Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

16:57Jeff:I don't believe it either. But also, I have no idea what she's going to do. Like it wouldn't surprise me at this point for it to be like more of a translation of Wuthering Heights in the way that one battle after another is a translation of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, that the seeds of their vibe together shape the relationship at the heart of the movie. That's my guess going in, really, is that it will be more about... There's a lot of corsets and a lot of lingering looks and some BDSM sorts of vibes, overtones to the trailer. And the trailer looks a lot sexier than the book, certainly. So really, who knows and maybe finnell is playing with the popular imagination of wuthering heights and this misconception of it as a romance um it really is it really is quite dark yeah and we'll get to

17:50Rebecca:once we talk more about what it's like and the ideas maybe we'll come back to talk about possibilities for the adaptation i find myself more sympathetic to just the trailer version of withering heights because i think it might be trying to recreate the strangeness of the of contemporary readers of Wuthering Heights in 1848, especially 1850 and after to the modern day. Like this is a weird book. It's, it's hard to say meant to, but the effect it had on contemporary readers is one of bewilderment. And again, I'm going to go back to an original, like to make you feel wild while you're watching it to use that.

18:24Rebecca:Like you are, I found myself and I think a lot of readers find themselves confused and compelled simultaneously and frustrated by the text. And that's one thing. Sometimes that makes for an enduring work of art. Sometimes it makes for a mess that gets forgotten. But there's something here. And even contemporary critics at the time said, this is a weird book. There's a lot I don't like about it. It's certainly immoral. Young lady shouldn't read it, as you might imagine, 1847. There's a lot more hitting each other in abuse than we would like today, but especially when you think of the mores of popular culture such as it was in 19th century England and America.

19:03Rebecca:But there's something here that is different that seems to be of its own sense. And then we mix that in with the Bronte's own biography, which we'll get to in a second, is pretty fascinating. So kind of right away, it was seen as a wild book. It doesn't seem connected to a lot of other things. I can talk to a little bit to how it's connected to romanticism in a larger kind of way. But the Brontes themselves have become monuments of English literature. And it's still very much a contested work. Like, talk about books that answer questions and books that ask them. This one is sort of wondering where questions come from in its own way.

19:46Rebecca:Like, where is the source of all this crap and how do we deal with it? I find really compelling, even as I'll admit here, we're not quite into the reading section. I do not enjoy this book, Rebecca Shinsky. This is not one of my favorite books. I don't really enjoy the reading experience. The first 100 pages, especially, I'm like, God, this is tough sledding. But you get some of these moments, especially when Catherine and Heathcliff are talking to or about each other and explaining their torture that are, that my eye, I kind of don't, my reading mind doesn't blink. I'm compelled and fascinated and I find myself returning to them.

20:20Jeff:I think that's a really important thing that the reading experience of this is for me also very uneven. There were, there were a lot of moments and we saw each other in person while I was reading this and I was like, man, I am suffering. Like there are a lot of moments where I was like, this is just taking me forever to get through. And then I would hit like a 20 page section where I would feel riveted to the page. And that sort of that unevenness, like that you don't quite know where the story is going or what's about to happen or what's important and what ultimately will not be important. And most of it is ultimately not important, is challenging.

20:57Jeff:And like, I mean, frankly, it took me 10 days to get through this 300 page novel, which is a lot for me. I just needed to space it out. Let's talk a little more about why this is important. And I think that the myth around the Bronte sisters is part of it. Not only is the book important because it is part of the gothic romance canon, but this is Emily Bronte's only novel. Of course, her sister Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre, their sister Anne, also a novelist. All of them died young. This is published in 1847, originally under a pen name. She wrote it as Ellis Bell. The sisters all wrote under these assumed names that are sort of, they come across as gender neutral, names that would have been assumed to be male at the time because they understood that there were prejudices against female names, female writers.

21:51So they published their poetry originally under male names.

21:54Jeff:And then after Emily dies, Catherine, or sorry, Charlotte, there's so many names, Jeff.

22:00Rebecca:I know, right? Which Catherine, which Bronte? Yeah. Yeah.

22:04Jeff:After Emily Bronte dies, her sister Charlotte sort of comes clean that Ellis Bell was Emily Bronte and she does some edits and sort of reframes and repackages the story and publishes it. It was radically transgressive at the time. And not just because Catherine and Heathcliff are, their relationship is semi-incestuous. Like they're not related to each other, but they were raised as brother and sister functionally. There's really no...

22:31Rebecca:Kind of Royal Tenenbaum's energy, right? Like it's wrong. It's not illegal, but it's kind of wrong. But there's also no discussion of that.

22:38Jeff:Like, there's no discussion of that at all on the page. People just recognize in the story that Catherine and Heathcliff love each other and can't be together. But no one's like, hey, isn't that kind of weird? And that in itself is transgressive, not to remark upon the transgressive nature of it. And I think you're right that people just didn't know what to do with this when it came out. It was only modestly successful at the time, not nearly as successful as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. And as you mentioned earlier, it just came into having any sort of popularity or critical respect in the 20th century.

23:14Rebecca:In doing the background, I knew but I had forgotten, and we'll get to Jane Eyre eventually too, a true sensation. On the order of anything we would talk about in contemporary culture, it's even remarked upon in some of the contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights that there's a Jane Eyre fever sweeping the country to the point where they just assume the reader of a review of Wuthering Heights has read Jane Eyre already, even though it came out a little bit after. I mean, really probably in the 50 shades kind of cultural dominance, except that there weren't TV or movies or music. So it's hard to imagine.

23:48Rebecca:Less competition. It's just hard to convey how much a literary sensation like this mattered in the sort of proto-popular culture imagination. We talked a bit about that with Dickens, but Jane Eyre was very much the case. and stories for women about love and women's concerns, and we can talk more about that, have been underrated as a cultural and artistic force since the dawn of whatever. And this is another example of this. But I think Wuthering Heights, and it was pulled along long enough to be rediscovered because of the Bronte association with Jane Eyre, which was so much more popular. I'll try this book by the other Bronte sister that's also a story about something we may recognize it as love if we're sort of in an opium den or something like that.

24:36Rebecca:And it was sort of carried along long enough to be reconsidered later. And I reread this appreciation of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights for Virginia Woolf, which is quite beautiful. And that she, as someone who is interested in women's writing in A Room of One's Own and that whole tradition, she saw something powerful and unique in Emily Bronte. And it's so hard to remember that Bronte was like 28, and this is her first book. And she'd had as much education as she could really had, but sort of left her own devices. They spent a lot of time writing and reading, and she and her sister created this sort of fictional Scottish Highland world of Gondel, and there's a whole backstory, and then produced this book, which is wild to look at.

25:25Rebecca:And I have this quote here from a contemporary critic that I think is illustrative. And I think I agree with it to some degree, which is, here's a quote, if the rank of a work of fiction is to depend solely on its naked imaginative power, then this is one of the greatest novels in the language. Because there's something raw. And I don't want to say true, but compelling and feels elemental here about something. And we can talk about what that thing is. Is it love? Is it desire? Is it repressed, psychosexual, whatever? But there's something going on here that continues to compel. And is there a better version of this book, which is not sort of groaning under the metatextual stuff and the comings and goings and the confusing?

26:13Rebecca:And we can get to the sort of the spinning molten core here which is these two triple a literary figures in the form of katherine earnshaw and heathcliff and one of my hot takes i won't i'll spoil it here is like katherine

26:25Jeff:earnshaw as much of a villain as heathcliff is oh 100 percent yeah he gets because the name is

26:30Rebecca:more recognizable um and not just another katherine show title um we sort of underestimate her own

26:39Jeff:she's like lady mcbeth i think she's like the original unlikable heroine yeah this is like if

26:44Rebecca:what if Richard II and Lady Macbeth fell in love? That's what this book is. And then sort of Kool-Aid man themselves into an Austin setting. That's what this book is, Rebecca. And I think that makes it fascinating, but also very hard to wrap your arms around.

