Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

This episode of Zero to Well Read is sponsored by thriftbooks.com, where you can find more than 19 million used and new books. We're talking about Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte today. And I think if you're going to buy an edition of Wuthering Heights in this day and age, you can get, and they have like a $4 paperback that you can like throw in your bag or do whatever. They've got a critical edition. They've got all sorts of stuff. But I think this is one you want on your shelf. And there's all kinds of amazing special editions. My favorite that I've found is the Penguin Clothbound Classic Series. It's got this really evocative blue sort of vine cover. Came out in October 2009. But you also have got editions that got embossing, sprayed edges, alternate languages. Over 1,800, I kid you not, editions of Weathering Heights to be found on thriftbucks.com. And with every order, you get closer to a new free book as part of their reading rewards program with free shipping on orders over 15 bucks in the U.S. Thanks to Thriftbooks.com for sponsoring Zero to Well Read. Welcome to Zero to Well Read, a podcast about everything you need to know about the books you wish you'd read. I'm Jeff O'Neill. And I'm Rebecca Shinsky. Get ready to get broody, friends, because today we are discussing Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. The time has come. The film is hitting theaters later this week. One of the big movie events of the year and one of the big movie going question marks, because this looks very spicy. It's Emerald Fennell, who created Saltburn. And we would have gotten to Wuthering Heights at some point on this show, for sure. One of the canonical books. But we are doing it today to coincide with the film, which we have not seen yet. I don't know if you're planning to. I'm going to go see it for science. We might do some more coverage of it. We'll see. I don't know, maybe, Rebecca, and I think I feel in my bones after reading Wuthering Heights again and preparing for the show today. And something I felt going in, which is I think people don't know what they're talking about when they talk about Wuthering Heights. And I feel that way myself. One million percent. I do think that of the service element to this show, this might be one of our higher value over replacement podcast episodes because what people think Wuthering Heights is versus what it is and then how it might be represented in this particular adaptation and all adaptations. This is a wild story. This is an unruly book. And I think that's putting it mildly. And we're going to get all to that here. But I hope we do the work and the, you know, basically the experience of reading it justice and give people something to think about and chew on and take forward with them as they see the movie or frankly hear discourse about the movie, which I'm maybe more interested in. I mean, the movie itself is the discourse. That's a great point. I saw a trailer for this. I've seen the trailer several times in the theater. But one of the recent times, my husband was with me. And it was while I was reading the book. And we saw the trailer and it scrolls across like the greatest love story of all time on the screen. And I'm like, what do you think this story is about? And his guess of what it was about versus what this book is actually about was wildly off. And I am going to assume that if you have not read Wuthering Heights and all you are familiar with is like the popular sort of cultural message. It's a great love story. He's the original bad boy. It's so broody. you're going to be surprised by what you hear today in what actually happens in the book. And I'm just certain that we're going to be surprised by what Emerald Fennell does with it in the film. Yeah. Heathcliff doesn't brood. He screams and hit people. He actually does the opposite of brooding. Maybe I should take that for my hot take. But yeah, I don't know. I think it is. You have a note down here below. We'll get to all of this here that like the name is carrying a lot of water that feels like, you know, it's this windswept star crossed lovers that can't be together, but they should be because of love and truth and beauty. It's not that book, folks. We'll get into it here. Clink the link in the show notes to sign up for our free newsletter. Comes that we do once per episode. Vanessa Diaz is helping us corral some of our notes here, some explanatory material, some other fun stuff there. That one's free. Also, you can become a member of our Patreon to get early ad-free episodes or at the higher level, bonus content. We sometimes plan what we're going to talk about that bonus content. We have not done that today. We're going to kind of let's see what we find interesting to continue talking in that office hour segment. So that's patreon.com slash zero to well read. And a reminder to rate and review the show wherever you're listening. And you can always email us at zero to well read at book riot dot com. I'd be especially interested in people's early reading experiences, people that haven't read Wuthering Heights and hear us talk about it. Go see the movie. This is this is ripe for feedback from you all. And thank you so much for listening, joining the show. hit that five stars on Apple podcast or Spotify, wherever, where you listen. You can also find us on Instagram. You can find us on YouTube. Again, all those links are in the show notes there. Okay, Rebecca, synopsis time. And this is one where maybe more than any other book we've read, and this is saying something because we've done midnight's children and love in the time of color at this point, the plot matters, matters, but it doesn't matter at all. I think that's right. Yeah. I mean, my one liner here is hell hath no fury like a goth boy scorned. A stranger comes to town at the start of this book. His name is Mr. Lockwood. He's our original narrator. He is renting a different property that the owner of Wuthering Heights also owns. And so he goes to meet his landlord and his landlord is Mr. Heathcliff, who is living in this kind of great rambling house in the remote moors of Yorkshire. And Mr. Lockwood quickly realizes that he has walked into the middle of like a hot mess, the hottest of messes. The vibes are so bad when he walks into this house. The vibes are terrible. So, so bad. And he befriends the housekeeper, Nellie Dean, who gives him the lowdown on what's going on with these people and why they're all so mad at each other and how this has actually been going on for like a generation. So Heathcliff, who at the time the book opens, is the owner of Wuthering Heights, was orphaned as a child. He was taken in by the Earnshaw family, who at the time owned and lived in Wuthering Heights. They were awful to him, treated him like a second-class citizen, adopted him as a child, but also made him a servant in the home. And Nellie Dean tells Mr. Lockwood that Earnshaw's treatment of Heathcliff was enough to make a fiend of a saint. Heathcliff falls in love with their daughter, Catherine Earnshaw. So they're raised alongside each other, kind of as siblings, but we don't actually see much of their childhood or their relationship at all. But we're given to understand that she witnesses his suffering and he sees that she is this like kind of wild, free, unruly, independent girl. they grow up she chooses to marry the neighbor's son edgar linton and heathcliff starts on his revenge tour and this is just the beginning he gets his revenge by marrying edgar's sister isabella manipulating her really into marrying him but he stays obsessed with catherine isabella his wife knows it and she leaves heathcliff while she's pregnant with his child because He goes and makes out with Catherine and everybody hears about it. Then Catherine gives birth and, well, dies giving birth to her child with Edgar. The child is also named Kathy. The names in this book are hella confusing. So much repetition. I can't keep it straight. I'm going to screw it up at least nine times today. And I even got like a, I've got a family tree and I can't keep it straight. And I think that's part of the point, but we can get into that. I think so too. I dog-eared the family tree page at the top of the book. And I cannot tell you how many times I flipped back to it, trying to make sense of which Kathy they were talking about, which Mr. Linton, which Mr. Earnshaw. Who's a cousin to whom? Who's a step cousin of what? It's it's not like a family tree. I don't anyway, I don't know if I'm getting old and my brain is ricotta, but I had the damnedest time keeping the character straight. Well, you know, like the family tree is really confusing in 100 Years of Solitude, but somehow not as confusing as this. Yeah, well, it feels like this should be wieldy and manageable. And I guess part of it is it doesn't matter, but there's just all these other people getting in Catherine and Heathcliff's way. I mean, maybe that's as important as anything else to know who's who. So after Catherine dies, giving birth to Kathy, Heathcliff just loses it. Like the wheels are off. He goes fully off the rails. And he's on this long, cold campaign of revenge that plays out over generations while he's systematically using marriage and money and real cruelty to punish the families that he believes destroyed his chance at the happiness that he's entitled to. So children inherit grudges that they didn't create and don't understand. And basically, everybody gets hurt, both physically and emotionally, and nobody gets a chance at redemption. Like, this is not a happy ending. So I guess that's the first big thing, is this is pitched as one of the great love stories of all time. And it's talked about as a gothic romance. I think it is romantic in the capital R romantic sense. And, you know, we can talk about what that romantic movement was in literature in a little bit, but a typical romance ends with a happily ever after. And this is a nobody's happy ever. Hey, folks, I'm here with a podcast recommendation for you. 