Pride, Prejudice and Popcorn
Page 8
Heathcliff finds out how sick Cathy is and although Nelly begs him not to visit Cathy because excitement will kill her, he is determined, so he gets in and they have a truly touching scene in which they apologize to each other for all the selfish and bitter things they’ve done, and vow to be better people to each other from here on.
Ha, just kidding! Cathy’s response to seeing her heartbroken lover is to curse him for killing her by aggravating her to death, and Heathcliff’s response to seeing his dying lover is to curse her for breaking his heart and dying. Basically they have a big fight, with lots of “embracing.” Finally Heathcliff has to leave, and Cathy gives birth to a baby who is also named Cathy (we’ll call her “Cathy 2.0”). Cathy the First dies while Heathcliff hides outside the house. Heathcliff begs/curses Cathy to haunt him, and not to rest until he, too, is dead. This is where he says his famous line, “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (106).
Let me digress for a moment to mention an important Cathy fact. I did not shed a single tear for Cathy when she died. In fact, even though I sympathized with her because of her horrible life, I was thrilled that she wouldn’t be having tantrums and pinching people anymore. But upon the twelfth or so rereading of the book, I realized that Cathy acts like a spoiled kid partly because she is, in fact, a kid, or a very young woman, all the way through the book. Edgar proposes to her when she is about fifteen years old, and she dies three years later. No wonder she never matures as a person—she never has time. And that, combined with the fact that Cathy has so few options in her life, is worth a few tears.
Isabella proves to be a secret badass by escaping from Heathcliff and living for many years in hiding with help from Edgar. Yay! Hindley finally dies. Sorry Hindley, but…yay. Heathcliff is now the owner of Wuthering Heights and guardian of Hareton, who he vows to mold into a depraved brute, because nothing says “romantic hero” like child abuse. Specifically, he says, “Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we’ll see if one tree won’t grow as crooked as another with the same wind to twist it!” (118).
Chapters XVIII–XXIX: In which Heathcliff attempts to wreak vengeance by attacking people who weren’t even born when he was being insulted and abused.
Heathcliff put the first part of his revenge plan in place when he seduced Isabella and got Wuthering Heights away from Hindley. But his vengeance is not complete, oh, no.
Back in London where she’s been hiding out, my hero Isabella dies of another mysterious Victorian Wasting Disease. Up until this point Heathcliff did not pursue her, but he was keeping track of where she was so that he could grab her son (who is also his son) when he is good and ready. Once she dies, he swoops poor Linton (that’s the kid’s name) off to Wuthering Heights. At this point in the narrative, we jump ahead again about three years.
So here’s how things stand sixteen years after Cathy’s death. Cathy 2.0 (Cathy’s daughter) is, like her mother, high-spirited, naive and spoiled, but she has a strong core of sweetness, having known only love all her life. Linton is already suffering from Victorian Disease (his looks like that Victorian favorite, consumption, but it’s never named), and his time at Wuthering Heights has made him into an utterly selfish, whiny, vicious brat. Hareton is completely illiterate, has been taught a wide variety of curse words but no manners at all and does the farm work on the estate that is rightfully his.
When Cathy 2.0 is sixteen, she escapes the insufficiently watchful eye of Nelly and goes out to the moors, where she meets Heathcliff. Since she knows nothing of Heathcliff, she is perfectly cheerful about trotting off to the Heights with him, where—surprise!—her cousin Linton is living. Heathcliff is clearly matchmaking, and there is much covert exchanging of notes and such for a while until finally two things happen:
1. Edgar (remember Edgar? The one who was actually married to Cathy?) is stricken with Mysterious Victorian Disease. Cathy 2.0 needs to be by his side, all the time.
2. Linton, who suffers from a different Mysterious Victorian Disease (consumption, I assume, based on the coughing), becomes gravely ill, and sends Cathy 2.0 a note begging to see her.