26:56Jeff:Yeah. And people certainly felt that at the time. I think critics and scholars continue to feel that. Lucasta Miller, a scholar of the Bronte sisters, wrote the preface to the edition that I was reading, and she called it the most passionately original novel in the English language. Be careful out there, but passionately original at the time, maybe. But it was very different. Dickens' writing at the same time, this is around the same era where his major novels are coming out. And those are, for all of how wonderful Dickens is and inventive he is, this is a truly horse of a different color. Wuthering Heights is just a thing that nobody had seen before.

27:40Jeff:And when a book like that comes out, it's going to be divisive. It's going to be a topic of a lot of conversation. But then especially when the author is a young woman who has died, she comes from this family of all these young women writers, they've all died. The whole family is wrapped in tragedy. To get into Bronte's bio a little bit, she's the fifth of six kids in her family. Her mom was from a wealthy family. Her dad was a member of the clergy and they grew up, she grew up living in the parsonage of a Yorkshire village of about 5 ,000 people called Hayworth. And their life was really confined to home and to family.

28:19Jeff:Emily Bronte read really widely, but Charlotte described her as caring very little for the world beyond her beloved Yorkshire Moors. She was a homebody. And I think that's interesting too, that she didn't have a lot of experience out in the world. She didn't have a lot of touch points with people beyond those in her immediate vicinity. And her childhood is shadowed by death. Her mom dies when she's three, then two of her older sisters die when she's seven. And her father, for being the parson, for being a member of the clergy, is also difficult. He's cold and hard. He's weird. He imposes seemingly arbitrary rules on the girls.

29:02Jeff:He carried a loaded gun at all times for reasons that nobody...

29:06Rebecca:A lot of guns in Wuthering Heights. And I read the book first before going back to do the biography. It's like, oh, she was just used to see dudes wandering around their houses with guns over their shoulders.

29:15Jeff:Yeah. Her dad is prone to rages. And there's a character in the book who is also wracked with grief and prone to rages. And he gets drunk and he grabs his gun and you don't know what's going to happen. And that's because this is the thing Emily Bronte has seen in her life. But it's more complicated than that. Their father also was a little bit radical. He wanted the girls to be educated. And the intro to my edition described Emily Bronte as highly, if haphazardly, educated, that their father made sure all the girls had access to formal education. And I think this is really critical. Their leisure reading was not nearly as supervised as other middle-class girls and women at the time.

29:55Jeff:So they were out there reading whatever they wanted and having the opportunity to let their minds be unruly. And you can certainly see that happening in the book. Yeah.

30:06Rebecca:And we get a little of that Wuthering Heights, the importance of books and libraries and borrowing books and where it's taken away or burned very much a, I don't even know if it's a metaphor. I think it just is. It stands for itself as being a means of escape, a means engagement, a means of autonomy within your own mind and your own body when so many other avenues are cut off from you.

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31:19Rebecca:This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast? Smart move. Being financially savvy? Smart move. Another smart move? Having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. And I think like Shakespeare, the relative dearth of biographical data makes her and Charlotte and Anne and the work that much more compelling, that there isn't a follow-up.

32:04Rebecca:This isn't the first, and it's like, you know, eight novels later, you're going to see her in her first form. That this was her first one out of the gate is shocking. um and you know you and i have some telltale signs of a debut novelist even today and i think we see some of these here about like larded with narration and exposition but at the at the highest moments the most fascinating moments you can see what heights she's able to reach and that you kind of can't teach you can teach a lot of the other crafty stuff and i wonder if over time would she have softened or would she have heightened by getting some of the other accoutrements and structural problems out of the way?

32:47Rebecca:It's fascinating to do. And then she's then available for later scholars, largely feminists, to take her up and consider her from a more modern sensibility of like, how is this about repressed women and lack of education and lack of opportunity and the male gaze and male dominance and violence and, you know, sort of sexual seclusion and the very real. I mean, the inciting incident here that really carries us through the end of Volume 1 and Volume 2 is where Catherine Earnshaw kind of makes a business decision to marry Edgar, right? To say, okay, we're going to secure some money here because if I don't, then Heathcliff is, if I marry Heathcliff, that's who I really care for.

33:34Rebecca:And again, I have quotes under care, love, all those things, because I'm not even sure what emotion this is. And what I can do is I can have my cake and eat it too. I can get the benefits that come along with having the estate and then use that to raise Heathcliff up and he can stay close, but we just can't get married because things will just fall apart. We will be ruined and she doesn't really see, or really there's no way out because they're all ruined anyway because of what Heathcliff ends up doing. And she's trapped, right? She can't have what she wants because a different version of this, she could go out and make her fortune and live and be a governess or whatever, but that's not at stake for her here.

34:13Rebecca:She's got no outs and she has to make do and make the kind of concession that, to use the book I kept thinking about as a weird, bizarro doppelganger, Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy are tamer versions, or Heathcliff and Catherine are sort of evolved Pokemon versions or something of those two characters, where she turns down Mr. Collins, who's giving her an out to keep Longbourn. What if she had taken that? And then Mr. Darcy was a psychopath. You know, like, that's what you get with something like this. And then you get to spin those things out, and it becomes very interesting substrate upon which to do kinds of thinking and to explore.

34:57Rebecca:But it itself is elusive about what it cares about. I mentioned it's considered a romantic novel. It's certainly, you know, the Brontes would have been reading the romantic movement of the time, distinguished from romance of today, which is really narrowly defined as a story about physical or emotional romantic love that ends in a happy end or happy for now. Now, romanticism was something else, and it was, in a large part, a counter move towards enlightenment thinking of rationality, very interested in nature. It was interested in the supernatural. It was interested in the sublime. It was interested in intuition and feeling, and you can certainly see that here.

35:44Rebecca:And then we get a little bit into horror and gothic horror, which sometimes this is associated with because there are no real ghosts in this. Are we to believe, Rebecca, that there are any quote-unquote real ghosts in this? Is the reader to believe that there are real ghosts being seen here? That's one of the great questions of the book.

35:59Jeff:I didn't read it as real ghosts, but the vibes are so bad. We talk about people being haunted by the loss of someone or haunted by the terrible end of a relationship forever. Heathcliff is certainly haunted. Some of the older Earnshaws are also haunted, but there's not a ghost story.

36:19Rebecca:Yeah. At the very least, though, some of the characters believe they've seen ghosts or they've had very strange dreams. Like even Mr. Lockwood, he comes in, he has this very odd dream that seems like -

36:28Jeff:God, there's so many dreams, Jeff. So many dreams.

36:31Rebecca:And that's a hallmark of a certain kind of gothic story where something beyond merely human cognition is at stake. I mean, Heathcliff is so haunted by Catherine, like digs her ass up to make sure she's in there, which is a wild scene, by the way. I'm sure we'll get, well, maybe we won't, depends on where Fennell ends or how we put that in there. But these people are very much, at least they're open to the idea that these ghosts and figures who've been wronged or have died under strange circumstances are still sort of around. And even maybe they want them around because at least they're not gone.

37:07Rebecca:At least they're not consigned to oblivion, right? You'd rather be haunted by the one true thing that matters to you than to not be. And so that's a fascinating—I mean, there's lots of readings at the end of what's going on there. I don't know. But it's also—but Bronte wasn't like writing letters to Wordsworth or something like that. She was reading these people, but she wasn't a part of these literary conversations. It's not like Concord, Massachusetts, right, where Thoreau, we did this with—who were we talking about? Gosh darn it. Oh, Alcott. Sorry. you know it wasn't those situations she was a little bit more like Emily Dickinson where she was there and it was in the water but she wasn't at the salons or writing for the thing and being edited by other people so she has her own strange sort of offshoot of it almost like a you know kind of an evolutionary dead end where you get this one branch of the family tree of romanticism in English literature but it kind of doesn't go anywhere and it's hard to know to do something with that?