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Everything in Color is a deeply personal and tinder graphic memoir from Stephanie Stalvey, whose autobiographical comics began circulating online in 2020. They quickly resonated with readers searching for language around faith, identity, and intimacy. So make sure to check out Everything in Color and Love Story by Stephanie Stolovey. And thanks again to 23rd Street Books for sponsoring this episode. I think the thing people would find most surprising about reading this book is that you would think the book as a romantic tragedy would end kind of at the end of volume one when Catherine, the elder Earnshaw, the object of Heakless, whatever. We can talk about what nature of emotion they're experiencing obsession possession yeah lust whatever it else might be she dies and he's destitute and that's where the to this point the the the most recognizable film adaptations laurence olivier's 1938 1939 camera one of those two years but that ends there it doesn't do the whole second volume where heathcliff is you know an adult and moving the pieces around like a chessboard to inflict maximum pain and to secure his legacy, navigating the frankly Byzantine rules of English entailment and who's going to get what and who can marry whom and how it can't work. And then it sort of ends with a whimper, weirdly. Heathcliff dies sort of smidely, wildly into the rain. And then Kathy and Harriton sort of fall in love over her teaching him to read and they seem like they're going to be OK. And we're all just sort of left mystified. As are Nellie Dean and Mr. Lockwood, there is no resolution here of any kind. And I think that is interesting and fascinating in so many ways. But it sort of beggars belief how people think of this as one of the great, if not the great, love stories over toward. And the only thing I can come up with, Rebecca, is that people don't know what they're talking about. Like they literally are just voting for it blind. Maybe. I went and checked the Goodreads reviews and there are some detailed, well thought out, long reviews where people are like, I love this book and here's why. None of those cite it as a romance. So I think the popular presentation of it as this is one of the great love stories, where did that start? Where did the representation of this as a love story start? I could not track it down. I went down a lot of internet rabbit holes trying to figure out who said this was a love story. Like, Catherine dies at the like halfway through the book. And the rest is the revenge tour. There's like, it's all plot. That's one thing to say, like there's because the story is relayed by Nellie Dean to Mr. Lockwood and then Mr. Lockwood to us, and sometimes other people to Nellie Dean to Mr. Lockwood to us. we don't get any of Catherine and Heathcliff's interiority. We don't really have a sense of how they truly feel about each other or how those feelings developed. And then she's dead and the rest is the revenge tour. And it's clearly about Heathcliff's anger and that people took things that he wanted. And so he's going to take all of the things that they have. And marriage is the tool for doing that because marriage is the way that you get access to other people's property at the point in time. That if he can marry this person and he can manipulate that one into marrying this other person and then this person dies and their kid goes here, like all of these pieces move around the chessboard so that ultimately he ends up in possession of all of this land. Yeah. And I don't, I kind of looked similarly, like when did it get transposed into a great love story? Because I think, I think there's a good chance it was, we're going to talk about this a little bit, but it was re-evaluated in the 20s and 30s. And that 1938 movie starring Laurence Olivier, I think there's a chance that that was it. Because if you end it there, it is more of a Romeo and Juliet tragic love story, right? Where they can't be together. There's a way, I've not seen this. There's a way of filming it where the world is keeping them apart. And were it not for bourgeois sensibilities or morals or whatever, these two true loves could be together and they are sort of killed or eviscerated emotionally, physically, whatever, by the world. But that's not what happens in the actual book. It's something darker. It's something stranger. And I'm going to use the word fascinating in its highest realm, which is not necessarily good. Almost like watching a car crash is fascinating. Yes, you can't look away. You can't look away from it. But if you end at the end of volume one, and I have to believe that's where Fennell is going to end this, because otherwise, my understanding is Jacob Elordi is going to play Heathcliff and Margot Robbie is going to play the elder Catherine Earnshaw. Margot Robbie is going to die halfway through, and then it's going to be about Elordi torturing kids. That's literally what we're going to do here. I just don't believe that, Rebecca. I don't believe it either. But also, I have no idea what she's going to do. Like it wouldn't surprise me at this point for it to be like more of a translation of Wuthering Heights in the way that one battle after another is a translation of Thomas Pynchon's Vineland that like the seeds of their vibe together shape the relationship at the heart of the movie. That's my guess going in, really, is that it will be more about like there's a lot of corsets and a lot of like lingering looks and like some BDSM sorts of vibes, overtones to the trailer. And like the trailer looks a lot sexier than the book, certainly. So really, who knows? Maybe Fennell is playing with the popular imagination of Wuthering Heights and this misconception of it as a romance. It really is quite dark. Yeah, and once we talk more about what it's like and the ideas, maybe we'll come back to talk about possibilities for the adaptation. I find myself more sympathetic to just the trailer version of Wuthering Heights because I think it might be trying to recreate the strangeness of contemporary readers of Wuthering Heights in 1848, especially 1850 and after, to the modern day. Like, this is a weird book. It's hard to say meant to, but the effect it had on contemporary readers is one of bewilderment. And again, I'm going to go back to an original, like, to make you feel wild while you're watching it, to use that. Like you are, I found myself and I think a lot of readers find themselves confused and compelled simultaneously and frustrated by the text. And that's one, sometimes that makes for an enduring work of art. Sometimes it makes for a mess that gets forgotten. But there's something here. And even contemporary critics at the time said, this is a weird book. There's a lot I don't like about it. It's certainly immoral. Young lady shouldn't read it, as you might imagine, 1847. There's a lot more hitting each other in abuse than we would like today, but especially when you think of the mores of popular culture such as it was in 19th century England and America. But there's something here that is different that seems to be of its own sense. And then we mix that in with the Bronte's own biography, which we'll get to in a second, is pretty fascinating. So kind of right away, it was seen as a wild book. it doesn't seem connected to a lot of other things i can talk to a little bit to how it's connected to romanticism in a in a larger kind of way but the brontes themselves have become monuments of english literature um and it's still very much a contested work like talk about books that answer questions and books that ask them this one is sort of sort of wondering where questions come from in its own way? Like, where is the source of all this crap? And how do we deal with it? I find really compelling, even as I'll admit here, we're not quite into the reading section. I do not enjoy this book, Rebecca Shinsky. This is not one of my favorite books. I don't really enjoy the reading experience. The first 100 pages, especially, I'm like, God, this is tough sledding. But you get some of these moments, especially when Catherine and Heathcliff are talking to or about each other and explaining their torture, that are, that my eye, I kind of don't, my reading mind doesn't blink. I'm compelled and fascinated and I find myself returning to them. I think that's a really important thing that the reading experience of this is, for me also, very uneven. There were a lot of moments and we saw each other in person while I was reading this and I was like, man, I am suffering. There are a lot of moments where I was like, this is just taking me forever to get through. And then I would hit like a 20 page section where I would feel riveted to the page. And that sort of that unevenness, like that you don't quite know where the story is going or what's about to happen or what's important and what ultimately will not be important. And most of it is ultimately not important is challenging. And like, I mean, frankly, it took me 10 days to get through this 300 page novel, which is a lot for me. I just needed to space it out. Let's talk a little more about why this is important. And I think that the myth around the Bronte sisters is part of it. Not only is the book important because it is part of the gothic romance canon, but this is Emily Bronte's only novel. Of course, her sister Charlotte wrote Jane Eyre. Their sister Anne, also a novelist. All of them died young. This is published in 1847, originally under a pen name. She wrote it as Ellis Bell. The sisters all wrote under these assumed names that are sort of, they come across as gender neutral. names that would have been assumed to be male at the time because they understood that there were prejudices against female names female writers so they published their poetry originally under male names and then after emily dies catherine or sorry charlotte there's so many names jeff i know right which which which catherine which bronte yeah yeah after emily bronte dies her sister Charlotte sort of comes clean that Ellis Bell was Emily Bronte and she does some edits and sort of reframes and repackages the story and publishes it. It was radically transgressive at the time. And not just because Catherine and Heathcliff, their relationship is semi-incestuous. They're not related to each other, but they were raised as brother and sister functionally. There's really no- Royal Tenenbaums energy, right? It's wrong. It's not illegal, but it's kind of wrong. But there's also no discussion of that. Like, there's no discussion of that at all on the page. People just recognize in the story that Catherine and Heathcliff love each other and can't be together. But no one's like, hey, isn't that kind of weird? And that in itself is transgressive, not to remark upon the transgressive nature of it. And I think you're right that people just didn't know what to do with this when it came out. It was only modestly successful at the time, not nearly as successful as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. And as you mentioned earlier, it just came into having any sort of popularity or critical respect in the 20th century. In doing the background I knew but I had forgotten and we get to Jane Eyre eventually too a true sensation On the order of anything we would talk about in contemporary culture it even remarked upon in some of the contemporary reviews of Wuthering Heights that there a Jane Eyre fever sweeping the country to the point where they just assume the reader of a review of Wuthering Heights has read Jane Eyre already even though it came out a little bit after I mean really probably in the Fifty Shades kind of cultural dominance except that there weren TV or movies or music So it's hard to admit. Less competition. It's just hard to convey how much a literary sensation like this mattered in the sort of proto-popular culture imagination. We talked a bit about that with Dickens. But Jane Eyre was very much the case. and stories for women about love and women's concerns, and we can talk more about that, have been underrated as a cultural and artistic force since the dawn of whatever. And this is another example of this. But I think Wuthering Heights, and it was pulled along long enough to be rediscovered because of the Bronte association with Jane Eyre, which was so much more popular. I'll try this book by the other Bronte sister that's also a story about something we may recognize it as love if we're sort of in an opium den or something like that. And it was sort of carried along long enough to be reconsidered later. And I reread this appreciation of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights for Virginia Woolf, which is quite beautiful. And that she, as someone who is interested in women's writing in A Room of One's Own and that whole tradition, she saw something powerful and unique in Emily Bronte. And it's so hard to remember that Bronte was like 28, and this is her first book. And she'd had as much education as she could really had, sort of left her own devices. They spent a lot of time writing and reading, and she and her sister created this sort of fictional Scottish Highland world of Gondol, and there's a whole backstory, and then produced this book, which is wild to look at. And I have this quote here from a contemporary critic that I think is illustrative. And I think I agree with it to some degree, which is, here's a quote, if the rank of a work of fiction is to depend solely on its naked imaginative power, then this is one of the greatest novels in the language. Because there's something raw. And I don't want to say true, but compelling and feels elemental here about something. And we can talk about what that thing is. Is it love? Is it desire? Is it repressed, psychosexual, whatever? But there's something going on here that continues to compel. And is there a better version of this book, which is not sort of groaning under the metatextual stuff and the comings and goings and the confusing? And we can get to the sort of the spinning, molten core here, which is these two AAA literary figures in the form of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. And one of my hot takes, I won't, I'll spoil it here, is like, Catherine Earnshaw is much of a villain as Heathcliff is. Oh, 100%. And he gets, because the name is more recognizable, and not just another Catherine show title, we sort of underestimate her own, she's like Lady Macbeth. I think she's like the original unlikable heroine. Yeah, this is like if, what if Richard II and Lady Macbeth fell in love? That's what this book is. and then sort of Kool-Aid man themselves into an Austin setting. That's what this book is, Rebecca. And I think that makes it fascinating, but also very hard to wrap your arms around. Yeah, and people certainly felt that at the time. I think critics and scholars continue to feel that. Lucasta Miller, a scholar of the Bronte sisters, wrote the preface to the edition that I was reading, and she called it the most passionately original novel in the English language. like be careful out there but like passionately original at the time maybe yes um but it was very different like dickens is writing at the same time this is around the same like the same era where his major novels are coming out and those are for all of how i mean how wonderful dickens is and inventive he is this is a truly like horse of a different color Like, Wuthering Heights is just a thing that nobody had seen before. And when a book like that comes out, it's going to be divisive. It's going to be a topic of a lot of conversation. But then especially when the author is a young woman who has died. She comes from this family of all these young women writers. They've all died. Like, the whole family is wrapped in tragedy. And, like, to get into Bronte's bio a little bit, like, she's the fifth of six kids in her family. Her mom was from a wealthy family. Her dad was a member of the clergy. And they grew up, she grew up living in the parsonage of a Yorkshire village of about 5,000 people called Hayworth. And their life was really confined to home and to family. Emily Bronte read really widely. But Charlotte described her as caring very little for the world beyond her beloved Yorkshire moors. She was a homebody. And I think that's interesting, too, that she didn't have a lot of experience out in the world. She didn't have a lot of touch points with people beyond those in her immediate vicinity. And her childhood is shadowed by death. Her mom dies when she's three. Then two of her older sisters die when she's seven. And her father, for being, you know, the parson, for being a member of the clergy, is also difficult. He's cold and hard. He's weird. He imposes, like, seemingly arbitrary rules on the girls. He carried a loaded gun at all times for reasons that nobody— A lot of guns in Wuthering Heights. And I read the book first before going back to do the biography. It's like, oh, she just used to see dudes wandering around their houses with guns over their shoulders. Yeah, her dad is prone to rages. And there's a character in the book who is also wracked with grief and prone to rages. And he gets drunk and he grabs his gun and you don't know what's going to happen. And that's because this is a thing Emily Bronte has seen in her life. But it's more complicated than that. Their father also was a little bit radical. He wanted the girls to be educated. And the intro to my edition described Emily Bronte as highly, if haphazardly, educated, that their father made sure all the girls had access to formal education. And I think this is really critical. Their leisure reading was not nearly as supervised as other middle class girls and women at the time. So they were out there reading whatever they wanted and having the opportunity to let their minds be unruly. And you can certainly see that happening in the book. Yeah, and we get a little of that Wuthering Heights, the importance of books and libraries and borrowing books and where it's taken away or burned. Very much a, I don't even know if it's a metaphor. I think it just is. It stands for itself as being a means of escape, a means of engagement, a means of autonomy within your own mind and your own body when so many other avenues are cut off from you. And I think like Shakespeare, the relative dearth of biographical data makes her and Charlotte and Anne and the work that much more compelling that there isn't a follow up. This isn't the first. And it's like, you know, eight novels later, you're going to see her in her first form that this was her first one out of the gate is shocking. um and you know you and i have some telltale signs of a debut novelist even today and i think we see some of these here about like larded with narration and exposition but at the at the highest moments the most fascinating moments you can see what heights she's able to reach and that you kind of can't teach you can teach a lot of the other crafty stuff and i wonder if over time would she have softened or would she have heightened by getting some of the other accoutrements and structural problems out of the way? It's fascinating to do. And then she's then available for later scholars, largely feminists, to take her up and consider her from a more modern sensibility of like, how is this about repressed women and lack of education and lack of opportunity and the male gaze and male dominance and violence and, you know, sort of sexual seclusion and the very real, I mean, the inciting incident here that really carries us through the end of volume one, volume two, is where Catherine Earnshaw kind of makes a, she makes a business decision to marry Edgar, right? To say, okay, we're going to secure some money here because if I don't, then Heathcliff is if I marry Heathcliff, that's who I really care for. And again, I have quotes under care, love, all those things, because I'm not even sure what emotion this is. And what I can do is I can have my cake and eat it too. I can get the benefits that come along with having the estate and then use that to raise Heathcliff up. And he can stay close, but we just can't get married because things will just fall apart. We will be ruined and she doesn't really see, or really there's no way out because they're all ruined anyway because of what Heathcliff ends up doing. And she's trapped, right? She can't have what she wants because a different version of this, she could go out and make her fortune and live and be a governess or whatever, but that's not at stake for her here. She's like, she's got no outs and she has to make do and make the kind of concession that, to use the book I kept thinking about as a weird, bizarro doppelganger, Pride and Prejudice, where Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy are tamer versions or Heathcliff and Catherine are sort of evolved Pokemon versions or something of those two characters, where she turns down Mr. Collins, who's giving her an out to keep Longbourn. What if she had taken that? And then Mr. Darcy was a psychopath. You know, like, that's what you get with something like this. And then you get to spin those things out, and it becomes a very interesting substrate upon which to do kinds of thinking and to explore. but it itself is elusive about what it cares about. I mentioned it's considered a romantic novel. It's certainly, you know, the Brontes would have been reading the romantic movement of the time, distinguished from romance of today, which is really narrowly defined as a story about physical or emotional romantic love that ends in a happy ending or happy for now. Romanticism was something else And it was, in a large part, a counter move towards enlightenment thinking of rationality, very interested in nature. It was interested in the supernatural. It was interested in the sublime. It was interested in intuition and feeling. And you can certainly see that here. And then we get a little bit into horror and gothic horror, which sometimes this is associated with because there are no real ghosts in this. Are we to believe, Rebecca, that there are any quote unquote real ghosts in this? Is the reader to believe that there are real ghosts being seen here? I did not read it. That's one of the great questions of the book. I didn't read it as real ghosts. But the vibes are so bad. We talk about people being haunted by the loss of someone or haunted by the terrible end of a relationship forever. And Heathcliff is certainly haunted. And some of the older Earnshaws are also haunted. But this is not a ghost story. Yeah. At the very least, though, some of the characters believe they've seen ghosts or they've had very strange dreams. Like even Mr. Lockwood, he comes in, he has this very odd dream. There's so many dreams, Jeff. So many dreams. And that's a hallmark of a certain kind of gothic story where something beyond merely human cognition is at stake. I mean Heathcliff is so haunted by Catherine like digs her ass up to make sure she's in there which is a wild scene by the way I'm sure well maybe we won't depends on where Fennell ends or how we put that in there but these people are very much at least they're open to the idea that these ghosts and figures who've been wronged or have died under strange circumstances are still sort of around and and even