Great books are notable for the fact that your relationships with them as a reader change over time. My relationships with Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights have changed dramatically as I’ve viewed the books through different philosophies and life experiences. They’ve also changed as I’ve watched film adaptations of the books. Some of these adaptations were marvelous, and some were dreadful, but all of them taught me something important about the books.
My relationship with Jane Eyre started when I was about ten years old. I had an aunt (a kind one, who in no way resembled Mrs. Reed) who had a lot of books. I used to crawl between the back of an easy chair and the floor-length window curtains and read. I read adult books because that’s what this aunt had on her shelves. So Jane and I became friends when I opened a book that had interesting pictures, only to discover another girl in the book’s pages, one who was about my size, and who was, likewise, hiding at the window with a book that was difficult to read but had good illustrations.
Jane and I grew up together, and as I became older, I became more interested in the romance. As a young woman, I tried to decide whether or not Rochester was a worthy hero, and I admired Jane for her determination to be free and respected. My relationship with Jane (the book) has become more analytical and critical as I’ve gotten older. I see it through a lens of class, gender, religion and my own more mature view of human relationships. My relationship with Jane (the character) remains fiercely loyal. My relationship with Jane, the book, and Jane, the character, began as a profoundly personal one, and it has stayed that way through thirty years of annual readings. Watching film adaptations of Jane has only reinforced this, even as it has highlighted things that I often overlooked—Jane’s longing to be part of a family, for instance, and how very, very cruel the manipulations of Rochester are. My ire is relentless against any adaptation that fails to address the power of Jane’s spirit and her refusal to settle for anything that undoes her self-respect. My admiration for any adaptation that gets it right is boundless!
My relationship with Pride and Prejudice began in high school when I had to read it for English class. Dear readers, it pains me to tell you that my plaintive complaint to my teacher was, “This book is boring! Nothing happens!” I perked up quite a bit when Lydia ran off with Wickham, but I must admit that Pride and Prejudice seemed dry to me for many years after. Like Charlotte Brontë, I felt that it was passionless and constrained:
I had not seen “Pride and Prejudice,” till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a common-place face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright, vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses (Juliet Barker, “Letter from Charlotte Brontë to G. H. Lewis” In The Brontës, Wild Genius on the Moors [New York: Pegasus Books, 2012], 724–725)
What kept me interested in Pride and Prejudice was the passion of its fans. Much of my reading and writing involves fantasy and science fiction, and as a passionate fan of these genres, I am never more at home than I am when attending a Renaissance Faire or a science-fiction convention. Likewise, the serious Jane Austen fans, with their Regency Ball reenactments, fit right in to the idea that you can love something so passionately that you want to recreate it as closely as possible, as frequently as possible, with like-minded people. This kept me going back to the book, and every time I read it I liked it a little more, but I still didn’t really get what all these people were so excited about.
For me, it was the film adaptations of Pride and Prejudice that opened up the book to me. My husband and I were watching one of the adaptations (I think Colin Firth had just come out of the lake) when he (my husband, not Colin Firth, although it’s easy to confuse them) said, “You know, this is just like science fiction. There’s an alien society, and it operates under a rigid social code, with a rigid hierarchy—one that we don’t fully understand. And they speak in this alien language, and everything is in code, so you have to work really hard to understand what’s going on.”
Triumph! Suddenly, I understood Pride and Prejudice! There was passion, and happiness, and despair, and all the other things that I had been missing, but it’s all in code, under the surface. As I watched actors use their bodies and faces to communicate, the words took on new meanings. Even when actors varied wildly in their interpretations of the text, it still helped me pick apart what was really being thought and communicated (usually not the same thing). I am now an ardent fan of Pride and Prejudice—I’m just sorry that it took me so long to get there.
Finally we come to my nemesis, Wuthering Heights. Prior to working on this project, I would have told you that I loathe Wuthering Heights. I didn’t merely dislike it—I hated it. Every time I would have to mention Wuthering Heights I would start channeling Madeline Kahn in Clue, “I hated her so much, I just…Flames. Flames, on the side of my face….” The one good thing I had to say about Wuthering Heights was that for something to raise my ire so completely it sure must have hit a nerve.
I think my problem with Wuthering Heights was that it has this cultural legacy as a romantic love story. When I read it again for this project, I tried to read it as though I had no preconceptions. And that’s when I discovered that it’s not a love story between Cathy and Heathcliff. It’s a horror story. But it’s also a story in which a secondary couple’s love heals everything, so it ends up being a romance after all, just not with the couple that we all think of when we think about Wuthering Heights. I’ve become a bit of a crazed evangelist about this interpretation. It’s become so obvious to me that I want to stand around on street corners wearing those big sandwich signs. Only, instead of saying “The End Is Near,” my sign would say, “Heathcliff and Cathy are horrible people who do not know the meaning of real love! But the social themes in Wuthering Heights are very important! So you should read this book, even though it will destroy your very soul!” (That’s a lot to fit on one sign, so I’ve tabled my literary-street-sign-activism project for the time being.)
Frankly, I’m not thrilled with the result of any of the Wuthering Heights adaptations. But my understanding of the book got better as I realized why I was so annoyed at the things they left out. Adaptations have a tendency to soften Cathy’s behavior so she is more of a sympathetic victim, and diminish the role of Cathy’s daughter and of Hareton. This helped me understand that the fact that Cathy has temper tantrums in the book is important. The fact that Heathcliff beats Isabella is important. The fact that Hareton and Cathy 2.0 think of each other’s well-being is important. If you emphasize the idea of Heathcliff and Cathy as a tragic romantic couple, you are missing the point of the story entirely, and, of course, most adaptations go for the romantic-couple angle.
I have become an ardent defender of Wuthering Heights, but not as a romance (or rather, not as a romance between Heathcliff and Cathy). I’ve become fascinated with how many topics the book takes on—class, gender, patriarchy, familial relationships, money, race, education, isolation and the legacy of child abuse from one generation to the next. Above all, by reading and watching and rereading the story of Hareton and Young Cathy again, I’ve grown to believe that this book is not even a tragedy. There’s a very redemptive story to be found here, about what happens when you choose to be as happy as you can, as fully realized a person as you can be, within even the most constrained circumstances, and when you are able to think about the needs of another person over your own.
I love all three of these books in many different ways, and I’m grateful to all the film adaptations that have opened up new aspects of them for me (yes, even the MTV version of Wuthering Heights). I hope readers of this work will enjoy the adaptations, and, above all, enjoy the original books!
What You’ll Find in This Book
In this book, I use film adaptations of Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering
