I don't know, have you and Rochester gotten a little stale? Perhaps a little dangerous flirtation with another bad boy is just what's needed to put the spark back into your relationship.Originally Posted by Laura Clarke
I don't know, have you and Rochester gotten a little stale? Perhaps a little dangerous flirtation with another bad boy is just what's needed to put the spark back into your relationship.
ay up
I read both the same year.
For me, Jane Eyre is a moving story about a passionate and noble-minded girl growing up facing adversity and good fortune, in turn. Wuthering Heights is an existential whirlpool scything through the cultural norms and sensitivities of conventional humanity. Jane Eyre left me feeling of warm: Wuthering Heights feeling raped. I rate the latter among a handful of superlative novels.
"Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself"
Haha - no way, prendrelemick. I'll always love Rochester
But thanks guys - I'll definitively give it a try
I once read an article arguing that the trio Arthur Huntingdon (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Ann), Rochester (CB) and Heathcliffe (by Emily) were in fact different gradations of the Byronic Hero, the type of man you describe: mysterious past, doesn't give a damn (Rhett Butler who feels he's been wronged), and destructive. The article termed him 'mad, bad and dangerous'. However, where Heathcliffe is so dangerous that he actually kills everyone around and where Huntingdon is a lost cause who lets himself be helped too late, Rochester is made acceptable as you say. He's 'neutralised' by his blindness, so to say. Indeed he's become dependent on Jane and he can't really do anything to her because he can't see her.
I still don't know why anyone would go weak at the knees with Heathcliffe, though. Rochester, yes, because apart from being a manipulator there's not much wrong with him, but Heathcliffe that's something else...
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
I whole-heartedly agree!
Much as I love Jane Eyre for the kind of realism it projects in that relationship between Jane and Rochester who should actually be 'just' a secondary character, I really really was blown away by Wuthering Heights. It's one of the very very few books I just couldn't be torn away from. From the very first few sentences it just sucked you in in the most devilish way really. For the time that's quite remarkable.
There are no superlatives that can really express how truly sublime it is.
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
Charlotte took pains to distance Rochester from her siblings' literary heroes in a letter to her publisher in 1848:I once read an article arguing that the trio Arthur Huntingdon (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Ann), Rochester (CB) and Heathcliffe (by Emily) were in fact different gradations of the Byronic Hero, the type of man you describe: mysterious past, doesn't give a damn (Rhett Butler who feels he's been wronged), and destructive. The article termed him 'mad, bad and dangerous'. However, where Heathcliffe is so dangerous that he actually kills everyone around and where Huntingdon is a lost cause who lets himself be helped too late, Rochester is made acceptable as you say. He's 'neutralised' by his blindness, so to say. Indeed he's become dependent on Jane and he can't really do anything to her because he can't see her
I still don't know why anyone would go weak at the knees with Heathcliffe, though. Rochester, yes, because apart from being a manipulator there's not much wrong with him, but Heathcliffe that's something else...
You say Mr Huntingdon reminds you of Mr Rochester – does he? Yet there is no likeness between the two; the foundation of each character is entirely different. Huntingdon is a specimen of the naturally selfish sensual superficial man whose one merit of a joyous temperament only avails him while he is young and healthy, whose best days are his earliest, who never profits by experience, who is sure to grow worse the older he grows.
Mr Rochester has a thoughtful nature and a very feeling heart; he is neither selfish nor self-indulgent; he is ill-educated, misguided; errs, when he does err, through rashness and inexperience: he lives for a time as too many other men live, but being radically better than most men, he does not like that degraded life, and is never happy in it. He is taught the severe lessons of experience and has sense to learn wisdom from them. Years improve him; the effervescence of youth foamed away, what is really good in him still remains. His nature is like wine of a good vintage, time cannot sour – but only mellows him. Such, at least, was the character I meant to portray.
Heathcliff....is quite another creation. He exemplifies the effects which a life of continued injustice and hard usage may produce on a naturally perverse, vindictive and inexorable disposition. Carefully trained and kindly treated, the black gypsy-cub might possibly have been reared into a human being, but tyranny and ignorance made of him a mere demon.
I've owned Wuthering Heights for years but never read it because I've despised the characters in the adaptations I've watched. However, if the writing's as sublime as you are all saying it is, perhaps I've been depriving myself!
I love Jane Eyre.
Adaptations are rarely faithful, especially of a novel as subtle and radical as this. Heathcliff is hard to despise because his upbringing is so tortured. Catherine is Nietsche's superman and leaves us in awe. I've read nothing better and the memory still haunts me years later.