maybe they want them around because at least they're not gone at least they're not consigned to a oblivion, right? You'd rather be haunted by the one true thing that matters to you than to not be. And so that's a fascinating, I mean, there's lots of readings of the end of what's going on there. I don't know. But it's also, but Bronte wasn't like writing letters to Wordsworth or something like that. She was reading these people, but she wasn't a part of these literary conversations. It's not like Concord, Massachusetts, right? Where Thoreau, we did this with, who are we talking about? Gosh, darn it. Oh, Alcott. Sorry. You know, it wasn't those situations. She was a little bit more like Emily Dickinson where she was there and it was in the water, but she wasn't at the salons or writing for the thing and being edited by other people. So she has her own strange sort of offshoot of it, almost like a, you know, kind of an evolutionary dead end where you get this one branch of the family tree of romanticism in English literature, but it kind of doesn't go anywhere and it's hard to know to do something with how to do something with that like traditionally we talk about the romantic era of literature is like really interested as you said in nature in wildness in imagination and it is like it is unruly and dark and stands in contrast to that enlightenment rationality practicality things moving along in a logical sort of way and they're really like there is a logic to heathcliff here but it is not the lot it's not the ruling logic of the day and it's certainly not a logic that anybody i think wants to live inside this whole thing is so much more complex than any of the blurbs any of the like attempts to synopsize it um i did the exercise of asking chat gpt like what is wuthering heights about what happens uh and it's like here are all of the moments that occur but it can't get to how strange it is to read this book and to watch really the cruelty. I don't think we can press on that hard enough here that Heathcliff is not just a villain, but deeply cruel and abusive to everyone around him, to the animals in his home, to the people in his home. I don't think psychopath is an exaggeration for the behavior. And that is also kind of unremarked upon. People talk about how mean he is, but nobody's like, whoa, this guy is way out of pocket. Yeah. And that it's hard to know because they don't know what to make of Heathcliff. And we haven't really talked about this, where he is ambiguously, culturally, ethnically, racially categorized. You know, at one point, maybe your mother was the queen of the Orient, or maybe your dad was an Indian trader, or, you know, there's some subsequent criticism that maybe he was an escaped slave and because he's darker, but also is he a gypsy? But also could it just be that he has darker complexion and it's not about some racial dynamic that would be completely foreign to this little Yorkshire community? He is un-understandable. And that's the point. I think that's more the point than anything else. There's not a spinning moral core to the story. And that was one of the most interesting things about diving into a lot of the criticism and people's interpretations of it is that like Bronte did not have a defined political sensibility. Her sisters talked about this after her death, like early readings of it identified this, like she didn't have a political sensibility. She did not identify as a feminist of her day. There's not a political or gender argument at the heart of Wuthering Heights. And that means that it becomes a Rorschach test. It's a kind of projection screen for whatever you do want to find in Wuthering Heights, you can find. And I don't know that that's something Bronte was doing on purpose. It seems to me to be a byproduct of if you're not writing from a really defined social perspective, you end up opening yourself up to all sorts of interpretations. But we just can't know. And the book is harder to pin down than any of the sort of popular cultural descriptions of it want it to be. We don't get anything like it would be so fascinating to know. And I don't know if the discourse and we'd be the poor for it, but like what part of this was she herself most interested in? Like the question I would ask if I had 20 minutes to talk to her would be like, how the hell did this thing get started? Like, where did, what were you seeing that got you to think in these terms? because it's like, it's almost like the chronicle of an emotional natural disaster than is a story about anything. It's like Heathcliff and Catherine are these romantic meteors that hit this little community and destroy everything. And it's sort of Nietzschean, it's sort of beyond good and evil. It's like, it's not even about morality because it doesn't even seem like they're subject to it. They're not capable of engaging with morality or should they do this or not. There's this one scene where Catherine asks Nellie, like, have I done the right thing? And she's asking earnestly, but she also can't, she has no sense of how to evaluate it herself in marrying Edgar. And Nellie's like doing all these sort of middle, middle brow rationalizations, double speak stuff about, well, if you think it was right and it makes sense and I love you and it'll be made. And she's like, but I did, I do the right thing because she sort of knows that there was no right thing. and it leaves us to ponder ourselves like wait it doesn't it doesn't lend itself to if they'd only done x if they only done y it just doesn't seem subject to those kinds of things like did i do the right thing and then that there is no one right thing like is indicative of the fact that there were not clear paths to like free expression for women at the time and bronte may have been feeling that. Catherine is certainly feeling it on the page. And that can be true without the book being like a feminist argument, because she's also out there like marrying a man just for money and then making him watch functionally while she cuckolds him. Like Edgar knows that Catherine is still in love with Heathcliff. He knows that he that she's just with him and he's made to watch them be around each other and to see that connection. When I was describing this to Bob, I was like, Heathcliff is just Mr. Steal Your Girl right in front of Edgar. They're not going to any, not only not going to any trouble, but they're not making any attempts at all to hide how they feel about each other. Isabella knows right from the start that Heathcliff doesn't love her and that the marriage is out of convenience. It's functional. It's just a utility to get him these other things that he wants, but she also has no options. And so there is sort of a, there's a way of reading this that is about how dark the very limited options available to women are and what that rage could drive a woman to do, except the women don't get to have rage on the, on the page here. It's only Heathcliff. Yeah. There is a, there's a couple of scenes where they, I can't remember which Catherine it is, I think it's Kathy Jr., like grips someone's arm toes and scratches that she draws blood and is described as a vixen and she's a wolf and you'll see her talons now. But just physically Heathcliff is huge. Like that's another thing. Like he's a physically intimidating presence where there's no fair fight to be had with Heathcliff. They're very limited in their ability to fight back. But they do show their fangs and they do some other things, but they're still so subject to his own physical presence. And then, you know, what does he represent? The patriarchy? It's hard to do that because- I think that's way too simple of a reading. It's way too simple of a reading because he himself is subject to being outside of the social caste system of the day. Like he goes off for three years to make his fortune doing God knows what, gambling or stealing or giving several, or, you know, did he join them? Did he go to America and fight in the revolution and make a bunch of money or was he a privateer? it's unknown except that what it probably wasn't happening he didn't just go walk and become part of the land of dentry because that wasn't you know something he could do but there's there's this all this mystery about his own being his own being of being an outcast in society and you have down a little bit later i'm sorry it's more like hurt people hurt people there's an element to that that's not wrong it's not it's not it's not um that's not the point it doesn't explain the whole thing but there is an element of people here that are outside of their ability to build their lives as they would wish without making some serious compromises and bad choices along the way. Rebecca, when did you first read this book? This was my first completed attempt at Wuthering Heights. I tried it in high school. I think I was probably trying to make my way through the great romances. I remember reading Lady Chatterley's Lover and Rebecca around the same time and starting this and being so annoyed like where the hell is the romance what's happening here and just bailing um like you i do not like this book uh but reading it through the lens of like what would it have been like to read this in 1847 was really helpful and also kind of the mystified curious what are we still doing with with wuthering heights why does it still have such a grip on us. That was how I got through it. What about you? High school on my own, as I was trying to round out the books that I should be read in my own long, never-ending journey to be well-read, I guess, that continues apace, I was completely bewildered by it. I did not have any structure for understanding or having a way of being even sort of intellectually interested in it or historically interested. I do not like this book, but I don't think liking is the point, and I am compelled by it. I do think that it has an elemental force that amongst a lot of other cobwebs and strangeness in a bad way, there's something here that seems to be of its own and not strange for strangeness sake. And one thing I continue to remind myself, and I'd like to remind people listening to this show and others that experience art of any kind, the art that continues to be discussed and endures usually falls into one of two categories. One is it is either the first and or the highest expression of a moment, an idea, a movement, a form, or it's its own thing. And it breaks free of something else like that. It's a weirdo. It a weirdo And whenever we have a big contemporary hit that a weirdo whether it it Onyx Storm or The Da Vinci Code or Fifty Shades people are always so shocked that this weird thing became a phenomenon when I continue to argue that only weird things become phenomenons because they need, you have to be weird. You have to be novel. A novel has to be novel for it to really break out and catch fire. There has to be dry kindling for the fire to catch, something that hasn't been burned out already. And at the very least, Bronte is, she's out scrambling rocks that people didn't know could be scrambled. And that I'm glad to have read it again. I'm not going