38:08Jeff:Traditionally, we talk about the romantic era of literature as really interested, as you said, in nature, in wildness, in imagination. And it is unruly and dark and stands in contrast to that enlightenment, rationality, practicality, things moving along in a logical sort of way. And there is a logic to Heathcliff here, but it's not the ruling logic of the day, and it's certainly not a logic that anybody I think wants to live inside. This whole thing is so much more complex than any of the blurbs, any of the attempts to synopsize it. I did the exercise of asking chat GPT, like, what is Wuthering Heights about?

38:55Jeff:What happens? and it's like here are all of the moments that occur but it can't get to how strange it is to read this book and and to watch really the cruelty like i don't think we can press on that hard enough here that heathcliff is not just a villain but deeply cruel and abusive to everyone around him to the animals in his home to the people in his home i don't think psychopath is an exaggeration for the behavior and that that is also kind of unremarked upon like people talk about how mean he is but nobody's like whoa this guy is way out of pocket yeah and that it's hard to know because

39:36Rebecca:they don't know what to make of heathcliff and we haven't really talked about this where he is ambiguously culturally ethnically racially categorized you know at one point maybe your mother was the queen of the orient or maybe your dad was an indian trader or you know there's some subsequent criticism that maybe he was an escaped slave and because he's darker, but also is he a gypsy? But also could it just be that he has darker complexion and it's not about some racial dynamic that would be completely foreign to this little Yorkshire community? He is un-understandable. And that's the point. I think that's more the point than anything else.

40:13Jeff:There's not a spinning moral core to the story. And that was one of the most interesting things about diving into a lot of the criticism and people's interpretations of it is that Bronte did not have a defined political sensibility. Her sisters talked about this after her death. Early readings of it identified this. She didn't have a political sensibility. She did not identify as a feminist of her day. There's not a political or gender argument at the heart of Wuthering Heights. And that means that it becomes a Rorschach test. Yes. It's a kind of projection screen for whatever you do want to find in Wuthering Heights, you can find.

40:56Jeff:And I don't know that that's something Bronte was doing on purpose. It seems to me to be a byproduct of if you're not writing from a really defined social perspective, you end up opening yourself up to all sorts of interpretations. but we just can't know. And the book is harder to pin down than any of the sort of popular cultural descriptions of it want it to be.

41:25Rebecca:We don't get anything like it would be so fascinating to know. And I don't know if the discourse and we'd be the poor for it, but like, what part of this was she herself most interested in? Like the question I would ask if I had 20 minutes to talk to her would be like, how the hell did this thing get started? Like, where did, What were you seeing that got you to think in these terms? Because it's almost like the chronicle of an emotional natural disaster than is a story about anything. It's like Heathcliff and Catherine are these romantic meteors that hit this little community and destroy everything.

42:02Rebecca:And it's sort of Nietzschean. It's sort of beyond good and evil. It's like it's not even about morality because it doesn't even seem like they're subject to it. they're not capable of engaging with morality or should they do this or not. There's this one scene where Catherine asks Nellie, like, have I done the right thing? And she's asking earnestly, but she also can't, she has no sense of how to evaluate it herself in marrying Edgar. And Nellie's doing all these sort of middle brow rationalizations, double speak stuff about, well, if you think it was right and it makes sense and I love you and it'll be made.

42:35Rebecca:And she's like, But I did I do the right thing because she sort of knows that there was no right thing. And it leaves us to ponder ourselves like, wait, it doesn't it doesn't lend itself to if they'd only done X, if they only done Y. It just doesn't seem subject to those kinds of things.

42:51Jeff:Like, did I do the right thing? And then that there is no one right thing, like is indicative of the fact that there were not clear paths to like free expression for women at the time. And Bronte may have been feeling that. Catherine is certainly feeling it on the page. And that can be true without the book being like a feminist argument, because she's also out there like marrying a man just for money and then making him watch functionally while she cuckolds him. Like, Edgar knows that Catherine is still in love with Heathcliff. He knows that she's just with him. And he's made to watch them be around each other and to see that connection.

43:33Jeff:Like, when I was describing this to Bob, I was like, Heathcliff is just Mr. Steal Your Girl. Right in front of, just right in front of Edgar. They're not going to any, they're not going, not only not going to any trouble, but they're not making any attempts at all to hide how they feel about each other. Isabella knows right from the start that Heathcliff doesn't love her and that the marriage is out of convenience. It's functional. It's just a utility to get him these other things that he wants. But she also has no options. And so there is sort of a there's a way of reading this that is about how dark the very limited options available to women are and what that rage could drive a woman to do.

44:13Jeff:Except the women don't get to have rage on the on the page here. It's only Heathcliff.

44:18Rebecca:Yeah, there's a couple of scenes where they, I can't remember which Catherine it is, I think it's Kathy Jr., like grips someone's arm toes and scratches that she draws blood and is described as a vixen and she's a wolf and you'll see her talons now. But just physically Heathcliff is huge. Like that's another thing. Like he's a physically intimidating presence where there's no fair fight to be had with Heathcliff. They're very limited in their ability to fight back. But they do show their fangs and they do some other things, but they're still so subject to his own physical presence. And then, you know, what does he represent?

44:53Rebecca:The patriarchy? It's hard to do that because -

44:56Jeff:I think that's way too simple of a reading.

44:58Rebecca:It's way too simple of reading because he himself is subject to being outside of the social caste system of the day. Like he goes off for three years to make his fortune doing God knows what, gambling or stealing. We're giving several or, you know, did he join them? Did he go to America and fight in the revolution and make a bunch of money or was he a privateer? It's unknown except that what probably wasn't happening, he didn't just go walk and become part of the land of gentry because that wasn't something he could do. But there's all this mystery about his own being of being an outcast in society.

45:33Rebecca:And you have down a little bit later, I'm sorry, it's more like hurt people, hurt people. There's an element to that that's not wrong. It's not encompassing. That's not the point. It doesn't explain the whole thing. But there is an element of people here that are outside of their ability to build their lives as they would wish without making some serious compromises and bad choices along the way. Rebecca, when did you first read this book?

45:55Jeff:This was my first completed attempt at Wuthering Heights. I tried it in high school. I think I was probably trying to make my way through the great romances. Like, I remember reading Lady Chatterley's Lover and Rebecca around the same time and starting this and being so annoyed, like, where the hell is the romance? What's happening here? And just bailing. Like you, I do not like this book, but reading it through the lens of like, what would it have been like to read this in 1847 was really helpful. And also kind of the mystified, curious, what are we still doing with Wuthering Heights? Why does it still have such a grip on us?

46:39Jeff:That was how I got through it. What about you? No.

46:41Rebecca:High school on my own, as I was trying to round out the books that I should be read in my own long, never-ending journey to be well-read, I guess, that continues apace. I was completely bewildered by it. I did not have any structure for understanding or having a way of being even sort of intellectually interested in it or historically interested. I do not like this book. But I don't think liking is the point, and I am compelled by it. I do think that it has an elemental force that amongst a lot of other cobwebs and strangeness in a bad way, there's something here that seems to be of its own and not strange for strangeness sake.

