Twilight vs. Wuthering Heights

So, on my stats page I’ve noticed that the Wuthering Heights post is really the only one that anybody reads. Perhaps I should make this a Wuthering Heights blog…..

No, but I really just kind of slapped that post together  — you know, wanted to vent my rage about Twilight trying to warp Emily Bronte’s horror novel into a love story. In fact, I feel so strongly about the subject that I turned one of my final papers into an argument about the detriments of watering down literature. What do I mean by that? I mean that Wuthering Heights is not simply a love story and you can’t just dilute it into one. Girls are flocking to this work after the Twilight series has mangled it almost to death, and it’s very bad to just let them believe that the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine is love.

Anyway, I’m pasting my essay on here to do justice to my previous post. Here it is:

*Please Note: This paper is mine. I wrote it. This is not for you to print out and turn in to your English class. I better not find out you did or I will find you. I will.

That’s Enough, Twilight

Upon its publication in 1847, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights shocked critics with dark portrayal of human nature in the dismal English countryside, and was largely dismissed. However today, 150 years after Bronte’s death, Wuthering Heights has made quite a comeback. Publishing giant HarperCollins has launched a new edition of the book which includes a cover with Twilight-esque artwork. Because of the association with the Twilight enterprise, HarperCollins reports that sales have jumped from 8,551 copies sold a year in Britain to 34,023 sold with the new cover launched in 2009. I’m in total support of the resurgence of classic literature, but I don’t like what’s happening with this edition of Wuthering Heights. First, the book comes with the tagline “love never dies”, and second, “Edward and Bella’s favorite book” (the main characters of the Twilight series) is stamped on the cover.  Why is Wuthering Heights the couple’s favorite novel? Because of the love story. And thus, with a new cover and tagline, HarperCollins and Twilight transform Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff’s doomed, obsessive and unhealthy relationship into one of romance and “eternal” love – and Heathcliff becomes a heartthrob for thousands of mislead teenage girls.

At first I didn’t believe that young girls could still be attracted to Heathcliff (or want a relationship resembling that of Heathcliff and Catherine’s) after actually reading the novel. But after poring over blogs and message boards at the Literature Network Forums, I found that I was mistaken. Thankfully, most of the posts contained something like, “I know he’s bad”, “he does horrible things”, or “he’s not the best person” – at least they don’t believe Heathcliff totally favorable. However, these allowances were always followed with a “but”. One user writes “even if [Heathcliff’s] heart was black, he still loved Catherine”, and another adds that she loves “his ability to love passionately and eternally”. All of the posts were published after the Twilight saga surfaced, and some of the girls even compared Heathcliff with the tortured-soul vampire Edward Cullen. Reading through these posts showed me how easily Twilight has transformed a once near-horrifying story of obsession into a romance, and led me to believe that many girls are not getting an accurate picture of what Wuthering Heights is really about – which, I promise you, is not love.

Of course, I understand that to topple Twilight’s association with Wuthering Heights is not an easy task, but it becomes much easier when taking a more objective look at the text. Let’s examine, for example, the “eternal love” that exists between Heathcliff and Catherine. Their relationship begins when Heathcliff is brought to Wuthering Heights as an orphan and looks to Catherine for maternal love. But what could have been a healthy, supportive relationship between the two soon morphs into obsession when Heathcliff starts to depend on Catherine for affection and approval – gifts she gives sporadically at best. While there are some instances of innocent love in their childhood, such as when Catherine sometimes stands up for Heathcliff and neglects her friends to be with him, she eventually tires of Heathcliff. Once she receives a taste of what life is like as a lady during her stay with the Lintons at Thrushcross Grange, her sole interest lies in marrying up – something which Heathcliff cannot promise. She outright claims to Nelly that, “it would degrade [her] to marry Heathcliff” (68) because he is poor and can offer her nothing. But Catherine still toys with Heatcliff’s emotions, sometimes speaking to him with affection and then abruptly telling him that he isn’t good enough for her. The “love” readers see in this story is co-dependency and a desire for control. The only person Catherine really loves is herself, and Heathcliff, equating self-worth with Catherine’s affection, cannot let her go.