to be out here and trying to get people to read it because it is its own flavor and it's not for everybody. Yeah. And I think to that point, this is maybe the first book we've talked about here that I don't think is widely taught today. Like even Twilight from the first season is taught in some places. But Wuthering Heights is one of those classics that people recognize as a classic. You recognize it as you did as a kid as something that you should have read or you should get to someday because it's important for reasons we don't quite understand. But it's not, like I couldn't find a lot of syllabi that Wuthering Heights is on. I'm sure there are people doing this like in the graduate level. I didn't encounter it in college. I talked to some friends like nobody had to read this in school. Everyone that is in my like pretty literary social circle who had a story about Wuthering Heights had one similar to ours that they picked it up on their own because they heard it was important. And trying to read this without a guide, especially if you're like 17, the language is old fashioned and you don't have a grounding and like what's going on here would have just been super challenging. So talk about your own, like, let's dive into that a little bit of like your actual reading experience. What is the physical sensation of reading this like? I mean, honestly, I was annoyed a lot of the time. There's a lot of setup, like 35 pages to just set up for us, like how Mr. Lockwood arrived, where he arrived and who Nellie Dean is and who all the characters are. And then not much about Catherine and Heathcliff. Like if you go into this expecting to figure out why these people love each other, it's frustrating that we don't get to see it. It resists tidy interpretation. And so I think if you can just let it be messy, like once I got myself into that space, I'm like, oh, this is a mess. These are messy people. And we like messes. We do. Generally speaking, we're interested in messes. We do. And they're messy in a similar way to like the way that Gatsby is messy. Like everybody's just out there reacting to stuff. So when I got into that headspace, that was really helpful. And I really had to resist applying contemporary, a contemporary lens to this. Like there's a way to talk about this as a story about trauma and revenge. And it is. But I don't think that's what Bronte is doing. and like Heathcliff is one of those guys who can't have what he wants so nobody can have what they want and I think she recognized that type she recognized the anger there's a lot about like implicitly women as property that women are the gateway to getting the property that you want but she's not writing from the perspective of like how dare men use women as pawns in these situations it's just you really have to put yourself in an 18 like tie on your bonnet and go to 1847 and i was surprised by how violent it was like really deeply disturbingly violent probably one of the reasons it's not taught in a lot of classrooms um heathcliff is hitting people he's yelling at people he's throwing stuff he's torturing the pets and like also none of that is really remarked upon as super bad. It's just the way he is, the thing that he's doing. And it's hard to track, as we talked about at the beginning, that multiple people are named Catherine. There's multiple Earnshaws going around. There's multiple Mr. Lintons. Which generation we're in and everything is unsettling. And I do think that is intentional on Bronte's part. These people are messy. They're unsettled. The experience of reading it is unsettled. I had I'm like, did Emily Bronte invent postmodernism? Like, the text makes you feel sometimes the way that the characters feel. I'm just like, I can't get my head around this. I don't know what ground I'm standing on. A really kind of one-of-a-kind reading experience. Yeah. I think it might be helpful for people that want to trot out to the moors is to see it more like a mystery than a romance. because you look at how it's put together. Lockwood comes into town, like often happens, you know, some of a stranger comes into town and something weird is going on. He falls ill and he's essentially laying in bed for a long time. And Nellie comes to tell him the story in parts. And sometimes he's left in suspense between parts. And we're kind of in the middle of it, right? Because we sort of catch up with the contemporaneous events through Lockwood's eyes and his sort of entanglements with him as being the Lisee. But he's trying to figure out what this is going on. And Nellie is telling him what she knows. And her understanding is incomplete. Also, she's also younger than I am, Nellie, by the way. I thought that was important. You know, she's like the old, you know, servant. And she's like seven years younger than I am. Middle-aged characters have it rough in books from this time period. Though I have to say, her memory is unbelievable. reciting entire passages of dialogue back and forth between two people that happened years ago anyway that's one of the but she herself is trying to understand the story she can relay events but she doesn't understand them she knows like what happened but she is in awe of catherine and heathcliff especially as anybody else is and the book is trying to get to tell us the truth which is what happened, but why it happened, the source of this feeling, the source of these desires, the source of this momentum is completely unresolved. But if you think of it as more of a mystery, I think it helps understand why we get these layers of text, right? You mentioned it, but I think at one point I tracked that Lockwood is telling us the story of him being told the story of someone telling her the story about a letter they got in which someone else was telling there's like six layers of text to wade through and i think there's an element of like myth making that happens when you do that like heathcliff is like a demigod almost like beast and beauty and the beast kind of character that everyone is revolving around and no one has direct access to so you all have these stories and stories and you know this and i saw him he was doing this and it's like he is a monster in that regard or like Jaws where you see him kind of swimming around. But then when he does come up, it's terrifying and sort of beautiful and awesome in like the larger version of awesome. That experience I had. I think the central question to me, if I could boil it down to maybe my best guess here of what this is about, is what if you take the idea of an all-consuming love to its logical end? You know, this idea of you are the only thing that matters to me is a fundamentally selfish, narcissistic, world-abnicating position. And that is sort of at the core of some of the most, I don't know, sentimental, mawkish, extreme versions of, well, I only need you, there's just the two of us, the whole world could fall away, right? Well, what if someone actually did this who was also a giant brute and just didn't care about the rest of the world except to be with one person? And what would happen if they didn't have that person? Wouldn't it look a lot like this? Yeah, I think it would. And that gets to, I think, maybe why teenage girls have been drawn to this. The idea of you're all that I need. I would destroy the world for you has historically been presented as romantic and positive. I find it to be gross. And antisocial and criminal most of the time. Can the dude get a hobby, please? but like yeah the law you don't actually want that you don't actually want to be the whole center of someone's world this is a cautionary tale about having a lover who's obsessed with you and like maybe the modern version of it is those memes that are like get you somebody who looks at you the way that you know like whoever it is in the photo is looking at this other person we don't actually want this. It is not actually good. Obsession is destructive. And I think you're right that if Bronte is going for anything, it is look at how destructive single-mindedness, obsession, this idea of one true love can be. Just to go back to the layers and layers of narration, the narrative choices here are the most interesting thing about the book to me, that it's told second or third or fourth or fifth or sixth hand by the time that the story gets to us. And that means we should really wonder what is true here. Like, this is a game of telephone. And Heathcliff is certainly brutish, but we can't know how he felt or how Catherine felt, because they never tell us. We're never in their heads. We hardly get any direct dialogue. And that choice on Bronte's part, that's one of the things that I would want to ask her is, what are you getting at with that we only see these people through like multiply removed lenses? Makes it really interesting, but also it's kind of a reader beware. Like you don't really don't take any of this as gospel. gospel. I think another thing that it does is all these sort of textual layers, when we get a moment of Catherine or Heathcliff almost monologuing about how they're feeling, it heightens that because of all the other dross that we have to wade through to get there. So it's like you have to climb, you have to go through the moors and climb with the rocks. But then when you get the sunset for a moment, I think it feels all the more sublime or all the more powerful because of how rare that thing is. And there are several here that in a play version of this, Catherine and Heathcliff would get wonderful speeches. Terrible, but wonderful. And that's the thing that got me to think about, again, my best analogy is, what if Richard II and Lady Macbeth fell in love on the moors in a Jane Austen novel? That's what you would get with something like this. All right. Time for stray thoughts. What else was wandering in and out of the transom of your mind as you were making your way through this book. Boy, these people are a nightmare blunt rotation. Though in a way it would improve things if everyone had a little downer. Yeah, yes. Everybody needs to just chill a little bit. But I do appreciate on a level that a book where literally everyone is unlikable has been this widely and consistently read. Like, well, more of that, please. Unlikable characters are much more interesting. unhappy characters tend to be much more interesting, but also just like, wow, you're going to be disappointed if you saw the trailer for this, or you've just heard this is one of the great romances and you pick up Wuthering Heights expecting a sexy, exciting, like passionate book. It's just so different from the public narrative about it. I think, yeah, I do think that we are not given to believe. I don't think there's even any a stretch reading where Heathcliff and Catherine are having a sexual relationship. I think it's that they're not that maybe makes it feel so on edge the whole time. They just need to do it to some regard. And I think there's a version of the movie where the anticipation, the desire is at such a fever pitch that people are acting out of their minds. And that maybe is an explanation as well as anything else here. I wonder