Jane Eyre is a fine story: Wuthering Heights is a tour de force. After all, Charlotte felt the need to water down Emily's masterpiece after her early death.
Last edited by Gladys; 12-31-2015 at 02:19 AM.
"Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself"
I think I need to read Wuthering Heights again, I was underwhelmed, I couldn't accept that people would act like that.
I got on a bit better with Jane, but again there were parts where I couldn't suspend disblief.
I enjoyed Tenant of Wildfell Hall best of the three, It was probably the most scandalous of the three at the time, but the plot and resolution satisfies the modern reader.
ay up
Jane Eyre is also a sort of alter ego of Charlotte, who fell herself in love with an older married man. It was seemingly a unrequited love. Charlotte seemed to be very inexperienced at the time. The relationship probably consistet mainly of an correspondence, intense on Charlottes side and not more than friendly on the professor's side.
So there was more wish fullfillment than reality involved. And, of course, Charlotte let her heroine have eveything she herself had wanted and could not get: a loving but dependent husband, riches, position, a happy family and children.
Last edited by Danik 2016; 03-11-2016 at 02:53 PM.
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
almost 8yrs after the fact, I actually remember everyone ignoring my post....so screw you all!
jane austen characters aside, and just for fun from some of the books ive since read:
holmes was ~59 when he starts a relationship with mary Russell, who was an underage teenager. the eventually marry.
Harry Blyth’s The Accusing Shadow, 1894. Daisy is 19 and Mr. Roach is 48.
Lee Child’s Jack Reacher in Running Blind. Reacher was in love with his CO’s daughter, Jodie Garber, when she was 15.
Alex Berenson The Faithful Spy, p83: “He didn’t gamble but he enjoyed the pageantry of the place, the billionaires walking beside women half their age…”
John Lescroat Dead Irish p113 “So Sam Polk had married Nika about six months ago. He looked to be around 55. She was mid-20s, maybe a little more. Got to be money Hardy thought, at least to some extent.”
David Baldacci’s The Target 2015. Will Robie is the object of the president's 15yr old daughter Claire Casson’s affection. Per a 2012 book, he was 40 then. The events in the latter book occur after the earlier one. He is at least 40 something.
Exit to Eden (1985) Lisa, ~18yrs old, answers an ad “Applications still being taken for the Roissy Academy. At this late date, only those entirely familiar with the training program should apply.” P46. Having just read The Story of O, Lisa recognizes what is at hand. She applies and after some time with a trainer Jean-Paul, she is delivered to her temporary owner. His age isn’t given but he is clearly well established and has “Gray thick hair…” p81.
1993 Michael Connelly’s Black Ice, p85 “He went to the bar and ordered an Anchor, and then took it to an empty table by the front door. The Wind was becoming crowded with the after-work crowd. People in business suits and dresses. There were a lot of combinations of older men with younger women…”
from War and Peace p73: In response to a query about a particular daughter taking singing lessons. “Too early? Not at all” said the Count. “Why, didn’t our mothers used to marry at twelve or thirteen?”
Page War and Peave p1090: French captain telling Pierre about a bizarre love triangle. “Thus the captain recounted the affecting story of his love for a fascinating Marquise of thirty-five, whose charming, innocent, seventeen-year old daughter he was in love with at the same time. Mother and daughter had vied with each other in magnanimity, and the rivalry, which had ended in the mother sacrificing herself and offering her daughter in marriage to her lover…”
Kafka’s The Trial (1968 edition, but first printed in 1925) chapter 6, K’s uncle Albert, takes him to see an old lawyer friend, Huld, to help with K’s case. When they gain entrance to the lawyer’s house, the author writes “The door really was open, a young girl---K recognized the dark somewhat protuberant eyes…” p99. Later in the scene, K finds reason to leave the lawyer’s room and has a dalliance of sorts with the girl, Leni. Among other things, he says to her, “In the first place, I had to listen to these old men jabbering.”p107. He is apparently gone for quite awhile because at their departure, his uncle upbraids him saying “Joseph! How could you do it! You have damaged your case badly, which was beginning to go quite well. You hide yourself away with a filthy little trollop, who is obviously the lawyer’s mistress into the bargain and stay away for hours.” p111. No one’s age is given but as the uncle raised Joseph there is probably a generation between the two, at least twenty years. Given that Huld is an old friend of Albert’s the same is probably true of him as well. The thought of his being aged is somewhat bolstered by Huld’s being bedridden with a suspected bad heart. The short of it is that someone “old,” probably in his 50s/60s has a “mistress” who is maybe twenty-something at the most.