47:24Rebecca:And one thing I continue to remind myself, and I'd like to remind people listening to this show and others that experience art of any kind, the art that continues to be discussed and endures usually falls into one of two categories. One is it is either the first and or the highest expression of a moment, an idea, a movement, a form, or it's its own thing. And it breaks free of something else like that. It's a weirdo. It's a weirdo. And whenever we have a big contemporary hit that's a weirdo, whether it's Onyx Storm or The Da Vinci Code or Fifty Shades, people are always so shocked that this weird thing became a phenomenon when I continue to argue that only weird things become phenomenons because they need, you have to be weird.

48:13Rebecca:You have to be novel to, a novel has to be novel for it to really break out and catch fire. There has to be dry kindling for the fire to catch something that hasn't burned out already. And at the very least, Bronte is, she's out scrambling rocks that people didn't know could be scrambled. And that I'm glad to have read it again. I'm not going to be out here and trying to get people to read it because it is its own flavor and it's not for everybody.

48:44Jeff:Yeah. And I think to that point, this is maybe the first book we've talked about here that I don't think is widely taught today. Like, yeah, even Twilight from the first season is taught in some places. but Wuthering Heights is one of those classics that people recognize as a classic you recognize it as you did as a kid as something that you should have read or you should get to someday because it's important for reasons we don't quite understand but it's not like I couldn't find a lot of syllabi that Wuthering Heights is on I'm sure there are people doing this like in the graduate level I didn't encounter it in college I talked to some friends like nobody had to read this in school.

49:25Jeff:Everyone that is in my pretty literary social circle who had a story about Wuthering Heights had one similar to ours that they picked it up on their own because they heard it was important. And trying to read this without a guide, especially if you're like 17 and the language is old fashioned and you don't have a grounding and like what's going on here would have just been super challenging.

49:48Rebecca:So talk about your own, like, let's dive into that a little bit of like your actual reading experience? What is the physical sensation of reading this like?

49:58Jeff:I mean, honestly, I was annoyed a lot of the time. There's a lot of setup, like 35 pages to just set up for us, like how Mr. Lockwood arrived, where he arrived and who Nellie Dean is and who all the characters are. And then not much about Catherine and Heathcliff. Like if you go into this expecting to figure out why these people love each other, it's frustrating that we don't get to see it. It resists tidy interpretation. And so I think if you can just let it be messy, like once I got myself into that space, I'm like, oh, this is a mess. These are messy people. And we like messes.

50:37Rebecca:We do. Generally speaking, we're interested in messes.

50:40Jeff:We do. And they're messy in a similar way to like the way that Gatsby is messy. Like everybody's just out there reacting to stuff. So when I got into that headspace, that was really helpful. And I really had to resist applying contemporary, a contemporary lens to this. Like there's a way to talk about this as a story about trauma and revenge. And it is, but I don't think that's what Bronte is doing. And like Heathcliff is one of those guys who can't have what he wants, so nobody can have what they want. And I think she recognized that type. She recognized the anger. There's a lot about like implicitly women as property, that women are the gateway to getting the property that you want, but she's not writing from the perspective of like how dare men use women as pawns in these situations.

51:34Jeff:It's just, you really have to put yourself in an 18, like tie on your bonnet and go to 1847. And I was surprised by how violent it was. Like, really deeply disturbingly violent. Probably one of the reasons it's not taught in a lot of classrooms. Heathcliff is hitting people. He's yelling at people. He's throwing stuff. He's torturing the pets. And like, also, none of that is really remarked upon as super bad. He's just, it's just the way he is, the thing that he's doing. and it's hard to track as we talked about at the beginning that like multiple people are named Catherine there's multiple Earnshaws going around there's multiple Mr.

52:14Jeff:Lintons like which generation we're in and what's like everything is unsettling and I do think that is intentional on Bronte's part that like these people are messy they're unsettled the experience of reading it is unsettled I had some like did Emily Bronte invent post-modernism like like the text makes you feel sometimes the way that the characters feel. I'm just like, I can't get my head around this. I don't know what ground I'm standing on. A really kind of one-of-a-kind reading experience.

52:47Rebecca:Yeah.

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54:12I, you know, I think it might be helpful for people that want to trot out to the moors is to see it more like a mystery than a romance.

54:22Rebecca:because you look at how it's put together. Lockwood comes into town, like often happens, you know, some of a stranger comes into town and something weird is going on. He falls ill and he's essentially laying in bed for a long time. And Nellie comes to tell him the story in parts. And sometimes he's left in suspense between parts. And we're kind of in the middle of it, right? Because we sort of catch up with the contemporaneous events through Lockwood's eyes and his sort of entanglements with him as being the Lisee. But he's trying to figure out what this is going on. And Nellie is telling him what she knows.

54:58Rebecca:And her understanding is incomplete. Also, she's also younger than I am, Nellie, by the way. I thought that was important. You know, she's like the old, you know, servant. And she's like seven years younger than I am.

55:10Jeff:Middle-aged characters have it rough in books from this time period.

55:13Rebecca:Though I have to say, her memory is unbelievable. reciting entire passages of dialogue back and forth between two people that happened years ago anyway that's one of the but she herself is trying to understand the story she can relay events but she doesn't understand them she knows like what happened but she is in awe of catherine and heathcliff especially as anybody else is and the book is trying to get to tell us the truth which is what happened but why it happened the source of this And that feeling, the source of these desires, the source of this momentum is completely unresolved. But if you think of it as more of a mystery, I think it helps understand why we get these layers of text, right?

55:58Rebecca:You mentioned it, but I think at one point I tracked that Lockwood is telling us the story of him being told the story of someone telling her the story about a letter they got in which someone else was telling, there's like six layers of text. to wade through and i think there's an element of like myth making that happens when you do that like heathcliff is like a demigod almost like beast and beauty and the beast kind of character that everyone is revolving around and no one has direct access to so you all have these stories and stories and you know this and i saw him he was doing this and it's like he is a monster in that regard or like jaws where you see him kind of swimming around but then when he does come up It's terrifying and sort of beautiful and awesome in like the larger version of awesome.

56:47Rebecca:That's what experience I had. I think the central question to me, if I could boil it down to maybe my best guess here of what this is about, is what if you take the idea of an all-consuming love to its logical end? You know, this idea of you are the only thing that matters to me is a fundamentally selfish, narcissistic, world-abnicating position. And that is sort of at the core of some of the most, I don't know, sentimental, mawkish, extreme versions of, well, I only need you, there's just the two of us, the whole world could fall away, right? well, what if someone actually did this who was also a giant brute and just didn't care about the rest of the world except to be with one person?

57:31Rebecca:What would happen if they didn't have that person? Wouldn't it look a lot like this? Yeah, I think it would.

57:38Jeff:And that gets to, I think, maybe why teenage girls have been drawn to this. The idea of you're all that I need, I would destroy the world for you has historically been presented as romantic and popular. I find it to be gross.

57:57Rebecca:And antisocial and criminal most of the time.

57:59Jeff:Can the dude get a hobby, please? But like, yeah, you don't actually want that. You don't actually want to be the whole center of someone's world. This is a cautionary tale about having a lover who's obsessed with you. And like maybe the modern version of it is those memes that are like, get you somebody who looks at you the way that, you know, Whoever it is in the photo is looking at this other person. We don't actually want this. It is not actually good. Obsession is destructive. And I think you're right that if Bronte is going for anything, it is look at how destructive single-mindedness, obsession, this idea of one true love can be.

58:45Jeff:just to go back to the layers and layers of narration. The narrative choices here are the most interesting thing about the book to me, that it's told second or third or fourth or fifth or sixth hand by the time that the story gets to us.

58:59Rebecca:And that means we should really wonder what is true here.

59:04Jeff:Like this is a game of telephone. And Heathcliff is certainly brutish, but we can't know how he felt or how Catherine felt because they never tell us. We're never in their heads. We hardly get any direct dialogue. And that choice on Bronte's part, that's one of the things that I would want to ask her is, what are you getting at with, like that we only see these people through like multiply removed lenses? Makes it really interesting, but also it's kind of a reader beware. Like you don't really, don't take any of this as gospel.

