's The Tenant of Windfell Hall. (What I know about it: it has a shorter Wikipedia article than her other book.)

So as I journey through these books, all for the first time, I will keep you posted on how it goes. Get excited!

In conclusion, I don't know how to tell Blogger to make that fancy e. I just found one and copy/pasted "Brontë" for this whole post instead of typing it out.

(P.S. Don't forget to scroll down after this post--there's a new monarch moment and a Harry Potter review.) Click here to read more . . .