Brontë-saurus!

It's an odd title for a blog post, but if you have no idea what I'm talking about, then just bear with me. I promise that you will find out why eventually. ;)

Sorry if my last post sounded a little depressing. Things are okay and have calmed down over the weekend. In fact, my sister and I kind of re-bonded over a successful charity project we had to do yesterday for Rainbow. Thank goodness!

Anyway, I finished reading Jane Eyre recently, and I've gotta say, I ABSO-FREAKIN'-LUTELY LOVED IT. Charlotte Bronte, you are a literary genius! AMEN to strong female protagonists who show us the way to be true to ourselves, who reject the BS society tries to shove down their throats, who eventually forgive those who have utterly wronged them, and who are capable of loving someone unconditionally (no matter how horribly twisted his mistakes were, *cough, cough, Rochester*).

Jane Eyre has officially joined my list of favorite female heroines, along with Viola of Messaline, Elizabeth Bennet, Suze Simon, Em Watts, and Buffy -- to name a few.

So anyway, I've recently picked up Wuthering Heights, written by Charlotte's sister Emily, and so far I'm on Chapter 5. It's been sitting on my shelf collecting dust for about 7 years. I bought the paperback in a 2-book special from the Scholastic catalog when I was in the 6th grade. You can't resist buying a couple of classics that cost altogether $2.00 and have pretty covers like these: 

Darcy gives his letter of sincere apology to Elizabeth! GASP! I devoured Pride & Prejudice right away -- it was actually the main reason for my purchase, hehe. I'd read the abridged version in 4th grade and wanted to read the original text, so I went ahead and bought it -- especially since Wuthering Heights came with it, both for a cheap price!

Heathcliff on this book cover looks TOTALLY hot. That's the edition that I have, and man, do I feel butterflies a-fluttering in my tummy whenever I admire the cover. But perhaps Scholastic picked up on this, so they changed the cover to something less... um, provocative. They're a children's book publishing company, first and foremost. Go figure. Here's the new cover that they settled for instead:

The cover art seems appropriate here, if a 12-year-old girl were to pick this up and read it. The setting is in the moors, an endless stretch of uneven grassland that you could easily get lost in. It's supposed to symbolize the characters getting lost in their passions -- both for love of each other and for bitter revenge against those who have wronged them.

But I still prefer the blue cover with the hot Heathcliff. I could just 'effing SWOON!

Then, in the middle of my search, I came across a completely different type of cover...

OH GOD, NO. I found this Twilight-ish cover for Wuthering Heights on this website. WHY, WHY, WHY must it permeate everything?! To tell you honestly, Stephenie Meyer sort of killed Wuthering Heights for me. When I was reading Eclipse last summer, I thought Meyer was stretching the comparison between Belward and Cathcliff wayyyyy too far. Bella, according to SMeyer, has it SOOOOO BAD for Edward -- as much as Cathy had it for Heathcliff. But I beg to differ. Bella's just sex-starved, in my opinion. As if dying a virgin was a fate worse than death itself. There are SAINTS who died to preserve their virginity, and yet this twit-face a-dork-a-klutz is so willing to give hers away to a sparkly, blood-sucking century-old popsicle. I mean, Bella was the one trying to desperately jump Edward's bones from day one.

I get the message that both couples are star-crossed, but they're star-crossed in very, very different ways.

Exhibit A: How The Lovely Couples All End Up 

Cathy and Heathcliff NEVER get together -- not officially, at least to my knowledge and from what I've heard about Bronte's story. Society always gets in the way, because society says that Cathy's too good to marry Heathcliff. And okay, it may seem that forces also try to keep Bella and Edward apart -- such as Bella's werewolf friends disapproving of her relationship with Edward, and other vampires who want to tear Bella's throat out. HOWEVER, Bella and Edward end up attached at the hip for eternity with a life-sucking monster daughter whom Jacob imprints on. A slightly messed up ever after for the vamp lover and the twinkle-toed mind reader, but an ever after nonetheless. Cathy and Heathcliff weren't so fortunate -- one of them dies, and the other is constantly haunted by the lover's ghost (or vivid memory of their beloved, really).

Exhibit B: The Heroines (in Bella's case, the heroin, hardy-har-har)

Cathy is impetuous and mischievous, often wiry and adventurous. She's always getting into trouble because she's always active. If I'm correct, she always drags Heathcliff down with her when she's running around making mischief. Whereas Bella is just a Mary Sue whose only interest is in doing the laundry, washing dishes, and eye-sexing (er, gawking and drooling over) her dazzling undead "veggie" vamp boyfriend. If Bella does find herself in knee-deep shit, it's because she's the passive victim of other vamps wanting to drink her blood or wanting her dead because Eddie killed their mate.

Exhibit C: The Heroes, the Bloody Bastard and the Bloodsucker
Heathcliff is a surly and sullen kind of guy, due to his rough childhood. He's an orphan, and he was found by Mr. Earnshaw, Cathy's father, who decided to take him in and adopt him as if Heathcliff was his own son. Meanwhile, Cathy's older brother, Hindley, totally hated Heathcliff because Heathcliff was always stealing his thunder, always their father's favorite. Heathcliff was pretty much abused throughout his life, and this hardened him into the harsh man he grew up to become. Heathcliff can't possibly be compared to Edward -- at least, not in a substantial and monumental way that SMeyer tries to pass it off as.

So Edward is also an orphan, due to the Spanish influenza outbreak in the early 1900s. And maybe Edward's probably killed a few people because he may have lost control when he was a newborn vampire (as we vaguely learn in the leaked Midnight Sun draft). But a majority of the time Edward is too much of a gentleman to get rowdy. Sure, he gets jealous of Jacob -- especially after Jake does a reverse fur-splosion and morphs back into his impeccable naked human glory. (Bella, you should have gone for wolf boy!) But despite the angsty grimacing and jealousy, Edward usually is the Kodak picture, the poster-child of decorum (insofar as how Meyer wants us to see him; Edward's just a walking mess of psychological fuckery, even more so than Heathcliff).

The Verdict?
If anything, I think SMeyer's attempt at the comparison between her lovebirds and Emily Bronte's classic couple pales greatly. Twi-tards are going to get the wrong idea about Wuthering Heights.

On a lighter note, I found out that a Sparknotes blogger plans to blog about Wuthering Heights, mostly to find its literary merit. SMeyer had also killed the classic story for this person, but due to the persuasive pleading of some Brontephilic friends, this person decided to read Wuthering Heights after all, and to also blog their reactions about it. They're pretty funny. So far, they've blogged about chapters 1 and 2. You can find their blog posts -- just click here.

I think I'll do the same. I already have a marble composition notebook especially dedicated for this, and I actually entitled it "Julianne's Reading Journal for Breaking Down Dense Literature: Tackling Wuthering Heights." So far I've written recaps for chapters 1-5. I'll type them up and post them in this blog in my next entries. Maybe it'll help you out and also get you interested in the book.

In the meantime, I'll leave you with this extremely amusing video that I found on Youtube a couple of weeks ago. These would have been AWESOME toys to play with growing up, wouldn't you say?