The Cleaner (2007) by Brett Battles, p315 “Quinn noticed that Burroughs’s taste in companions hadn’t changed. Burroughs liked them tall, he liked them blonde, and he liked them fake. The liked them young, too. Tonight’s date couldn’t have been more than twenty-four, at least a quarter-century younger than Burroughs.”
P86 in The People’s Act of Love (2007) Anna is with a group of student revolutionaries and she’s asks one of them if they know a man named Lutov, who is her father. The student replies “…he spends most of his time trying to seduce girls who hang around the Marxists. You’re just his type. You should be careful.” Anna is 16.
Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) p122: “I was almost twelve by then and was beginning to look a bit womanly…In the past, men had taken no more notice of me on the streets than if I had been a pigeon; now they were watching me when I passed them. I found it strange to be the object of attention after being ignored for so long.”
P131: “If was right about the Chairman’s age, he was probably no more than forty-five. Plenty of geisha has achieved tremendous success by the age of twenty. The geisha Izuko was probably no more than twenty-five herself.”
P339. Introduced as a geisha at elegant parties in the USA, Sayuri finds herself in conversation with women, whom she surmises are thinking “My goodness… I’m talking with a prostitute…” and then she continues narrating, “A moment later she’s rescued by her escort, a wealthy man a good thirty or forty years older than she is.”
James Rollins’ The Doomsday Key (2009) P108 “Ivar was fast approaching his sixty-fifth birthday…” “Though only in her late twenties Krista Magnussen…” P159 “Moving into his [Ivar] arms, she kissed him again. Not chastely this time, but full on the lips…He recognized that she was seducing him…”p163.
Water for Elephants (2006), “She tells me about meeting August---she was seventeen, and it had just dawned on her that the recent spate of bachelors joining her family for dinner were actually being presented as potential husbands. When one middle-aged banker...”
Louis L’Amour The First Fast Draw (1959), writing about the time immediate post Civil War, “It was Matt Kirby who knew about Lacy Petraine…[T}he year she was sixteen she married an Irish gambler named Terence O’Donnell. He was, according to Matt, a gentlemen. He was thirty-two when she married him…” p70.
If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet?! (1992) by Cynthia Heimel. “I know this is true because all my male friends say it’s true. They have girls coming out the wazoo. If one girl doesn’t work out, if she’s not pretty enough, or talented enough, or young enough, they just find another one.” P74. “And I see it in the lives and relationships of friends and acquaintances. Get a job, your husband hates you. Get a good job, your husband leaves you. Get a stupendous job, your husband leaves you for a teenager.” P79. “I have finally figured out the rudiments of how to love somebody, too late. There are no men my age, and if there are, they want twenty-two year olds to bear their children.” P158.
for a bit of gender reversal:
The Lives of Dax (1999). ““After all, McCoy was a small-town boy a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday. The venerable old campus of Ole Miss…was like a dream to him…(p127) And if wasn’t just any Trill, he realized with surprise and delight. It was the famous Emony Dax, three-time latinum medalist in the ’24 Olympics on Aldebaran. McCoy hadn’t been born when she competed in those games…Seeing her now, twenty-one years later, it was clear to McCoy that the holos hadn’t done her justice. She was beautiful (p131)…He tried not to stare at Dax, but he couldn’t help it. The Trill was far and away the most attractive and beautifully sculpted woman he human had ever seen---a work of art so fully and perfectly rendered that, to his teenaged eyes, she hardly seemed real (p132)…But before he could make his way across the gym, he found Dax standing in his way…”I was just wondering what you found so interesting…I think you spent more time looking at me than at the gymnasts” [after some desultory conversation] “Are you asking me out?...Because if you are, you’d better get to the point” “Er, dinner?” “Dinner would be splendid.” (p139) {after a few pages of dinner and conversation] Suddenly, he kissed her. It was a deep kiss. A passionate kiss. And she returned it was the same kind of passion. Slowly, she pulled him down to the ground and drew him to her. And there, under the velvety Mississippi sky, Leonard McCoy and the woman from the stars made love.”” (p146). Assuming she was say 14-20 during the Olympics, twenty-one years earlier, she’s 35-41 during the present, while McCoy is only 17. What makes the story more compelling is that Dax is a symbiont and Emony is its host, so Dax brings to Emony all the memory and life experiences of two generations of hosts before her.
In Alexandra Ivy’s contribution Out of Control in the book Predatory, Angela Locke is a 26yr old graduate student in a relationship with a man, Nikolo Bartrev, who was seemingly a visiting professor but is actually a powerful being (a Sentinel) protecting her from harm. His age isn’t given but the author references a character named Fiona who “had been as close as any daughter to him” (p30). That implies a generational age gap of ~20 yrs. Later, the leader of his organization, a man named Wolfe, refers to him as “old man” (p54).