59:41Rebecca:I think another thing that it does is all these sort of textual layers, when we get a moment of Calfin or Heathcliff almost monologuing about how they're feeling, it heightens that because of all the other dross that we have to wade through to get there. So it's like you have to climb, you have to go through the moors and climb with the rocks, but then when you get the sunset for a moment, I think it feels all the more sublime or all the more powerful because of how rare that thing is. And there are several here that in a play version of this, Catherine and Heathcliff would get wonderful speeches.

1:00:16Terrible, but wonderful.

1:00:18Rebecca:And that's the thing that got me to think about, again, my best analogy is, what if Richard II and Lady Macbeth fell in love on the moors in a Jane Austen novel? Like, that's what you would get with something like this. All right. Time for stray thoughts. What else was wandering in and out of the transom of your mind as you were making your way through this book?

1:00:35Jeff:Boy, these people are a nightmare blunt rotation.

1:00:38Rebecca:Though in a way it would improve things if everyone had a little downer. Yeah.

1:00:43Jeff:Yes. Everybody needs to just chill a little bit. But I do appreciate on a level that a book where literally everyone is unlikable has been this widely and consistently read. Like, well, more of that, please. Unlikable characters are much more interesting. Unhappy characters tend to be much more interesting. but also just like, wow, you're going to be disappointed if you saw the trailer for this, or you've just heard this is one of the great romances, and you pick up Wuthering Heights expecting a sexy, exciting, passionate book. It's just so different from the public narrative about it.

1:01:24Rebecca:I think, yeah, I do think that we are not given to believe. I don't think there's even any a stretch reading where Heathcliff and Catherine are having a sexual relationship. I think it's that they're not that maybe makes it feel so on edge the whole time. Like they just need to do it to some regard. And I think there's a version of the movie where the anticipation, the desire is at such a fever pitch that people are like acting out of their minds. And that maybe is an explanation as well as anything else here. I wonder about, is this if Romeo and Juliet were dicks? That's my other thought here.

1:02:07Rebecca:What if Romeo and Juliet were just like really toxic assholes and they're all dead at the end? It wouldn't be beautiful, but it would be something.

1:02:16Jeff:Yeah, I think that's a good one. I also, thinking about other classic literature, kind of wondered if Heathcliff was a prototype for Gatsby. that Heathcliff, you know, he goes away and then he returns and he's made money, as you said, and we don't know where his money has come from. And people tell all these stories about him and they make all these assumptions and project things onto him. And that happens with Gatsby too. Like they're not the same character, but Gatsby also is this sort of mythical, he's arrived out of nowhere. He has all this money. People like to imagine what his backstory is.

1:02:49Jeff:And I couldn't find any formal like mention or acknowledgement of Fitzgerald talking about Wuthering Heights but one would think he at least would have had the opportunity to read it there's a lot of threads that are similar like a man appears from nowhere and has no confirmable backstory and becomes this screen onto which people project all sorts of assumptions or maybe just an interesting thread

1:03:12Rebecca:connecting the two yeah that reminds me a little bit of David Copperfield's mentor in David Copperfield of like this person of sort of sketchy background. And it's actually said in the book, Wuthering Heights, like honest people don't have to hide things. I think we're pretty much told that he got up into some shenanigans, right? Like I don't know if it was a bootlegger or slave trader. It could be anything at this point. But it was not on the up and up for sure. I have an analogy here. Fifty Shades is to twilight as Wuthering Heights is to pride and Prejudice. And by that, I mean, you know, famously E.L.

1:03:47Rebecca:James wrote Fifty Shades because of the chasteness of Twilight, especially the first volume, right? And like the understanding that our human emotions, our sexual desire, romantic love, our roiling passions resist that kind of restraint. It cannot be restrained by that. And there's a development, like Pride and Prejudice, 1813, I think. So, you know.

1:04:10Jeff:About 30 years earlier. About 30.

1:04:12Rebecca:Yeah. The Brontes certainly would have read and adored, I assume, Austen, or maybe been frustrated by it, because as much as I love Pride and Pride, as much as I love Austen, sensual it is not. The spontaneous outpouring of uncontrollable emotions is sort of the definition of romanticism according to Wordsworth. Or is that Coleridge? I get this confused. It's been a while. It is not. It's awfully chaste. It's awfully monk-like and priest-like. Like, it is Apollonian, not Dionysian, for all you Greek heads out there. And it does feel to me like, well, what if they just could not resist each other for good or for ill, Mr.

1:04:51Rebecca:Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet? And not even just them specifically, but this dynamic of these more formal, these more acceptable, these more socially acceptable drawing room kinds of stories about love. But we also all know there's a lot more to the human heart than that. And, you know, part of me is like, what if she just wanted to let him off the hook and let him go?

1:05:13Jeff:You know, this is making me think about how during our Twilight episode, you were yelling at one point, just do it already. Yes.

1:05:20Rebecca:Yeah. Yeah.

1:05:21Jeff:And yeah, I think if they had just had a chance to consummate their relationship, like a lot of this is that it's unrequited. And the traditional reading of Wuthering Heights is that they don't get to consummate their relationship, that it's all just yearning forever. And that's also dangerous and toxic sometimes. Like just let them do it. And then like -

1:05:42Rebecca:Existential blue balls is not good for anybody. Everything, I mean, it is not good. That's not healthy. It's going to go real bad for a lot of people.

1:05:50Jeff:You heard it here first. Other straight thoughts. I don't know that the pathetic fallacy, which is where weather stands in for people's emotional states, has ever worked harder than in Wuthering Heights.

1:06:03Rebecca:To the point where his name is Heathcliff, where Heath is another word for moor. So his name is just cliffs on a moor. Like his name is the place they are. Like, can you do that, Rebecca? Do we allow this? I don't, we're also allowing,

1:06:16Jeff:like Bronte refers to all the residents of Wuthering Heights as inmates, which I looked and was like in use at the time as a stand-in for residents, but also feels to me chosen.

1:06:28Rebecca:It's so claustrophobic. I don't know if we've gotten that word into the air here, but the whole thing is so claustrophobic. Even though it's in the moors because of the weather and the winter, it's like, it's just people are sitting around in rooms bouncing off the walls and into each other like for three quarters of the book.

1:06:41Jeff:Yeah. Everybody needs to like go for a walk, you know, get outside.

1:06:47Rebecca:Get a little aerobic activity, some yoga maybe. What else do I have to do?

1:06:50Jeff:What you need is your silly little mental health walk is what they need here. Totally.

1:06:54Rebecca:When they do them all the time, it doesn't help. That's where the ghosts are, Rebecca, on your mental health walk. I don't know. I didn't confirm this. I tried to look it up. I got to nowhere. Is this where O 'Nellie is from? Because we get like 35 O 'Nellies in this book.

1:07:08Jeff:Let's just go with that.

1:07:09Rebecca:Do you like that? Sure. I also have – something so famous for being set on the Moors, we actually don't get a lot of narration or description of the Moors.

1:07:19Jeff:Yeah. No, I was expecting – and even a friend said to me like, man, if you can get through all the Moors stuff. So I was expecting the Moors equivalent of like the wailing scenes in Moby Dick. No. There's not a lot of that.

1:07:32Rebecca:I have, we've said this before, how does In the World is Ranked So Highly and Greatest Love Stories pull the list? Could it be that people are getting confused and conflating, like lumping it in with Jane Eyre?

1:07:42Jeff:I don't get it. I also think that this happens more often than people want to admit where like, I didn't get this book, but I'm going to assume it's like a problem with me and not the book. And so I should say that this is a great book.

