Every movie we see #97: Luis Buñuel’s Wuthering Heights and the advantages of the shut-in life
How does a shut-in consumptive English spinster get to write Wuthering Heights? It is the most intense love story ever written, and Cathy and Heathcliff the craziest lovers in literature. Their relationship goes beyond possession, desire or wanting to live happily ever after: what they call “love” is the stuff of psychotherapy. It’s not just obsessive love—they can’t even be jealous of other people because as Cathy says, “I AM Heathcliff”.
This situation does not make for happy endings, nor do they expect one. Cathy makes an effort at a healthy, “normal” life, marrying a decent man and playing the devoted wife and mother-to-be. Of course it doesn’t work. She basically starves herself to death, but even death will not end her pain. Heathcliff meets her weeping housekeeper and asks if Cathy is dead. The housekeeper says she sleeps with the angels or something, and Heathcliff cries, “May she wake in torment!” Then he bangs his head on a tree, leaving bloodstains. He curses her for leaving him, and then he calls on her to haunt him. He asks her to give him no peace. And the amazing thing about Emily Bronte’s novel is that you believe this extreme emotion could exist.
Writing teachers always advise their students to “write what they know”—what about Wuthering Heights? It is a triumph of the imagination, fueled by powerful feelings that had no other outlet but the written page.
In Abismos de Pasion, Luis Buñuel’s film adaptation from the 1950s, the tale is set in Mexico. This does away with one of the things we love about the Emily Bronte: the atmosphere. Misty moors, howling winds, ghostly faces in the window—it’s not called Wuthering Heights for nothing. (Note that her sister’s novel is called Jane Eyre and not Thornfield Hall, though the sisters both created dark, mysterious, Byronic, unpleasant leading men. We’ve never read their youngest sister Anne—will look up The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.)
The Buñuel also dispenses with the “ghost story” and the love story involving the second generation terrorized by Heathcliff, who really is not a nice man. Though if we were to go by national stereotypes, the “passionate” Latin-American nature is a closer match to Bronte’s characters than the “polite, repressed” Brits. Instead of squelching around in the mud and contracting tuberculosis, you’ve got people in arid, dusty farms and blazing sunshine. But the emotion is the same: the passion that drags the lovers to hell.
Writers are already shut-ins by definition, maybe there is something to the reclusive life.
* In Career Girls by Mike Leigh, two friends divine the future by asking a question and opening a copy of Wuthering Heights to a random page.
* * We’re going to read Virginia Woolf’s essay, A Room of One’s Own.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
September 15th, 2014 at 19:02
That’s it, I’m going to reread Wuthering Heights.
Speaking of the reclusive life, here’s an interesting article about Mrs. Dalloway and the inner life.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/joshua-rothman/virginia-woolfs-idea-of-privacy
“But, inevitably, the extroverted cataloguing of everyday minutiae—meals, workouts, thoughts about politics, books, and music—reaches its own limits; it ends up emphasizing what can’t be shared.”
Learn to leave your inner life alone. Learn to cultivate and appreciate it.
September 16th, 2014 at 11:32
Angus: Kurak. How are you going to have an inner life if you’re so busy connecting with the outside world?
September 16th, 2014 at 17:29
Reclusion worked for the artistic life of the Brontes, I guess because they had the best critics in one another. Very rare when a family would have many geniuses, but I guess even Branwell, who leant towards the crazy spectrum, was all right :-D I always thought they had the greatest childhood in the world: writing fan fiction before there was a name for it, enacting them in plays and running and playing on the moors.
There was the moors, of course. They lived in town, at the Parsonage, but never liked associating with the locals. Even so, it was easy to walk to the moors from their house. Being on the moors, in a way, gave me a sense of why they wrote those books. The heather, the solitude, the nothingness. Emily wouldn’t have appreciated the English and Japanese signs leading to their favourite spots now named after them: the Bronte chair, the Bronte bridge and the Bronte waterfall, which was, by the way, a trickle.
The hike was six miles (return) and the steep climbs were not hard, maybe especially if you’re not five months pregnant (this was 2010 and I was close to naming my daughter Emily, but as my name’s Catherine I thought it would be too much). At the end of the trail is an abandoned farmhouse called “Top Withins,” said to have been the inspiration for Wuthering Heights. There were no other people at the farmhouse when we were there, only sheep, but then it was the World Cup. Like a reclusion peak season.
September 16th, 2014 at 18:28
deckshoes: Our long-delayed drive across the English countryside will probably happen in the fall. Are there accommodations near the parsonage? Can people check into “Wuthering Heights”?
September 17th, 2014 at 00:43
Hi Jessica, not sure about the rates in Haworth but from experience, the nearer you are to a popular site the pricier it gets. We usually stay at Holiday Inn in York in that part of the north, it is not bad. From there is just an hour or so drive to Haworth Parsonage and other sites you might be interested in – Scarborough, where Anne Bronte is buried and Whitby, a fantastic seaside town featured in Stoker’s Dracula, Gaskell’s Sylvia’s Lovers and Byatt’s Possession.
I love Yorkshire, wouldn’t mind living there even if I have trouble understanding the accent :-P
September 18th, 2014 at 23:25
deckshoes: Thanks! Maybe we’ll do Yorkshire and Thomas Hardy’s Wessex. Looking forward to squelching around in the moors.