The Innocent by Harlen Coben, p122-123. The main character, Matt, is talking with a ~60yr old woman named Sonya, and she’s telling him about her husband cheating on her. “Oh, did I mention that she’s young? The girl Clark is sleeping with?...Thirty-two, we have a daughter that age.”
a small counterpoint: P250 “Cingle had started developing at a young age. By twelve, she could pass for eighteen. Boys loved her, girls hated her. With all the years of enlightenment, that was pretty much the norm. Neither one of those attitudes bothered her much. What did bother her, especially at that young age, were the looks of older men, even relatives, even men she trusted and loved. No, nothing ever happened. But you learn at a young age how longing and lust can twist a mind. It is rarely pretty.”
The Velocipede Races (2016) Emmeline marries a man named Cassius Everett. She’s 18; his age isn’t given but she describes him upon their first meeting: “His dark hair was sprinkled with grey at the temples and he had a few lines around his eyes, but, otherwise, I had no sense of his age” p39. He’s rich, owns his own factory, and has a mansion and servants.
Harlan Coben’s The Innocent (2005). The genesis of the thriller is that a pimp secretly videotaped various men having sex with underage prostitutes. One of the men turned out to be a married FBI agent who had sex with a girl who had just turned 15, p458.
The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest (2009) Blomqvist’s sister, representing Lisbeth at her trial, cross-examining Peter Teleborian who kept attacking Lisbeth for being “in the company of older men.” “When I was twenty-two I had a relationship with a man who was forty-seven that lasted several months…” p584.
After Lisbeth is released from prison she travels to Gibraltar. she is in a hotel elevator with a man who is described as being between 50 to 55. shes 27. she says to him, “I’m feeling an irresistible urge to have sex with somebody...I’m in room 711...I’m going up to my room, take a bath and get into bed. If you want to keep me company, knock on the door within a half hour... p613.
The Natural (1952). As concerns Iris: “Half her life ago, just out of childhood it seemed, but that couldn’t be because she was too strangely ready for the irrevocable change that followed, she had one night alone in the movies met a man twice her age, with whom she had gone walking in the park.” P135. Later the author tells us that Iris is 33, and that she has a daughter who is grown who has a child of her own. That seems to make Iris ~15-16 at the earlier described time.
Carte Blanche (2011) a new James Bond novel by Jeffry Deaver. “He (Madhi al-Fulan) was in his mid-fifties” P178… “In front of one of the dozens of large computer monitors sat an attractive woman, a brunette, in her late twenties...she blushed, the ruddy color stemming from her affection for her mentor, who she glanced at quickly, a supplication for approval, which al-Fulan provided in the form of a seductive smile” P181.
Gone with the Wind Scarlett is a 16yr old when her love/hate affair begins with Rhett Butler, who is presented as at least in his mid 30s. Scarlett’s younger sister Suellen is being courted by a man named Frank Kennedy who is 40. However, he eventually marries Scarlett when she is ~21 and he is ~45. Scarlett’s parents married when they were 40ish and 15.
ive got 3-4 times as many examples from movies ive recently watched...
Jes, Bounty! This looks like you are collecting material for a Dissertation on age differences in Literature. Some of these stories are charming. Today things look sad with all this representations of pedophilia. Some kind of innocence seems to have gone.
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
as I go through pop culture life---books, movies, music, news, etc, its something I pay attention to. its relatively common.
its amongst the many things I would enjoy writing about but I really feel like I need a collaborator to do so.
if youre up for some more danik, I can include some of the illustrations from movies.
heres a couple of samples:
Abbott & Costello’s Here come the Co-eds (1945): Martha Driscoll (Molly) is the object of David Cook’s (Benson) affection, born 1922 and 1901, ages 23 and 44 respectively, a 21 year age gap. What makes this especially interesting is that Benson was the Dean of the school and Molly was a student. Further, Costello, born in 1906 was in a relationship with Peggy Ryan, born 1924, an 18-year age gap. Costello was also an employee of the school and Peggy was a student.
Abbott & Costello Comin’ Around the Mountain (1951), Mattie is 14yrs old and part of the family is trying to marry her off to Wilbert (Lou) who as an actor is 45.
if youre up for some controversial conversation, we can do that too.
I´ll have to think about it. Back in the evening.
"I seemed to have sensed also from an early age that some of my experiences as a reader would change me more as a person than would many an event in the world where I sat and read. "
Gerald Murnane, Tamarisk Row
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