1:07:54Rebecca:Has cultural momentum of a kind? Yeah.

1:07:57Jeff:Like cultural imposter syndrome. Yeah.

1:08:00Rebecca:Interesting. Notable quotes. There's a bunch and also not that many. Like, I guess we didn't really talk about the stylistically. There's not a lot of, wow, this would make a good Goodreads quote in the narration. But in the dialogue, there's some really heavy stuff. So where do you want to go?

1:08:15Jeff:I mean, also just like the ultimate quotes about codependency.

1:08:20Rebecca:Oh, my God.

1:08:21Jeff:He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. I'm like, that is the top quote on Goodreads, I believe. It's probably all over all sorts of things on Etsy. People probably say this in their wedding vows. Folks, this is not what Wuthering Heights is about.

1:08:37Rebecca:Or it is, but it is, but this is bad. It's bad. If you think this way, disaster awaits.

1:08:44Jeff:All consuming love is bad. You got to have a hobby. You got to have some friends. At one point, Catherine is saying, I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hearty and free. That, I think, gets to another, like sort of one of the spinning molten cores of the book is this desire for free expression and to push against boundaries. Bronte certainly is pushing against convention here. And then it was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn, which is about Catherine and Heathcliff's relationship, but really rang the bell for me of the most popular quote from Twilight.

1:09:25Jeff:light. And so the lion fell in love with the lamb, which, you know, Stephanie Meyer talked about having been influenced by Wuthering Heights as well.

1:09:32Rebecca:It's so interesting to close read for just a second. The idea of a honeysuckle embracing the thorn, there is no world in which the honeysuckle is not pierced. Right. I mean, just to put it sort of directly, like there is no world in which that embrace can be good. There is this fantasy of the lion laid down with the lamb, you know, more evocative and sort of corporeal of embrace in the thorn and the honeysuckle. How tender and subject to honeysuckle is what happens to the honeysuckle to embrace the thorn.

1:10:05Jeff:And it really lets Catherine off the hook. Like, she's not as bad. She's not as violent as Heathcliff. But she is not this delicate honeysuckle creature. No, she's not. She isn't. She's also a thorn. They both do a lot of damage and they leave a lot of people in their wake. and what the origins of that are in the story. Like, is it Nellie letting Catherine off the hook and her telling of it? Like, who starts that? Like, where did Catherine get the good PR team is a great question here.

1:10:37Rebecca:There's like, again, there's some like Melville Shakespeare-like moments and soliloquies. I'm going to do an extended one here. It doesn't have a reducible meaning. Like, this means X or suggests Y, but this is Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine the Elder. I cannot express it, but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation if I were entirely contained here? My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning. My great thought in living is himself. If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be.

1:11:14Rebecca:If all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should seem not a part of it. Like that is Shakespearean, man. There's questions of being and desire and selfhood and the divine all kind of wrapped up here. And I think I get just enough of these moments. And there's not just one. There's, I don't know, six to 12 kind of like this that make the oyster shucking worth it. And some of this is painful oyster shucking for me, but the pearls are something there. And here's another one from Catherine. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath, a source of little visible delight, but necessary.

1:12:00Rebecca:Nellie, I am Heathcliff. He is always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure any more than I'm always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So it's beyond romantic love. He's like rocks, like a pillar, like beyond even questioning the necessity of. It's weird, Rebecca. It is weird. It's pretty strange. Um, and then she says, like, she realizes she's made a horrible deal and says after marrying Edgar, well, if I cannot keep Heathcliff for my friend, if Edgar will be mean and jealous, I'll try to break their hearts by breaking my own. And so her, her last resort is to use her own body and being, uh, to sort of buy transfer and hurt them.

1:12:45Rebecca:And she does.

1:12:46Jeff:Yeah, she does. it's a real like if Catherine can't be happy can't nobody be happy if Heathcliff can't be happy can't nobody be happy they're just willing to take down everything in their path in service of the fact

1:12:58Rebecca:that they can't have what they want yeah one more this is Heathcliff um after she's dead where is she not there not in heaven not perished where oh you said you cared nothing for my sufferings I pray one prayer I repeat it till my tongue stiffens Catherine Earnshaw may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed. You haunt me then. The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad. Only do not leave me in the abyss.

1:13:27Jeff:And speaking about Catherine's death, you mentioned that after she dies, he has her dug up so that he can see her and hold her for a second and be sure that she's there. And then he insists that when he dies, the plan will be for them to be buried side by side with the sides like the in the interior sides of their coffins taken off so they will could be next to each other as their bodies deteriorate like that's real gothic shit yeah and also the kind of thing that a certain flavor of like hot topic teenage girl might be drawn to that as you grow up you learn is pretty toxic like that these kinds of people are intoxicating, but also quite toxic.

1:14:09Jeff:And that's all language, of course, that Bronte wouldn't have used. And I'm not even sure she recognizes that in its fullness. But if there's a contemporary reading, it's like, oh boy, toxic relationship.

1:14:19Rebecca:Yeah, it's so fascinating because I think that idea still exists too in a lot of ways for people of all kinds of like this idea of love being or desire or connection or soulmates or whatever you want to use of being almost a cosmic force that is not even really specifically about that person, but through them or within them. The problem is that we're just damn people and we make mistakes and we're messy and perfect and flawed. But through this, this Phoenix force, I mean, that's an X-Men quote for all you heads out there, has to flow through this imperfect vessel. And if you think in those terms, what else but disaster can arise?

1:15:01Rebecca:I don't know that anything else can happen. You had a wonderful idea here. You collected an incomplete list of descriptions of Heathcliff. Would you like to run through them for us all, Rebecca?

1:15:10Jeff:He's described as having habitual moroseness, being a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man, a brute beast, an incarnate goblin, monster, fiend, hellish villain, viper, having basilisk eyes, a most diabolical man, and a scoundrel more than once. And I'm sure I missed some. Oh, you did. But those are wonderful, yeah. At a certain point in the book, I was like, oh, I got to start keeping track of these.

1:15:36Rebecca:You know, it's bad when the best thing someone can say about you is a scoundrel.

1:15:40Jeff:I really loved incarnate goblin.

1:15:47Rebecca:Yes. Let's see. I think that's enough quotes for us for now. Is it for you? Well, if you can't tell by now, Rebecca, what do you think a listener might use to do a

1:15:59Jeff:differential on their desire to read this book? I think if you can and want to do the mental time warp of imagining what it was like to read this when it came out in 1847, that's an interesting exercise. If you like plot, because this book is basically all plot, and if messy, ambiguous stories work for you, this is a good one to pick up.

1:16:21Rebecca:I also have, if you want to be smug about how people get Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff wrong, you can do that too.

1:16:26Jeff:Yeah, it's a good note. Not so much for you if you are looking for a traditional romance with a happily ever after. If TikTok told you this was a love story. And also there is real rough physical and psychological abuse. And as you notice, like it's just tough sledding, trying to keep things straight. So if you don't want to be juggling a bunch of people with the same name and constantly flipping back to a family tree, like reader, take caution.

1:16:51Rebecca:I kind of go back and forth about because or despite the difficulty of some of just the logistics and names and what's happening. And there's a lot of like Lockwood just describing where Nellie is or how she came back. And like, is it is that important to the feeling and mood of the book? Or is there a version of it's even more powerful if that's streamlined? It's an unanswerable question, but I do find myself wondering that. The immortal questions that Art asks, here are the few that we tend to work through here. What is the good life? What do I have my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is?

1:17:28Rebecca:How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil? Rebecca, kind of unsurprisingly seems resistant to this mode of analysis.

1:17:47Jeff:I don't know.

1:17:48Rebecca:What is the good life? What do I have my neighbor?