Cathy 2.0 sneaks off to see Linton and is horrified to discover that although Linton really is near death, the message begging her to visit it was part of an Evil Plan. Heathcliff had been trying to get those two wacky kids together so that Linton would then have Cathy 2.0’s money, and then he would leave a will giving everything to Heathcliff, and then he would die. Thus would Heathcliff have wreaked vengeance on the Linton family. But the courtship was going slowly, and Linton was clearly at death’s door, so Heathcliff lured Cathy 2.0 over to speed things up—which he does by locking her into the house and telling her that she can’t leave until she marries Linton and spends a night there. He ends up keeping Cathy 2.0 captive for about a week. When he finally lets her go home, her father is still alive (yay!) but not for long (d’oh!). The orphaned Cathy 2.0, who did marry Linton, is taken back to Wuthering Heights to serve as Linton’s nurse.
Chapters XXX–XXXII: In which Heathcliff’s plans are foiled, and we reach the end.
Linton dies, bringing the death total to ten so far (Mr. Earnshaw, Mrs. Earnshaw, Mr. and Mrs. Linton, Hindley’s wife, Hindley, Isabella, Catherine Earnshaw, Edgar and Linton—litters of puppies and nests of baby birds not included). Heathcliff informs Cathy 2.0 that because she married Linton, and Linton left everything to Heathcliff, Heathcliff now owns everything that Cathy 2.0 has, from the Grange to her clothes. Mr. Lockwood (remember him?) shows up and finds Wuthering Heights to be an appalling place. The book thus far was a flashback—we are now up to speed on things with Mr. Lockwood wandering around.
But Heathcliff, who should be cackling with glee at the fact that everyone around him is either miserable or dead (in most cases, miserable and then dead), is having motivational problems. Cathy 2.0 is moving with startlingly modern precision through the stages of grief as described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. There was Denial (“Mr. Heathcliff, you’re a cruel man, but you’re not a fiend; and you won’t, from mere malice, destroy irrevocably all my happiness” [173].), Anger (much of it directed at Hareton for his role as an accomplice in Heathcliff’s plot), Bargaining, Depression (enter the unimpressed Mr. Lockwood), and finally, Acceptance. Cathy 2.0 begins to make friends with Hareton and teach him to read. Soon Cathy 2.0 and Hareton are running around the moors just like Heathcliff and Cathy did—but they are able to show kindness and selflessness toward each other. They have fights and make mistakes, but they are able to put each other’s needs ahead of their own in a way that Cathy and Heathcliff never did.
Heathcliff would love to break them up, but he is continually haunted by Cathy the First and is strangely lethargic. Every time he tries to hit Cathy 2.0, or even scold her, he is distracted. “It is a poor conclusion, is it not…an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses…and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished!” (203). He sees visions of Catherine everywhere, and eventually, he locks himself in her old room, where he starves himself to death (bringing the death total to eleven).
Hareton, who should have been the master of Wuthering Heights since his father’s death, becomes master of it at last. He and Cathy 2.0 order that Wuthering Heights be shut up. They will be married and live at the Grange. Local people say that they see the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff wandering the moors. The end.
The Big Picture
Ladies and gentlemen, the best way to give you the Big Picture of Wuthering Heights is with the following description from Isabella explaining how she escaped from Heathcliff (Joseph is a servant who spends the whole book preaching hellfire, and “His host” refers to Hindley):
The back of the settle and Earnshaw’s person interposed between me and him; so instead of endeavoring to reach me, he snatched a dinner knife from the table and flung it at my head. It struck beneath my ear, and stopped the sentence I was uttering, but
, pulling it out, I sprang to the door and delivered another; which I hope went a little deeper than his missile. The last glimpse I caught of him was a furious rush on his part, checked by the embrace of his host; and both fell locked together on the hearth. In my flight through the kitchen, I bid Joseph speed to his master; I knocked over Hareton, who was hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway, and, blessed as a soul escaped from purgatory, I bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road…and far rather would I be condemned to a perpetual dwelling in the infernal regions than, even for one night abide beneath the roof of Wuthering Heights again (115).
Why am I inserting this lengthy quote in the middle of the Big Picture? Because the entire book is here in miniature, and yet no adaptation wants to touch this passage. Every kind of cruelty is explored in this book—child abuse, abuse of women, verbal abuse, physical abuse and cruelty toward animals (both sadistic, as when Heathcliff starves a nest of birds to death because he is angry with Cathy, and pragmatic, as when Hareton kills the puppies in order to keep the farm’s dog population down). There are racist epithets and insults based on class, and aspersions on the virtue of women and masculinity of men. Heathcliff and Cathy live in a cruel world, and they respond by being cruel to themselves, to each other and to everyone around them.
