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Thread: wuthering heights

  1. #16
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pompey Bum View Post
    Yes, great movie. The Homer character (pushing the little railroad car) is my favorite. The day I retired I drove home, sat down in my chair, dusted my hands off, and said, "I woik for no man!"
    Funny thing, that movie have a low reputation among Coenians, as if it lacks some of the dark humor of the more heavy works and the coolness of the Lebowski comedies. I find it an almost perfect adaptation, full of memorable scenes and small characters. The black guitar player and the cyclop being a KKK member is too amazing.

    But I think the universality of Homer is quite ancient. His epics were much like the Bible later came to be. . People took meaning from his poetry that may or may not have been latent in the original intent. And of course it helped that he never really existed. People could make all sorts of things out of him. (But please draw no false equivalence here with God ).
    No doubt. I mean, if we consider the athenean drama scene happened already in another world/culture, the number of plays dealing with the aftermatch of the war, way more tragic than Homer ever was making up for characters like Cassadran and Hecuba to shine show how much they believe in the truth of that war and stories. It was not just some fancy poem, but a relation with a myth we are far from having. I dont think God was such storyteller.



    Well, God knows Dickens was full of self-importance. If Tom Jones had been a Dickens character he would have been deceiving villain like Harold Skimpole or at best a tragic youth-led-astray like Richard Carstone. I don't think Dickens believed in winning young men with a few all-too-human flaws.
    Well, in the end it is the just the awareness of romantic age (which is probally ours), so full of human suffering, heritage, dramas that the Enlightenment people are free from the burden.



    When I first read Tom Jones I found him too much like some "Our Hero" from an old silent movie. But in fact he's a lot more than that--if only because this "Our Hero" likes to get laid now and then, and has to extricate himself--humanely--from all the trouble that makes for him. I love Candide, but he and Gulliver are really just stage props for their authors' lampoons. Don Juan is a somewhat better comparison, but I see that character as having a little more flesh to him, perhaps because I conflate him with Byron--especially in that first glorious canto. (I never read Vathek so I can't offer an opinion). Tom Jones is certainly an early character in the English novel, but I think he's a bit better than his reputation (which seems somehow apt. ).
    I shouldnt have mentioned Don Juan, with Byron being such champion of the early XVIII writers against the "evil wordsworth/coleridge" duo, that it is too obvious the apple wouldnt fall far from the tree in this case. I didnt meant to compare the characters characterization, because Fielding is in the end a novelist, Voltaire and Swift were a Voltaire. Funny enough, despite being first a playwriter, Voltaire capacity to create characters was rather dull (or flat), he is a man of action. I read once a analyse of Candine which I foudn funny (and I can imagine Voltaire laughing at it too) saying that Martino, Pangloss and all people who Candide meets and receive some advice is actually Voltaire under disguise of one his moods, so Candine doesn't travel around the world, but around Voltaire.



    Well, if it's intensely cynical humor, then I suppose I do get Crime and Punishment. Actually, the scene from The Idiot I was thinking of is profoundly cynical. (SPOILER ALERT IF ANYONE IS FOLLOWING THIS THREAD WHO HAS NOT READ THE IDIOT). I mean the final scene in which Myshkin (the Christ figure) and Rogozhin (in my view a kind of Satanic counterpart) are in the sack together, with Nastassya Filippovna, the women for whom they have been competing, dead before them like a human sacrifice. The image is shocking--and perhaps cynically humorous? I've sometimes wondered if the visitation of the devil/devil hallucination to Ivan Karamazov didn't have a kind of gallows humor to it as well.
    I once said Dostoievisky was a cynic here in the forum and Gladys (our resident Dostoievisky fan) didnt like it, thinking of the negative meaning of the word, not, as I was thinking, of the phylosophical meaning. You are talking about someone who wrote in his diary the intention to write a work similar to Candide and failed (I dont think Dostoievisky had that sheer inteligence and speed that Voltaire had, nor culture or love for work, so this failure is mostly understandable). Dostoievisky is a rabid critic, but the Czar was not the french king to play around with the impertinent intellectual. This certainly made the humor in dostoievisky be stuck on this throat. Also, it may seem Dostoievisky had this genuine concern for humanity, Voltaire couldnt care less.

    Anyways, despite that his work is philosophical, the whole existentialism side, I think Keats idea that the poet was the least philosophical being works here too. Dostoievisky was working in the emotions, the dramas and internal confiicts while making a critic to the russian society, not being philosophical. Just happen his insight gave him this vision that we can see all we can see in his works now, but he surelly tried to bite and smile at sametime.

    Of course Iven is a critic to atheism, but funny you pic a scene that has some Voltaire vibes on it, as it is all about the needful existense of the devil (thus God). Hows that is not a joke that Nietzche would love?
    Last edited by JCamilo; 11-19-2017 at 04:52 AM.
    #foratemer

  2. #17
    the beloved: Gladys's Avatar
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    I love Wuthering Heights. The novel consistently transcends the lives of its characters and speaks to an unlimited universe of angst, suffering and emotional pain. Heathcliff and the first Catherine evoke the fallen Adam and Eve, struggling for meaning and integrity in a vale of tears. Their numinous perception and uncompromising honesty shames us all.

    Emily Bronte's contemporaries deplored an author - a man - who would plumb such dreadful depths. Nevertheless, Emily Bronte's expansive, panoramic and uncompromising introspection was a major influence on Emily Dickinson, Henry James and others.