Heathcliff, seen in the light of a jilted and misused lover, is quite pitiable– prime bait for teenage girls with maternal feelings. It’s no surprise here that, even given his violent acts, these girls are finding ways to “but” him out of being an evil character – especially when movies and new book covers are so ardently claiming that Wuthering Heights is “the greatest love story of all time”. What Twilight isn’t telling girls is not to take their pity too far – Heathcliff is as much a selfish monster as Catherine. If he loves Catherine so much, then why does he marry Isabella and why does he devote the rest of his life to making her living family (including her daughter of the same name) miserable? He is described as “vicious”, he attempts to hang Isabella’s dog, and he delights in the death of more than one character – in short, with Heathcliff’s presence comes a storm of death and sadness that only dissolves with the death of Heathcliff himself at the end of the novel. In modern-times, we would describe him as a sociopathic serial killer. And, in fact, he fits the profile: white male, mid-thirties, with mommy issues.

But I understand that the girls fawning over Heathcliff aren’t necessarily attracted to serial killers, and they’re not stupid. Love is a very complicated emotion (as Heathcliff can attest to), and it’s easy for girls to think that a guy like Heathcliff is just misunderstood. I think Bronte anticipated this perception of Heathcliff, and that’s why she gave the sobering example of Isabella Linton. Isabella is Edgar Linton’s (Catherine’s husband) sister who lives with the married couple at Thrushcross Grange. After Heathcliff disappears for three years and comes home a rich man only to find that Catherine has deserted him for Edgar, his brooding, dark nature instantly attracts the bored, lonely Isabella. Although he seems cruel, Isabella is captivated and believes, like so many girls, that with a little love and care Heathcliff can become the man of her dreams. Heathcliff sometimes encourages Isabella’s romantic feelings in order to make Catherine jealous, but he never claims to love her and every semi-kind word is coupled with a curse against her family. But Isabella is convinced that Heathcliff is simply under Catherine’s evil spell, turns a blind eye to any cruelty or hatred he shows her, and marries him. It isn’t until after the marriage that Isabella becomes disillusioned with her bad boy: he neglects her, always running off to see Catherine in secret, and leaves her to handle a drunken Hindley alone. When she finally runs away, we learn that Heathcliff was also physically abusive and apparently threatened to kill Isabella if she stood in the way of his diabolical plans. Isabella flees her marriage bruised and bleeding to live and die alone in a foreign country. Isabella’s story begs readers not to fall in to the same trap of confused and undeserved affection – she once believed Heathcliff to be “just misunderstood” and she barely escaped her marriage with her life.

It may seem trivial to force the point about Twilight twisting Wuthering Heights into a love story, but there is real danger in allowing teenage girls to mistake the unhealthy relationship in the latter for love. After reading and becoming attached to characters like Heathcliff, girls get a very skewed idea of what romance is. At first Disney warped these ideas with claims of “happily ever after” and “Prince Charmings”. Now it’s the bad boy: he’ll beat you up and tear you down, but, oh, he’s so attractive. Of  course, I don’t advocate restricting what girls read, but I do condone having just as much media about how unhealthy bad-boy relationships are as there is about Wuthering Heights as a love story. As it stands, the watering down and romanticizing of the classic to a single theme gives girls the wrong idea. Confusing obsession with love is exactly the mistake Heathcliff makes with Catherine, and it turns into a deadly spiral of revenge and hate. We must re-complicate Wuthering Heights and show girls how little the tumultuous relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff resembled love, or risk a generation of Isabella Lintons.

Works Cited

Bell, Amanda. 'Twilight' helps 'Wuthering Heights' sales increase . The Examiner, 2009. Web. 6
May 2010. <http://www.examiner.com/x-4908-Twilight-Examiner~y2010m4d11-   Twilight-helps-Wuthering-Heights-sales-increase>.

Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. 1847 ed. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993. Print

Mare, Ashley, and Oread. “We know why Heathcliff was bad but what are some good traits?”

The Literature Network Forums. N.p., Apr. 2008. Web. 6 May 2010.

<http://www.online-literature.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35277&gt;.