1:17:51Jeff:Yeah, I think if I had to write like an English 101 paper based on one of these for Wuthering Heights, I would probably peg it to what is the good life. And you could you could make the case around having the relationships that you want or don't want being treated well by family, the consequences of getting or not getting those things. what do i like none of the characters here are concerned with morality bronte doesn't seem particularly concerned with morality so i don't think it's about what do i don't sort of don't

1:18:21Rebecca:have access to us at this this dark thing between amongst them is not really a moral question as

1:18:27Jeff:much as one of survivors right and the other the elements of some of these other questions are in play like that people die that catherine has died is a thing that heathcliff is wrestling with but they're not really making sense of the world through the lens of those questions. I think it's what is the good life and really like what happens if you don't get the good life that is the primary thing going on here. But I don't know, Wuthering Heights really resists going into any of these cleanly.

1:18:56Rebecca:I might think about what else might there be. Not only are there ghosts, but this idea of love is like a supernatural force itself, almost like a Greek godlike sort of divinity that is chaotic it's not it's not good or bad necessarily but it's its own thing um that it over it has overwhelmed heathcliff and katherine's sensibility and if we think of that as as wuthering heights it's like insisting on the human in the face of the enlightenment and rationality there's something else going on here as even says don't you think there should there's some must be some existence beyond just you is that love is that the divine is that oblivion?

1:19:33Rebecca:What else that there might be? And sometimes the answer is bad. Sometimes the answer, there are these demonic forces or these things that are beyond the capability of humans to control them. I keep thinking of Cormac McCarthy in Stella Maris, his last published book, where one of the characters is afraid that if you got a glimpse behind everything, that it would not be nothing, nor would it be the pearly gates, but some third thing. And I do think that Bronte is wondering about that. Beyond all this stuff, if we really had access to the essence of all things, are we sure we want to tap into that?

1:20:10Rebecca:Are we sure about that?

1:20:11Jeff:That's a great point, especially knowing that she was sickly for a lot of her life. She goes to school and then she has to come back because she gets sick. And it's unclear, I think, to anybody, is this anxiety that we didn't have a label for at the time, that she wants to be a homebody and she has trouble being away from things that are familiar or physical sickness. When does the physical sickness become part of it? Like she dies of tuberculosis, but there's other stuff going on there. And so and she's watched her family die.

1:20:43Rebecca:Everyone's subject to dying at any time. I mean, I think that's that's hard to underestimate both in her life and this book. Like it's really and even at one point, Nellie Dean says, I'm I find I'm no happier than when someone is dying as long as there's not a shrieking mourner there because it's peaceful and I know what's going on. I was like, that is a weird idea. That's a weird, dark place to be. That's a very strange place to be. But it's, I think, like we said, it's no surprise that this is a tougher nut to crack with the implements we usually use here. And that's kind of cool in some way.

1:21:15Rebecca:Are we sure this is about art and writing, Rebecca?

1:21:18Jeff:I mean, it's obviously about the solace and liberation of reading and education that was important for Bronte and it's important for the characters. But she does not seem concerned with a writerly identity to me or being an artist with the function of art. of art. The book is not about writing in some way, but books as gateways to freedom. And certainly like that wild, free, intellectual unruliness that was part of the Romantic era is right there.

1:21:48Rebecca:Could you get the most of the gist of this from watching the Signal adaptation?

1:21:52Jeff:I mean, there are several adaptations. You talked about the 1939 one, which is thought to be well done, but nothing has ever become like the signal adaptation. We're going to see if Emerald Fennell can take that trophy. It'll be wild if she does. But you've noted earlier that even in that 1939 version, it ends when Catherine dies, which is the halfway mark of the book. So that's a no then. Like you can't get the just, most of this is about the revenge, actually.

1:22:23Rebecca:Half of it, at least. And the weirder stranger, less Rooly half at that. If we were to make our own adaptation, would you choose a movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets?

1:22:34Jeff:I had fun with this. I want a jukebox musical with early 2000s angsty pop punk. I'm nominating my chemical romance.

1:22:43Rebecca:I started thinking about this as a musical and like Fanu the Opera is sort of doing some things about this, of like this toxic but compelling, generative, but also gross relationship. I think a musical, do I want songs in this? I don't think I do. I would be curious about a play, maybe because I've really got my hooks into there's some Shakespeare pieces to this, and because the most important moments are spoken, right? Whereas in a lot of books we say that are harder to translate, the most important moments are interiority or feeling. All the important feelings are said or unknown, which lends itself to a play.

1:23:29Rebecca:I don't think I would enjoy it myself. I'm not buying a ticket, but let's go to town. I do think a movie can do the setting and the windswept moors and the isolation and some of the real physical pieces that I think are important. And maybe if we were in English in 1850, we'd have a better sense of the terrain here. But mine is all mediated by the idea of Wuthering Heights. Like my idea of the moor is mediated already through Wuthering Heights, which doesn't have much. So it's just a bunch of like weirdly self-referential representations that's sort of based on nothing. Like if you gave me seven landscapes with grass and rolling hills in them, could I pick out the moor?

1:24:11Rebecca:I'm not sure. at this point. Miscellaneous, trivia adaptations, rumors, misretriever quotes, etc.

1:24:18Jeff:When she was a teacher, Bronte told her students that she liked her dog more than she liked people. And it is said that when she died, her dog followed her coffin to the grave and howled outside her bedroom door for weeks. And this reminded me of those t-shirts that say, I like my dog and maybe three people.

1:24:37Rebecca:Can I dwell on that? Maybe this is better for hot takes or the office hours that is not a good thing that's not a good look for people that wear that t-shirt or say i agree does everyone know this do we all know that you're like that's that's a you problem that's that's not a the world is a problem that is a you are a problem the world is certainly a problem but that you like your dog and maybe three people as a t-shirt you're wearing i'm not sure we're i'm not sure you're where you think the t-shirt is certainly not helping you no at that place no but i had some affection for her for her poor dog here

1:25:09Jeff:dogs have a rough time in wuthering heights i felt that for them i don't think it was all great for

1:25:15Rebecca:dogs on the moors and then farms and you know they're they're not getting the farmer's dog subscription food service you know what i'm saying it's not happening and i think this is your note

1:25:24Jeff:here but this is like bronte is one of those cases where we just don't have much biographical historical info about the author and that dearth makes the text like much more interesting and intriguing, mysterious, elusive. That we don't know much about her is part of what works here, I think.

1:25:42Rebecca:I have one more that I forgot to put in. Emily, and I think it was Anne, co-authored a book of a volume of poetry, had it sort of essentially the version of self-publishing. It wasn't quite the same it was today. You'd like pay a publisher to do it. Not uncommon. And there was one review of that work. Would you like to guess how many, as far as we know, how many copies of that were sold? Oh, I have no idea. Two. Two confirmed copies sold and got one review. So there we go. Tough, tough out there for writers always and forever. Hot takes, Rebecca. We got several here. We do.

1:26:16Jeff:This lends itself to hot takes. I think girls who are obsessed with Wuthering Heights don't actually want Heathcliff. They want to be Kathy. She's spirited and passionate and independent. She's desired by two men and she's described as saucy multiple times and she gets to be a monster. If anything is aspirational, it's not the love story. It's Kathy's wildness and this guy coming after her. But as we have said, this is also not the kind of love that you want to be a subject of.

1:26:44Rebecca:No, not at all. I'd like to introduce those people who have maybe not read Much Ado About Nothing or looking for a role model. Beatrice and Much Ado About Nothing. Maybe I just like Shakespeare better. Or it's just like she gets to be feisty and fun and she holds her own and still doesn't like go nuts and burn everything down. And great news for people.

1:27:05Jeff:That is the Shakespeare of this season of Zero to Well-Read. So stay tuned. There might be a reason for that.