Just as with Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice, there are some themes that an adaptation of Wuthering Heights needs to address in order to be a good adaptation. Unfortunately, the book is so dense that it seems to be almost impossible for a filmmaker to deal with them all. Some filmmakers get part of the book right, but I don’t think any of them did justice to the whole book. Remember that I’m judging these works based specifically on their success as adaptations. Here are some of the major themes of the book that I want a film to address:
1. Although we should feel deep sympathy for Cathy and Heathcliff, who endure abuse as children and societal limitations as adults, we are not supposed to admire Cathy and Heathcliff. We’re not supposed to root for those two crazy kids to get together. It’s not a romance. Their relationship is one of obsession and selfishness. It’s also about two people who have no sense of boundaries. But instead of thinking, “I must sacrifice myself to the other, for I can’t live without them,” they think, “I am he (as she is me, as you are he and we are all together) and so he must want what I want and I must have what I want all the time.” It never occurs to Cathy that Heathcliff will be dissatisfied with seeing her married to another man. It’s what Cathy wants, so she assumes that it must also be what Heathcliff wants. Since they are the only people of importance in the world, it certainly doesn’t matter what Edgar Linton wants. It never occurs to Heathcliff to stay away from Cathy when any excitement is bound to kill her—in his mind, if he wants to see her, it necessarily follows that she must want to see him.
2. People are shaped by how they are treated. Heathcliff and Cathy are not admirable characters, but it is possible to view them with sympathy because we see how horribly they are treated as adults and as children, and how completely they are trapped by social constraints. Even Isabella and Cathy 2.0 become almost completely transformed after a short period of being trapped and abused by Heathcliff. Critics love Wuthering Heights because it deals so eloquently with the effects of prejudice, isolation, class discrimination, patriarchy and child abuse on the individual. I don’t think an adaptation has to take on all these issues, but it does have to communicate the idea that there are societal and familial forces at work here.
3. Although people are shaped by how they are treated, people are not without some ability to choose their responses. Hindley drinks himself to death. Heathcliff and Cathy become obsessive and selfish, and, in Heathcliff’s case, viciously cruel. But Isabella, who is even more thoroughly trapped than Cathy, finds a way to free herself, and Cathy 2.0 and Hareton are able to discover deep reserves of selfless love. Cathy 2.0 and Hareton choose to be happy long before their external circumstances change by learning to respect themselves and each other.
4. Wuthering Heights is a grandiose, melodramatic story. It is the gothic story. That excerpt I quoted above, with the knife throwing and the insults and running out into the moors past the dead puppies? It’s not an unusual one. If you want to do Wuthering Heights, you’ve got to be pretty over the top. And you have to have terrible weather and a sense of profound isolation.
5. Wuthering Heights is not a story about love, but it is a story about passion. I’m often baffled at how people can see the Heathcliff/Cathy relationship as a romantic one, when they are so unremittingly selfish and cruel toward one another. But I think what draws people to that relationship is the dark allure of being someone’s whole world. Cathy and Heathcliff need one another to exist and yet they feed one another’s worst impulses. There is something mesmerizingly attractive about the idea of being so important to another person that they have to possess you—your will, your body, your very identity. Any adaptation worth its salt should not romanticize the Heathcliff/Cathy relationship, but it should show them as having tremendous chemistry. Heathcliff, in particular, should regard Cathy with an obsessive intensity that is both sexual and frightening.
Up until a year ago, I would have told you that I loathed Wuthering Heights. But now I see it very differently. I can see why people have written thousands of pages analyzing the book—I’m finding it rather difficult not to do so myself. It’s not a romance. It’s a horror story about the generational legacies of child abuse, class oppression, patriarchy, alcoholism and bigotry. But it’s not unrelentingly dark. The romance between Cathy 2.0 and Hareton shows that it’s possible to choose to break cycles of oppression. In a book where love is a toxic, selfish, destructive force, Cathy 2.0 and Hareton show us love as a selfless source of joy—something that can make us better.
