Wuthering Heights - just started reading

[kev67]

I just started reading the big one, the one Kate Bush sang a song about all those years ago. After this, I can consider myself well read, even if I haven't read much Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer or any of the Greeks, or the Russians or French. I've read Pride & Prejudice and I finally got Jane Eyre out of the way. I can get started on Gissing, Gaskell, the rest of Dickens, Hardy and all the others when I've finished this.

After reading the first two chapters, it seems a more extreme version of what I was expecting. I was expecting some harshness, but not this level of outright hostility. I am sure Mr Lockwood could have spent a more convivial afternoon at The Slaughtered Lamb* down the road. It also reminded me of a television comedy, The League of Gentlemen (I think), in which in which the grotesque owners of a corner shop up a mountainside in Wales or somewhere murder their customers each episode. Maybe Wuthering Heights is where these parodies of unfriendly country folk ultimately spring from.

I was interested the younger Cathy was practicing witchcraft with wax dolls. I thought that was a voodoo thing from Cuba or the Dominican Republic.

* Pub at the start of An American Werewolf in London

[Gladys]

Extreme is an apt way to characterise the whole novel.

[kiki1982]

:lol: Indeed, extreme is a very good description for it!

I think I personally was mesmerised by it, reading the first chapter. It was just so weird that I wanted to discover what the cause of it was. I think you could describe that first encounter as even more freezing than freezing cold. There is just no humanity there. It is sad and weird at the same time.

About the witchcraft. I think it could be something that was practised outside Cuba. The Celts already made small models of things to offer to the gods. So maybe that was a wink to that practice. Wikipedia says that the Cubans got it from Europe and not the other way round (although that's unreferenced).

[kev67]

It's interesting that the language does not seem to have changed that much since when the book was written, nearly 180 years ago. I always had trouble understanding Shakespeare's language from the 400 years ago. I do not seem to have the same problems with authors of 200 years ago. The exception is Thomas Hardy, who deliberately chose obscure words. I noticed in chapter 3, the words 'palava' and 'trash'. These are slang words but still in use today. We still say "What a palava!" sometimes. I actually thought 'trash' was an Americanism, but obviously not.

It's a little tricky working out what Joseph is saying. Wuthering Heights seems to be in the same area as the James Herriot books. Herriot loved the Yorkshire Dales. He used to write down the local's speech phonetically, but they seemed a little easier to understand. I wonder if the accent had changed much between the 1820s and the 1920s.

[kiki1982]

Oh, so that's how you write 'palava', I always thought it was spellt 'palaver' (after the Dutch word, 'palaveren' which means to rabbit on a lot without doing anything).

I thought 'trash' was also used by Shakespeare. It's peculiar that some words that were originally English are now deemed 'ugly and American' :yuk:.

Maybe the reason why the Yorkshire dialect is more difficult to understand as written 180 years ago than that by James Herriot is maybe because James Herriot could have a look at examples how to spell it. Maybe he had several precursors who had a stab at it. Emily probably had very few, although the Brontë siblings were great fans of Scott and he writes pretty much in the same way when he lets his characters talk Sco'esh.
Also remember that the Brontë siblings probably spoke with a Yorkshire accent where James Herriot was not from Yorkshire. The result could be that he perceived it differently to the Brontë siblings. It's easier to write something down when you are an outsider than when you are an insider, because as an insider you don't know how outsiders 'hear' your sounds. Certainly in the era before the existence of sound recording, that must have presented a challenge.
Admittedly, Dickens did well in mimicking the East End London accent, but by that time he had probably had contact with plenty of people who spoke 'properly'. Therefore he culd envisage how an East End accent would sound to an outsider and write that down.

[kev67]

I think Emily Brontë is better at writing the local dialect better than Charlotte Brontë. In Jane Eyre, I could work out the meaning but not what it sounded like. In Wuthering Heights it's the other way around. I think I have as much trouble understanding Joseph written down as I would hearing him.

Dickens seems good at representing local, working class accents. Hardy seemed pretty good too. Hardy also seems very good at middle class speech patterns. I felt as if I was in the same room as Angel Clare's parents. British accents have changed a lot over the years, in particular middle class accents. Whenever I watch an old British film or radio piece, the gentlemen sound like Noël Coward, while the ladies speak in a 'cut glass' accent, rather like the queen used to. It used to set my teeth on edge, but you rarely hear it any more. That makes me wonder how they sounded two hundred years ago, but since the middle and upper classes spoke standard British English, their words would not have been spelt phonetically to reflect their accents.