about, is this if Romeo and Juliet, if Romeo and Juliet were dicks? That's my other thought here. What if Romeo and Juliet were just like really toxic assholes and they're all dead at the end? It wouldn't be beautiful, but it would be something. Yeah, I think that's a good one. I also, thinking about other classic literature, kind of wondered if Heathcliff was a prototype for Gatsby, that Heathcliff, you know, he goes away and then he returns and he's made money, as you said, and we don't know where his money has come from. And people tell all these stories about him and they make all these assumptions and project things onto him. And that happens with Gatsby too. Like they're not the same character, but Gatsby also is this sort of mythical, he's arrived out of nowhere. He has all this money. People like to imagine what his backstory is. And I couldn't find any formal mention or acknowledgement of Fitzgerald talking about Wuthering Heights, but one would think he at least would have had the opportunity to read it. There's a lot of threads that are similar, like a man appears from nowhere and has no confirmable backstory and becomes this screen onto which people project all sorts of assumptions. Or maybe just an interesting thread connecting the two. Yeah, that reminds me a little bit of David Copperfield's mentor and David Copperfield of like this person of sort of sketchy background. And it's actually said in the book, Wuthering Heights, like honest people don't have to hide things. I think we're pretty much told that he got up into some shenanigans, right? Like, I don't know if it was a bootlegger or slave trader. It could be anything at this point. But it was not on the up and up for sure. I have an analogy here. 50 shades is to twilight as withering heights is to Pride and Prejudice. And by that, I mean, famously, E.L. James wrote Fifty Shades because of the chasteness of Twilight, especially the first volume, right? And the understanding that our human emotions, our sexual desire, romantic love, our roiling passions resist that kind of restraint. It cannot be restrained by that. And there's a development, like Pride and Prejudice, 1813, I think, so it, you know. About 30 years earlier. About 30 years ago. The Brontes certainly would have read and adored, I assume, Austin, or maybe been frustrated by it. Because as much as I love Pride and Regents, as much as I love Austin, sensual it is not. The spontaneous outpouring of uncontrollable emotions was sort of the definition of romanticism according to Wordsworth. Was that Coleridge? I get this confused. It's been a while. It is not. It's awfully chaste. It's awfully monk-like and priest-like. Like, it is Apollonian, not Dionysian, for all you Greek heads out there. And it does feel to me like, well, what if they just could not resist each other for good or for ill, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet? And not even just them specifically, but this dynamic of these more formal, these more acceptable, these more socially acceptable drawing room kinds of stories about love. but we also all know there's a lot more to the human heart than that and you know part of me is like what if she just wanted to let him off the hook and let him go you know this is making me think about how during our twilight episode you were yelling at one point just do it already yes yeah yeah and yeah i think if they had just had a chance to consummate their relationship like a lot of this is that it's unrequited and the traditional reading of weathering heights is that they don't get to consummate their relationship, that it's all just yearning forever. And that's also dangerous and toxic sometimes. Like, just let them do it. And then... Existential blue balls is not good for anybody. Everything, I mean, that is not good. That's not healthy. It's going to go real bad for a lot of people. You heard it here first. Other straight thoughts. I don't know that the pathetic fallacy, which is where weather stands in for people's emotional states has ever worked harder than in Wuthering Heights. To the point where his name is Heathcliff, where Heath is another word for moor. So his name is just cliffs on a moor. Like his name is the place they are. Like, can you do that, Rebecca? Do we allow this? I don't. We're also allowing, like Bronte refers to all the residents of Wuthering Heights as inmates, which I looked and was like in use at the time as a stand-in for residents, but also feels to me chosen. It's so claustrophobic. I don't know if we've gotten that word into the air here, but the whole thing is so claustrophobic. Even though it's in the moors because of the weather and the winter, it's like, it's just people that are sitting around in rooms bouncing off the walls and into each other like for three quarters of the book. Yeah. Everybody needs to like go for a walk, you know. Do some push-ups. Get a little aerobic activity, some yoga maybe. What else do I have here? What you need is your silly little mental health walk is what they need here. Yeah, right. Totally. When they do them all the time, it doesn't help. That's where the ghosts are, Rebecca. on your mental health walk. I don't know. I didn't confirm this. I tried to look it up. I got to nowhere. Is this where O'Nelly is from? Oh. Because we get like 35 O'Nellys in this book. Let's just go with that. Do you like that? Sure. I also have, for something so famous for being set on the Moors, we actually don't get a lot of narration or description of the Moors. Yeah. No, I was expecting, and even a friend said to me like, man, if you can get through all the Moors stuff. So I was expecting the Moors equivalent of like the wailing scenes in Moby Dick. No. There's not a lot of that. There's not a lot. Yeah. I have – we've said this before. How does In the World is Ranked So Highly and Greatest Love Stories pull the list? Could it be that people are getting confused and conflating with – like lumping it with Jane Eyre? And maybe – I don't get it. I also think that this happens more often than people want to admit where like I didn't get this book, but I'm going to assume it's like a problem with me and not the book. And so I should say that this is a great book. Has cultural momentum of a kind? Yeah. Like cultural imposter syndrome. Yeah. Interesting. Notable quotes. There's a bunch and also not that many. Like, I guess we didn't really talk about the stylistically. There's not a lot of, wow, this would make a good Goodreads quote in the narration. But in the dialogue, there's some really heavy stuff. So where do you want to go? I mean, also just like the ultimate quotes about codependency. Oh, my God. He's more myself than I am. whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. Like that is the top quote on Goodreads, I believe. It's probably all over all sorts of things on Etsy. People probably say this in their wedding vows. Folks, this is not what Wuthering Heights is about. Or it is, but it's like, but it is, but this is bad. It's bad. If you think this way, disaster awaits. All consuming love is bad. Like you got to have a hobby. You got to have some friends. at one point Catherine is saying I wish I were a girl again half savage and hardy and free that I think gets to another like sort of one of the spinning molten cores of the book is this desire for free expression and to push against boundaries Bronte certainly is pushing against convention here and then it was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn, which is about Catherine and Heathcliff's relationship, but really rang the bell for me of the most popular quote from Twilight, and so the lion fell in love with the lamb, which, you know, Stephanie Meyer talked about having been influenced by Wuthering Heights as well. It's so interesting. To close read for just a second, the idea of a honeysuckle embracing the thorn, there is no world in which the honeysuckle is not pierced, right? I mean, just to put it sort of directly. Like there is no world in which that embrace can be good. There is this fantasy of the lion laid down with the lamb, you know, the peaceable kingdom. But that is a fantasy, right? Like this is a much more evocative and sort of corporeal of embrace in the thorn and the honeysuckle. How tender and subject to honeysuckle is what happens to the honeysuckle to embrace the thorn. And it really lets Catherine off the hook. Like she's not as bad. She's not as violent as Heathcliff, But she is not this delicate. No, she's not. She isn't. She's also a thorn. They both do a lot of damage and they leave a lot of people in their wake. And what the origins of that are in the story, like, is it Nellie letting Catherine off the hook in her telling of it? Like, who starts that? Like, where did Catherine get the good PR team is a great question here. um there's like again there's some like melville shakespeare like moments and soliloquies i'm going to do an extended one here it doesn't have a reducible meaning like this means x or suggests y but this is katherine earnshaw katherine the elder i cannot express it but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is or should be an existence of yours beyond you what were the use of my creation if i were entirely contained here my great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning. My great thought in living is himself. If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be. If all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should seem not a part of it. That is Shakespearean, man. There's questions of being and desire and selfhood and the divine all kind of wrapped up here. And I think I get just enough of these moments. And there's not just one. There's, I don't know, six to 12, kind of like this, that make the oyster shucking worth it. And some of this is painful oyster shucking for me, but the pearls are something there. Here's another one from Catherine. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath, a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nellie, I am Heathcliff. He is always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure anymore than I'm always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So it's beyond romantic love. It's like, he's like rocks, like a pillar, like beyond even questioning the necessity of. It's weird, Rebecca. It is weird. I think he pretty strange And then she says like she realizes she made a horrible deal and says after marrying Edgar well if I cannot keep Heathcliff for my friend if Edgar will be mean and jealous I try to break their hearts by breaking my own And so her last resort is to use her own body and being to sort of buy transference hurt them. And she does. Yeah, she does. It's a real, like, if Catherine can't be happy, can't nobody be happy. If Heathcliff can't be happy, can't nobody be happy. They're just willing to take down everything in their path in service of the fact that they can't have what they want. Yeah. One more. This is Heathcliff after she's dead. Where is she? Not there, not in heaven, not perished. Where? Oh, you said you cared nothing for my sufferings. I pray one prayer. I repeat it till my tongue stiffens. Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I killed. You haunt me then. the murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always. Take any form. Drive me mad. Only do not leave me in the abyss. And speaking about Catherine's death, you mentioned that after she dies, he has her dug up so that he can see her and hold her for a second and be sure that she's there. And then he insists that when he dies, the plan will be for them to be buried side by side with the sides, like the interior sides of their coffins taken off so that they could be next to each other as their bodies deteriorate. Like that's real gothic shit. And also the kind of thing that a certain flavor of like hot topic teenage girl might be drawn to that as you grow up, you learn is pretty toxic. Like that these kinds of people are intoxicating, but also quite toxic. And that's all language, of course, that Bronte wouldn't have used. And I'm not even sure she recognizes that in its fullness. But if there's a contemporary reading, it's like, oh boy, toxic relationship. Yeah, it's so fascinating because I think that idea still exists too in a lot of ways for people of all kinds of like this idea of love being or desire or connection or soulmates or whatever you want to use of being almost a cosmic force that is not even really specifically about that person. but through them or within them. The problem is that we're just damn people and we make mistakes and we're messy and perfect and flawed. But through this, this Phoenix Force, I mean, that's an X-Men quote for all you heads out there, has to flow through this imperfect vessel. And if you think in those terms, what else but disaster can arise? I don't know that anything else could happen. You had a wonderful idea here. You collected an incomplete list of descriptions of Heathcliff. Would you like to run through them for us all, Rebecca? He's described as having habitual moroseness, being a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man, a brute beast, an incarnate goblin, monster, fiend, hellish villain, viper, having basilisk eyes, a most diabolical man, and a scoundrel more than once. And I'm sure I missed some. Oh, you did. But those are wonderful. Yeah. At a certain point in the book, I was like, oh, I got to start keeping track of these. You know it's bad when the best thing someone can say about you is a scoundrel. I really loved incarnate goblin. Yes. Let's see. I think that's enough quotes for us for now. Is it for you? Well, if you can't tell by now, Rebecca, what do you think a listener might use to do a differential on their desire to read this book. I think if you can and want to do the mental time warp of imagining what it was like to read this when it came out in 1847, that's an interesting exercise. If you like plot, because this book is basically all plot, and if messy, ambiguous stories work for you, this is a good one to pick up. I also have, if you want to be smug about how people get Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff wrong, you can do that too. Yeah, it's a good note. Not so much for you if you are looking for a traditional romance with a happily ever after if tiktok told you this was a love story and also there is real rough physical and psychological abuse and as you notice like it's just tough sledding trying to keep things straight so if you don't want to be juggling a bunch of people with the same name and constantly flipping back to a family tree like reader take caution i kind of go back and forth about because or despite the difficulty of some of just the logistics and names and what's happening. And there's a lot of like Lockwood just describing where Nellie is or how she came back. And like, is that important to the feeling and mood of the book? Or is there a version of it that's even more powerful if that's streamlined? It's an unanswerable question, but I do find myself wondering that. The immortal questions that aren't asked here are the few that we tend to work through here. What is the good life? What do I have my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil? Rebecca kind of unsurprisingly seems resistant to this mode of analysis. I don't know. What is the good life? What do I have my neighbor? Yeah, I think if I had to write like an English 101 paper based on one of these for Wuthering Heights, I would probably peg it to what is the good life. And you could you could make the case around having the relationships that you want or don't want, being treated well by family, the consequences of getting or not getting those things. What do I like? None of the characters here are concerned with morality. Bronte doesn't seem particularly concerned with morality. So I don't think it's about what do I owe my neighbor? They sort of don't have access to us at this dark thing amongst them is not really a moral question as much as one of survivors. Right. And the elements of some of these other questions are in play, like that people died, that Catherine has died is a thing that Heathcliff is wrestling with. But they're not really making sense of the world through the lens of those questions. I think it's what is the good life and really like what happens if you don't get the good life that is the primary thing going on here. But it I don't know. Wuthering Heights really resists going into any of these cleanly. I might think about what else might there be. Not only are there ghosts with this idea of love is like a supernatural force itself. Almost like a Greek godlike sort of divinity that is chaotic. It's not it's not good or bad necessarily, but it's its own thing. that it has overwhelmed Heathcliff and Catherine's sensibility. And if we think of that as Wuthering Heights, it's like insisting on the human in the face of the enlightenment and rationality. There's something else going on here. As Ian says, don't you think there must be some existence beyond just you? Is that love? Is that the divine? Is that oblivion? What else that there might be? And sometimes the answer is bad. Sometimes the answer is there are these demonic forces or these things that are beyond the capability of humans to control them. I keep thinking of Cormac McCarthy in Stella Maris, his last published book, where one of the characters is afraid that if you got a glimpse behind everything, that it would not be nothing, nor would it be the pearly gates, but some third thing. And I do think that Bronte is wondering about that. Beyond all this stuff, if we really had access to the essence of all things, are we sure we want to tap into that are we sure about that that's a great point especially knowing that she was sickly for a lot of her life like she's she goes to school and then she has to come back because she gets sick like and it's unclear i think to anybody is this like anxiety that we didn't have a label for at the time that she wants to be a homebody and she has trouble being away from things that are familiar or physical sickness when does the physical sickness become part of it. Like she dies of tuberculosis, but there's other stuff going on there. And so, and she's watched her family die. Everyone's subject to dying at any time. I mean, I think that's, that's hard to underestimate both in her life and this book. Like it's really, and even at one point Nellie Dean says, I'm, I find I'm no happier than when someone is dying, as long as there's not a shrieking mourner there because it's peaceful and I know what's going on. That is a weird idea. That's a weird idea. It's a dark place to be. That's a very strange place to be. But it's, I think, like we said, it's no surprise that this is a tougher nut to crack with the implements we usually use here. And that's kind of cool in some way. Are we sure this is about art and writing, Rebecca? I mean, it's obviously about the solace and liberation of reading and education that was important for Bronte and it's important for the characters. But she does not seem concerned with a writerly identity to me or being an artist with the function of art. The book is not about writing in some way, but books as gateways to freedom. And certainly like that wild, free, intellectual unruliness that that was part of the romantic era is right there. Could you get the most of the gist of this from watching the Signal adaptation? I mean, there are several adaptations. You talked about the 1939 one, which is thought to be well done, but nothing has ever become like the Signal adaptation. We're going to see if Emerald Fennell can take that trophy. It'll be wild if she does. But you noted earlier that even in that 1939 version, it ends when Catherine dies, which is the halfway mark of the book. So that's a no then. Most of this is about the revenge, actually. Half of it, at least. And the weirder, stranger, less really half at that. If we were to make our own adaptation, would you choose a movie, musical, TV series, or Muppets? I had fun with this. I want a jukebox musical with early 2000s angsty pop punk. I'm nominating my chemical romance. I started thinking about this as a musical. And Fandom of the Opera is sort of doing some things about this, of this toxic but compelling, generative, but also gross relationship. I think a musical, do I want songs in this? I don't think I do. I would be curious about a play, maybe because I've really got my hooks into there's some Shakespeare pieces to this, and because the most important moments are spoken, right? Whereas in a lot of books we say that are harder to translate, the most important moments are interiority or feeling. All the important feelings are said or unknown, which lends itself to a play. I don't think I would enjoy it myself. I'm not buying a ticket, but let's go to town. I do think a movie can do the setting and the windswept moors and the isolation and some of the real physical pieces that I think are important. And maybe if we were in English in 1850, we have a better sense of the terrain here. But mine is all mediated by the idea of withering heights. Like my idea of the moor is mediated already through Wuthering Heights, which doesn't have much. So it's just a bunch of like weirdly self-referential representations that's sort of based on nothing. Like if you gave me seven landscapes with grass and rolling hills in them, could I pick out the moor? I'm not sure at this point. Miscellaneous trivia adaptations, rumors, misretrieve quotes, etc. When she was a teacher, Bronte told her students that she liked her dog more than she liked people. and it is said that when she died her dog followed her coffin to the grave and howled outside her bedroom door for weeks and this reminded me of those t-shirts that say i like my dog and maybe three people can i dwell on that maybe this is better for hot takes or the office hours that is not a good thing that's not a good look for people that wear that t-shirt or say i agree does everyone know this do we all know that you're like that's that's a you problem that's that's not a the world is a problem. That is a you are a problem. The world is certainly a problem, but that