The Adaptations
According to my best friend, Wikipedia, there are thirty-five adaptations of Wuthering Heights for TV and film. If it says so in Wikipedia, it must be true, and there is no way that I can watch thirty-five versions of Wuthering Heights. Neither my schedule nor my sanity will permit it. Instead, I’m presenting you with a broad range of adaptations that are easily accessible. I found most of mine at the library or on Netflix, so they aren’t terribly esoteric, and they span a range from Laurence Olivier to the MTV version. And no, this picky reviewer was not satisfied with any of them! Wuthering Heights has a reputation of being an unfilmable novel, and all the evidence I’ve seen has shown this to be true. Just read the book, y’all, and every time someone dies, take a shot (or eat some cake, which I prefer).
I have the same criticism of most of these, so I’ll just say it once here to avoid repetition. Most of these versions try to humanize Cathy and Heathcliff by leaving out some of the pair’s bad behavior (Cathy’s tantrums seem to get cut a lot, making the adult Cathy seem like a reasonable person who is a victim of circumstance and of her stalker, Heathcliff). This makes the movie much more watchable, but it’s a cheat and it reinforces the idea that this is a couple to root for. Most of the movies leave out everything that happens after Cathy dies, which reinforces the tragic-love-story angle but pretty much eliminates almost all the things that the book has to say.
Another almost universal problem is that of age. Some adaptations cast the same actress as Cathy and as Cathy’s daughter, which is quite a stretch. All of the Cathys, with the exception of Kaya Scodelario, are much older than Cathy is in most of the book. This is a problem because some of Cathy’s behavior in the book can be explained by sheer immaturity.
The strange narrative structure and the lack of sympathetic characters make Wuthering Heights famously difficult to film, and although some of these were good movies, almost none of them were Wuthering Heights. These adaptations have their strengths and weaknesses, but if you want to know what Wuthering Heights is about, you’re going to have to read the book. Since most of these adaptations make huge changes from the text, assume this includes many, many movie and miniseries spoilers.
Wuthering Heights, 1939—The One With Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon (★★½)
This was the last adaptation I watched, and it was helpful in reminding me what most people likely think of when they think of Wuthering Heights—a romantic gothic story in which deeply flawed people keep messing each other up, but they are clearly meant to be together and are a happy couple after death. As you know by now, this is not how I interpret Wuthering Heights, but it was still nice to watch Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff stalk around drawing rooms with his black eyeliner and swirling his cape around at the butler just like Dracula. The Linton household has a lot of gauzy curtains, and I was disappointed that Heathcliff never flew in through a window. Meanwhile Merle Oberon delivers a fantastic, though totally untrue to the book, performance as Cathy. Unlike her book counterpart, who expresses emotions by screaming and pinching people, this Cathy represses her emotions as much as possible and literally vibrates with tension. And her clothes! There’s this fancy white dress she wears that is covered with gold netting. I crave it desperately. Later she shows up at Wuthering Heights in a cloak lined with so much fur that she looks like a tribble with facial features. Then there are the gauzy nightgowns, which are more see-through than you might expect, and the jewelry, and all I can say is that you’d do well to put the mute on and just watch this movie for the cinematography and the clothes.
It will come as no surprise that this movie changes tons of things about the book to make Cathy and Heathcliff as relatable as possible, right down to showing that Heathcliff is fond of dogs (in the book, both Cathy and Heathcliff enjoy tormenting dogs, Hareton kills off unwanted puppies as sort of a farming chore, and Linton likes killing cats). Geraldine Fitzgerald delivers a fantastic, if somewhat over-the-top, performance as Isabella. Remember that this was the last version I saw, so by this time I was not inclined to get all worked up about the fates of these people, but Fitzgerald’s Isabella made me a little teary, even in my jaded state, as she begs for Heathcliff’s love. I must also applaud Hugh Williams, as Hindley, who delivers the best line of any adaptation I’ve seen. When Nelly tells him that Heathcliff has run away, and that Cathy ran out onto the moors after Heathcliff, Hindley drunkenly declaims, “Well! Don’t stand there with your mouth open like a fish! Go open a bottle, and let’s celebrate!” I may have developed an appreciation for the book, but I still think Heathcliff and Cathy are deeply irritating characters, so I had to watch that line several times whilst shrieking with laughter.