1:27:10Rebecca:Let's see. What else do I have? This is a critique of romance. This is Heathcliff. she abandoned them under a delusion she answered picturing me in a hero of romance expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion i can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature so obstinately she has persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impressions she cherished i i don't know you can take down the idea of capital r romance more directly than that or a certain version a certain idealized um extreme version of it.

1:27:48Jeff:I also, and maybe this is, I don't know if this is a hot take, I just think the title does a lot of work for making the book seem highfalutin. If it's called something other than Wuthering Heights. Catherine and Heathcliff?

1:28:00Rebecca:If it's called Catherine and Heathcliff?

1:28:03Jeff:It's, I don't know. It doesn't have as much aura around it.

1:28:06Rebecca:It reminds me of that scene in the West Wing where they have to, you know, say something about Bingo Bob being the vice president. They choose Redoubtable because no one knows what it means. Yes. I think Wuthering is like really a shibboleth or again another West Wing, or not a shibboleth It's just sort of a... It just sounds high-minded. An empty cipher for meaning. Yes. Yes. I agree with you.

1:28:24Jeff:Yeah. Bob this week was like, what actually is Wuthering? And I was like, I don't think that many people in the year of our Lord 2026 know what Wuthering is. It's just our cave version of Wuthering, right?

1:28:32Rebecca:Yeah. That's what I saw. It just like means subject to weather.

1:28:36Jeff:Right. And it's the name of the house. It's not like the place that they, you know, the natural setting that they're in. No. It kind of refers to that. But if this, yeah, if this is just called Catherine and Heathcliff or like, you know, I don't even know what the like a good alternate title would be. But if it's if it's called what Lockwood Grange or whatever the the home is that he lives in, it's not nearly as compelling today. But the title sounds like you have engaged with something high minded.

1:29:05Rebecca:I forgot to put this one down, too. You always know it's a bad guy if you only have one name. His name is just Heathcliff. He's not like Jim Heathcliff. His name is just Heathcliff.

1:29:13Jeff:Yeah, you got to watch out for guys with one name and guys with two first names.

1:29:17Rebecca:Yeah, right. And Heathcliff is sort of, it's Heath and Cliff. It's two names jammed into one. That's terrible. Worst of all worlds. I have nothing here for read-alikes. I really don't. I mean, like, there's Jane Eyre and some gothic stuff. But, like, even that, I don't have a good comp. You have some stuff here I don't think are bad. Yeah, none of it. I don't think any of it's great. I agree.

1:29:35Jeff:There's not, like, a straight comp for Wuthering Heights. Maybe you go to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier for more of that gothic. Like a more romance-y story. Gatsby for a different spin on how being obsessed with the past is a bad plan for you. And then honestly, like I just thought about the movie Cruel Intentions a lot. That's a good idea. You're like, you want your fix of messy people. You could get it in two hours. They're also, I think, they're step-siblings in that. Like, just go watch Cruel Intentions.

1:30:02Rebecca:Which is itself a modernization of danger. Of les liaisons des droves. So maybe if you really want to be falutin. Can you be low falutin?

1:30:10Jeff:A great question.

1:30:11Rebecca:You can be highfalutin. Could you be like normallyfalutin?

1:30:14Jeff:Can you just befalutin?

1:30:15Rebecca:Justfalutin. It's like being whelmed. Yeah. But if you want to be highfalutin, go read Dangerous Liaisons, the original French there. Cocktail Party Crib Sheet. Well, I agree with the same thing. This is, again, it goes back to my, this is actually a critique of an all-encompassing romantic love.

1:30:33Jeff:This is a book about why you should not want a boy to be obsessed with you.

1:30:36Rebecca:I think even critique is wrong. It's not even that. But it's more elemental than critique. It's like, this is what can, taken to its logical end, this is what a singular romantic pursuit does. It becomes a glacier moving through the, you know, rolling down the mountain and destroying everything in its path. Man, an interesting one. Zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest. One, historical importance. Two, readability. Three, current relevance of central questions. four book nerd read cred and five oh damn factor all of these are qualified because historical importance it's become historically important but it's not like this is the highest example of x or nor it led to y was a part of this movement on the other hand is that that could also i could hear the argument that it heightens this historical improvement because it is a one-of-one

1:31:27Jeff:i think that means we just drop it right in the middle you make it a five okay i think readability

1:31:33Rebecca:I think the readability is pretty low, actually.

1:31:36Jeff:Readability. And especially the servant's accents.

1:31:39Rebecca:Oh, yeah. You had that. We don't think we lingered on that. You had that. Tough. I could barely understand it. I skipped a lot of it because I can't make head nor tail out of it.

1:31:46Jeff:Yeah, no. And we talked about it a little in Little Women that the servant's accent was rough. But this is way rougher. And my edition had some footnotes for some of the slang that the servants were using. But in my opinion, there were not nearly enough footnotes to help me understand what was going on. Like, can we get some rewrites, please? Readability is, I don't know, four?

1:32:08Rebecca:I'd say three even. Yeah. Yeah. Whenever Joseph was getting ready to say a long thing, I was like, oh, no. I know. If there were major plot points buried in there, I'm sorry to listeners. I'm sorry to Bronte. I'm sorry to the literary canon. I did not get them.

1:32:20Jeff:I think we can take some validation that that was a critique that even Charlotte Bronte had of Emily Bronte's writing was she's never met these people. This is just what she imagines people of this class to sound like.

1:32:31Rebecca:I think that was one of our hot takes from Little Women. Are we sure that Alcott wouldn't like another crack at dialect? I think that's a fair one here. Current relevance of central questions presupposes we know what those central questions are.

1:32:48Jeff:i mean toxic relationships are perpetually relevant but also

1:32:54Rebecca:this book is so misunderstood yeah i think this is it's not dated i don't think it can be dated in that regard but it's hard to know what it's about maybe a seven i find myself compelled by what if you know is this is this really what people are desiring is this really what you understand or what happens to be obsessed if it's about obsession it's about single-mindedness but also about rebuke and scorn like that hasn't gone away but i'm not sure i know that's what it's about i think i can get on board with a six here okay sure this however i think is pretty good given everything we've said if someone's like you know i wanted to go see what weathering heights is about if they said that to me i'd be like that's good work and then they finished it yeah that is the book nerd read so like an eight eight or nine nine yeah oh damn factor at its very heights I have nines like at these at these really high soliloquies slash monologues slash whatever they're nines they're way up there with anything you're going to see in Melville and other things but they're you have to you have to get there like the rest of the stuff is so clunky it almost makes me wonder am I reading what I'm reading when I'm reading those my experience of it was I think

1:34:02Jeff:when those heights happened I was so relieved that something enjoyable was happening that it tempered the oh damn factor for me. So I would have been like a six or a seven on that.

1:34:13Rebecca:Yeah. I'll drag us maybe towards a seven and a half or eight if you don't mind there. Okay, Rebecca. That brings us to the end of our discussion. If you've got thoughts, email us, zero2wellread at bookriot.com. You can follow us on socials at zero2wellreadpodcast. That's Instagram, TikTok. And YouTube, go to patreon.com slash zero2wellread for detailed show notes, free newsletter, and to sign up for membership options. One of those options has the option to sign up for bonus content we call office hours that we're going to record right now, but will available only to subscribers that level. Thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read.

1:34:52Rebecca:Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, we did it.

1:34:57Jeff:We did it.

1:34:58Rebecca:We scaled the heights. We weathered the heights.

1:35:00Jeff:We weathered the weathered? I don't know.

1:35:03Rebecca:We weathered the weather of Emily Bronte. Singular, titanic.

1:35:07Jeff:Thank God it's singular.

1:35:09Rebecca:Inscrutable. Right. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you all later.

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