you like your dog and maybe three people as a t-shirt you're wearing. I'm not sure where, I'm not sure you're where you think you are. The t-shirt is certainly not helping you. No. At that place. No. But I had some affection for her, for her poor dog here. Dogs have a rough time in Wuthering Heights. I felt that for them. I don't think it was all great for dogs on the moors and then farms and, you know, they're, they're, they're not getting the farmer's dog subscription food service. You know what I'm saying? It's not happening. And I think this is your note here, but this is like, Bronte is one of those cases where we just don't have much biographical info about the author and that dearth makes the text like much more interesting and intriguing, mysterious, elusive. That we don't know much about her is part of what works here, I think. I have one more that I forgot to put in. Emily, and I think it was Anne, co-authored a book of, a volume of poetry had it sort of essentially the version of self-publishing. It wasn't quite the same. It was today. You'd like pay a publisher to do it. Not, not uncommon. There was one review of that work. Would you like to guess how many, as far as we know, how many copies of that were sold? Oh, I have no idea. Two, two confirmed copies sold and got one review. So there we go. Tough, tough out there for writers always and forever. Hot takes, Rebecca, we got, we got several here. Should we get through this? We do. This lends itself to hot takes. I think girls who are obsessed with Wuthering Heights don't actually want Heathcliff. They want to be Kathy. She's spirited and passionate and independent. She's desired by two men. And she's described as saucy multiple times. And she gets to be a monster. If anything is aspirational, it's not the love story. It's Kathy's wildness and this guy coming after her. But as we have said, this is also not the kind of love that you want to be a subject of. No, not at all. um i'd like to introduce those people who have maybe not read much ado about nothing are looking for a role model beatrice and much ado about nothing maybe i just like shakespeare better or it's just like she gets to be feisty and fun and she holds her own and still doesn't like go nuts and great news for people that is the shakespeare of this season of zero to well read so there might be a reason for that uh let's see what else do i have this is a critique this is a critique of romance um this is heathcliff she abandoned them under a delusion she answered picturing me in a hero of romance expecting unlimited indulgences from my chivalrous devotion i can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature so obstinately she has persisted in forming a fabulous notion of my character and acting on the false impressions she cherished i I don't know you can take down the idea of capital R romance more directly than that. Or a certain version, a certain idealized extreme version of it. I also, and maybe this is, I don't know if this is a hot take. I just think the title does a lot of work for thinking. I agree with you. For making the book seem highfalutin. If it's called something other than Wuthering Heights. Catherine and Heathcliff? If it's called Catherine and Heathcliff. It's. I don't know. It doesn't have as much aura around it. It reminds me of that scene in the West Wing where they have to say something about Bingo Bob being the vice president. They choose Redoubtable because no one knows what it means. Yes. I think Wuthering is like really a shibboleth or, again, another West Wing. Or not a shibboleth. It's just sort of a – It just sounds high-minded. An empty cipher for meaning. Yes. Yes. I agree with you. Yeah. Bob this week was like, what actually is Wuthering? And I was like, I don't think that many people in the year of our Lord 2026 know what Wuthering is. It's just our case of Wuthering, right? Yeah. That's what I saw. It just like means subject to weather. Right. And it's the name of the house. It's not like the place that they, you know, the natural setting that they're in, but it kind of refers to that. But if this, yeah, if this is just called Catherine and Heathcliff or like, you know, I don't even know what the, like a good alternate title would be. But if it's called what Lockwood Grange or whatever the home is that he lives in, it's not nearly as compelling today. But the title sounds like you have engaged with something high minded. um i forgot to put this one down too you always know it's a bad guy if you only have one name his name is just heathcliff he's not like jim heathcliff his name is just heathcliff yeah you got to watch out for guys with one name and guys with two first names yeah right and heathcliff is sort of heath and cliff it's two names jammed into one that's terrible worst of all worlds i have nothing here for read-alikes i really don't i mean like there's jane eyre and some gothic stuff but like even that i don't have a good comp yeah i don't think they're bad but Yeah, none of it. I don't think any of it's great. I agree. There's not like a straight comp for Wuthering Heights. Maybe you go to Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier for more of that gothic, a more romance-y story. Gatsby for a different spin on how being obsessed with the past is a bad plan for you. And then honestly, I just thought about the movie Cruel Intentions a lot. That's a good idea. You're like, you want your fix of messy people. You could get it in two hours. They're also, I think, they're step-siblings in that. Just go watch Cruel Intentions. Which is itself a modernization of… Of les liaisons de droves. So maybe if you really want to be falutin. Can you be low falutin? A great question. You can be high falutin. Could you be like normally falutin? Can you just be falutin? Just falutin. It's like being whelmed. Yeah. But if you want to be high falutin, go read Dangerous Liaisons, the original French there. Cocktail Party Crib Sheet. Well, I agree with the same thing. Again, it goes back to like, this is actually a critique of an all-encompassing romantic love. This is a book about why you should not want a boy to be obsessed with you. I think even critique is wrong. It's not even that. It's more elemental than critique. It's like this is what can take into its logical end. This is what a singular romantic pursuit does. It becomes a glacier moving through the, you know, rolling down the mountain and destroying everything in its path. Yeah. Man, an interesting one. Zero to well-read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10, with 10 being the highest. One, historical importance. Two, readability. Three, current relevance of central questions. Four, book nerd read cred. And five, oh, damn factor. All of these are qualified because historical importance has become historically important, but it's not like this is the highest example of X or nor it led to Y. It was a part of this movement. On the other hand, I could hear the argument that it heightens this historical importance because it is a one-of-one. I think that means we just drop it right in the middle. You make it a five. Okay. I think readability is similar. I think the readability is pretty low, actually. Readability, and especially the servant's accents. Oh, yeah, you had that. We don't think we lingered on that. You had that. Tough. I could barely understand it. I skipped a lot of it because I can't make head nor tail out of it. Yeah, no, and we talked about it a little in Little Women that the servant's accent was rough, but this is way rougher. And my edition had some footnotes for some of the slang that the servants were using, But there were, in my opinion, there were not nearly enough footnotes to help me understand what was going on. Like, can we get some rewrites, please? Readability is, I don't know, four? I'd say three even, yeah. Yeah, whenever Joseph was getting ready to say a long thing, I was like, oh, no. I know. If there were major plot points buried in there, I am sorry to listeners. I'm sorry to Bronte. I'm sorry to the literary canon. But I did not get them. I think we can take some validation that that was a critique that even Charlotte Bronte had of Emily Bronte's writing. was she's never met these people. This is just what she imagines people of this class to sound like. I think that was one of our hot takes from Little Women. Are we sure that Alcott wouldn't like another crack at dialect? And I think that's a fair one here. Current relevance of central questions presupposes we know what those central questions are. I mean, toxic relationships are perpetually relevant, but also this book is so misunderstood. Yeah. I think this is like- It's not dated. I don't think it can be dated in that regard, but it's hard to know what it's about. Maybe a seven? I find myself compelled by what if, you know, is this really what people are desiring? Is this really what you understand? Or what happens to be obsessed? If it's about obsession, it's about single-mindedness, but also about rebuke and scorn. Like that hasn't gone away. That's true. But I'm not sure I know that's what it's about. I think I can get on board with a six here. Okay, sure. This, however, I think is pretty good given everything we've said. If someone's like, you know, I wanted to go see what Weathering Heights is about. If they said that to me, I'd be like, that's good work. And then they finished it. Yeah, that is good work. The book nerd read. So like an eight? Eight or nine? Nine? Yeah. Oh, damn factor. At its very heights, I have nines. Like at these really high soliloquies slash monologues slash whatever, they're nines. They're way up there with anything you're going to see in Melville and other things. but there you have to you have to get there like the rest of the stuff is so clunky it almost makes me wonder am i reading what i'm reading when i'm reading those my experience of it was i think when those heights happened i was so relieved that something enjoyable was happening that it tempered the oh damn factor for me so i would have been like a six or a seven yeah i'll i'll drag us maybe towards a seven and a half or eight if you don't mind there okay Rebecca that brings us to the end of our discussion if you've got thoughts email us zero to well read at book riot.com you can follow us on socials at zero to well read podcast that's instagram tiktok and youtube go to patreon.com slash zero to well read for detailed show notes free newsletter to sign up for membership options one of those options has the option to sign up for bonus content we call office hours that we're going to record right now but we're available only to subscribers that level. Thanks to Thrift Books for sponsoring this season of Zero to Well Read. Zero to Well Read is a proud member of the Airwave Podcast Network. Rebecca, we did it. We did it. We scaled the heights. We weathered the heights. We weathered the weathered? I don't know. We weathered the weather of Emily Bronte's singular, titanic. God, thank God it's singular. Inscrutable, right. Thanks, everybody. We'll talk to you later. We'll see you next time.