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marianhalcombes · 6 years

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i’m reading jane eyre rn and i want to read wh after i’m finished... do you have any thoughts on jane eyre?? and how does it compare to wh?? sorry to bother you gnfjdjsjw

Hi!! omg literally no bother. I love talking about this stuff lol. I guess it depends on what you’re looking to get out of it! I strongly believe Wuthering Heights is the superior work and imo it’s the best book written in the English language, though that doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll enjoy it more than JE.

I think my main suggestion going into reading WH after JE is try not to compare them too much because they’re trying to do different things. Jane Eyre is definitely more digestible. It’s a book I enjoy and it has a lot of scholarly merit, and it obv has a massive place in the canon. Definitely the most widely beloved of the Bronte novels when it was published and to this day. It’s definitely a romance novel; WH isn’t (I’ll get to that). JE has also historically been heralded as an early feminist work, but a lot of Charlotte’s feminism is a little undermined due to how she handles race and racialized women via comparisons of Jane to colonized peoples/slaves and doubling with to Bertha. Don’t get me wrong–it’s a well-written book and Jane herself has so much appeal as a “plain” and independent, free-thinking heroine, but I don’t think it has as much nuance as WH. That is, I could spend the rest of my life discovering new layers and approaches to WH that I couldn’t do w/ JE. I actually suggest you read Wide Sargasso Sea if you like JE and want to think more about its implications of race.

I would not categorize WH as a romance novel, or at least not in the same way as JE or other 19th c women authors you might’ve read like Austen. I would encourage you to read it as a socio-political novel through the lens of ~romance… even this is tricky bc imo Cathy and Heathcliff should be read more as spiritually engaged than romantically, though there are elements of both. Like, the famous line “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” isn’t really a line about romantic love. Cathy’s saying they are LITERALLY the same person, which leads me back to it as a socio-political novel. Basically, it’s a critique of hegemonic institutions of Empire, patriarchy, the class system, and Christianity under which Cathy and Heathcliff unite, then betray each other/themselves. It’s a MASSIVELY radical novel. Hmu if you wanna talk more about that bc… #mood.

The other thing I would wanna emphasize for anyone going into WH is that a major point of criticism of the novel is that the characters are all shitty people, which…. ur not wrong. No one is conventionally likable, and you don’t have to ~like the characters to love the book imo. Heathcliff does some truly horrendous, unforgivable things. HOWEVER, he and Cathy should be read as oppressed peoples who are operating under the restrictions of their period. Heathcliff should and must be read as a person of color. And actually imo Emily’s use of the solidarity/comparison between white women and people (ie men) of color is more successful than Charlotte’s bc she’s not trying to equate the struggle, but to create bonds between oppressed peoples against their oppressors. That’s a more complicated convo and if you wanna have it, I’m so here.

WH has literally infinite dimensions of thematic discussions from race and colonialism to the role of religion (surprise: also massively radical) and everything in between. Whether or not you enjoy it, I think it’s important to recognize that it was RIDICULOUSLY radical for its period and to try to read it against conventions of romance bc if you do, it’ll end up being shitty (hot tip: you’re not supposed to romanticize Heathcliff).

edit: ahhhh one more thing. the use of gender in this. emily’s notion of androgyny as the ideal. WOOF! mother.

tl;dr JE may be more your cup of tea when it comes to reading for pleasure, but I don’t think there is really a debate when it comes to scholarly merit bc WH will win every time

Also this:

#long post/#lmao sorry this is so gd long #vitasvirginia

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