    And nice to see literature discussed on the forum once again.
    "Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself"

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    Welcome Gladys/New Thread Started

    Quote Originally Posted by Gladys View Post
    I love Wuthering Heights. The novel consistently transcends the lives of its characters and speaks to an unlimited universe of angst, suffering and emotional pain. Heathcliff and the first Catherine evoke the fallen Adam and Eve, struggling for meaning and integrity in a vale of tears. Their numinous perception and uncompromising honesty shames us all.

    Emily Bronte's contemporaries deplored an author - a man - who would plumb such dreadful depths. Nevertheless, Emily Bronte's expansive, panoramic and uncompromising introspection was a major influence on Emily Dickinson, Henry James and others.
    Ecce femina! Nice to have you with us, Gladys.

    Your evocation of life after the fall seems apt, even haunting--although personally I have enough to be ashamed of without letting Heathcliff in. Also, sorry to be so thick, but who was the male author you mentioned?

    Quote Originally Posted by Gladys View Post
    And nice to see literature discussed on the forum once again.
    Yes, I'm hearing this quite a bit recently. I propose to start a thread on the general literature forum in which we continue this discussion, but expand it beyond Wuthering Heights (which is the way the discussion had been going in any case). Perhaps that will draw more into the discussion or even lure back a few old LitNetters. I will include a link to this thread for context, but let's continue the discussion over there.

    ***

    Okay, done. Here's the link: http://www.online-literature.com/for...46#post1345646
    Last edited by Pompey Bum; 11-19-2017 at 11:17 AM.

  4. #19
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    Quote Originally Posted by Pompey Bum View Post
    Also, sorry to be so thick, but who was the male author you mentioned?
    Thick indeed. Ellis Bell!
    "Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself"

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    Oh, of course! The inventor of the telephone! [;-)]

  6. #21
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    I love Wuthering Heights- it has the quality of a fever dream, there's no attempt to be refined and literary. I think it speaks most strongly to people who come from that kind of remote rural place, with the lawlessness of nature. I don't think it's as grim a novel as people make out; the second generation manage to escape the fate of their parents.

  7. #22
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    Quote Originally Posted by kelby_lake View Post
    I think it speaks most strongly to people who come from that kind of remote rural place, with the lawlessness of nature. I don't think it's as grim a novel as people make out; the second generation manage to escape the fate of their parents.
    While the second generation may seem to escape, the crucial interest remains to the end with the heroic Catherine, dying in protest against the unfairness of human existence: hers and ours. How radical is that!

    By contrast, I've just enjoyed reading Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which was especially poignant as I worked for 19 months in England, starting in Bath, followed by Bristol in the county of Gloucestershire. So much of the setting was familiar. Heart warming is reference to the Sally Lunn bun, originating in Bath and referenced in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer.

    Astonishing to read, is a repeated reference to the possibility of Catherine Morland's unquiet slumbers, alluded to ironically in the closing sentence of Bronte's monumental masterpiece.

    I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.
    "Love does not alter the beloved, it alters itself"

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    Do you think at the end that Heathcliff is suffering from a schizophrenic break or something?

    I don’t believe he is intentionally starving himself- I feel like he can see and hear Catherine (visual and auditory hallucinations) and is thus distracted enough that he doesn’t eat. Maybe when he eats he doesn’t hear or see her anymore so he just doesn’t eat?

    I don’t know, what do you guys think?

    Also I think although Cathy and Healthcliff love one another it was such a strange love.

    For one thing Cathy wasn’t willing to risk it all and marry ‘below’ herself and I think if they had of married they still would not have been happy.

    Agree or disagree?
    Last edited by MrsWentworth; 02-23-2023 at 05:14 AM. Reason: Spelling errors

  9. #24
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    alas mrs wentworth, there are about 4 or 5 people here regularly posting. I suspect the chances of us presently being in the book, or just having recently read the book to the point of being able to remember it with such detail, is really small, so you might not get a reply to your queries for a longgggggggggg time. but hope is a good thing...

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    Haha thank you for the heads up <3

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    On the road, but not! Danik 2016's Avatar
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    Hi, Ms Wentworth, hope you are still around.

    Well, I love Wuthering Heights.

    I read the book long ago, but I still remember the haunting ending.

    The love between Cathy and Heathcliff is intense and tortured, but that is what makes it inmortal. They are separated by their social condition, but I think not only. Both have strong, willful temperaments and are very restless. I agree with you. Their marriage wouldn´t be happy, they would probably always find a reason for quarreling. Allbeit there are couples who need to quarrel in a Who Is Afraid of Virginia Woolf Way just to feel that their marriage is still alive.

    But in the second generation Emily Brontë construes a more harmonious relationship between the second Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw. The relationship between the Lintons and the Earnshaws, two old rural families, which was temporarily disrupted by the foundling Heathcliff reestablishes itself.
    "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

  12. #27
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    its been many years since ive read the book and I only have vague memories of it. "tortured" sounds right danik. I wonder if "star-crossed" would be fitting too?

    you both might be interested in knowing there is a contemporary book (I have it) called heathcliff: a return to wuthering heights by haire-sargeant.

    it takes a lot these days though to get me to read chick-lit so there's a good chance it'll sit there forever---unless you both get it and we all read it?

  13. #28
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    Still here!!

    It’s such a hard read but I still like it because it makes the reader have big feelings!

    It’s nice at the end that with the death of the first generation the ‘curse’ is lifted and Cathy and Hareton are able to go on and be happy.

    With Heathcliff alive he would let no one be happy.

    I think with the way the majority of the book went, it was good to end it on a happier note 😊

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