Learning to dance in the rain

GQ’s Men of the Year

Lists of “Top Ten” or “Best Of” regularly appear in many places in the media to spark debate and highlight trends. I’d have to endorse Mr William Shakespeare as a Man of the Year in every one of my lists, as he was “not of an age, but for all time” (© Ben Jonson) and he inhabits my soul every day. But I’m also happy to concur with some of GQ’s Men of the Year:

• Russell T Davies (thanks for your TV series It’s A Sin and past creativity)
• Captain Tom Moore (thanks for your past service and current inspiration)
• Marcus Rashford (thanks for your tenacity and courage)
• Josh O’Connor and Riz Ahmed (thanks for all your performances, in particular recently in Romeo and Juliet and Sound of Metal, but formerly in God's Own Country and Nightcrawler)
• And Prince Phillip, HM Queen Elizabeth II’s “constant strength and guide” and “strength and stay.” 

Falling within a bell curve

Prince Phillip’s recent death (9th April) produced much broadcast material and many column inches about whether he was the last of a particular kind of man. Such dogmatic reasoning always falls flat in my head, maybe because I’m a Libran and can usually see an alternative argument for everything. Prince Phillip was not unique despite his context and background; stastical probability (given the planet’s billions of people) suggests there will be other Prince Phillip types in decades to come. The one we’ve recently lost was remarkable, I agree, and I liked his daughter, Princess Anne’s, quotation about him – “a life well lived and service freely given.” Shakespeare has Hamlet say, of his late father, “I shall not look upon his like again” but he idolises the memory of the late king and is in a profound state of grief. More empirically truthful, I think, is Tim Minchin’s lyric in If I didn’t have you (somebody else would do):

I mean, I think you’re special

But you fall within a bell curve

Outlaw’s Cave

Robin Hood, now there’s a man! Steals from the rich and distributes to the poor…. possibly? Any road up, on the day Prince Phillip died, we met Michael and Janet to complete an undulating walk in the secluded woodland of Conjure Alders in the twin valley of the Rivers Maun and Meden, at the edge of Sherwood Forest. We walked across fields with huge horizons, through woods filled with birch and alder trees, picked over tangled roots by the river and marvelled at the sandstone cliff outcrop concealing Robin Hood’s Cave. No sign of Maid Marian or the merry men (or a reduction of income inequality) in early April 2021…. Where’s Robin Hood when you need him the most?

Waiting for the storm to pass

Spring continues to springeth and daffodils to bloometh. No-one knows exactly how Covid-19’s infection rate will spread, nor how severely, so time and tide wait for no man…. so now seems a good time to hook up (safely) with other Men (and Women) of the Year…. Thank you, Brian and Sue, for the fish finger butties and chips under your verandah in Tollerton and the inspirational message:

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass,

It’s about learning to dance in the rain

Once the pandemic is endemic and (hopefully) as ubiquitous and controlled as ‘flu, I imagine many people will continue to value nature and lobby decision-makers to tackle the global climate crisis and the over-exploitation of precious resources. Thank you, Nick and Graeme, for giving us a glimpse into the future with our proxy experiences of an electric car.

Sites opening up again

So if we live long enough to be in the market for a new car, electric will be the way to go. In the meantime, the pleasures of bread-making, flower arranging, table setting and dining at home are not to be abandoned lightly when the economy “opens up.” Buy locally? Travel locally? Save the planet? It’s been a pleasure to return to the (local-ish) Bolton Abbey Estate, and re-adding it to our repertoire of beauty spots, alongside the Leeds-Liverpool canal and the River Aire. A Man of the Year from the early 19th Century, Lord Byron, “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” expressed my feelings about walks and nature perfectly in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more….

River Wharfe at Bolton Abbey, River Aire near Saltaire and Leeds-Liverpool canal

 

Wuthering Heights

Images from Andrea Arnold's 2011 film with Solomon Glave and James Howson as Heathcliff and Shannon Beer and Kaya Scodelario as Catherine

It’s NOT ONLY about Heathcliff and Cathy….

Having blogged about Emily Brontë’s life (here) and my favourite Emily poem (here) I can’t stop myself blogging a few thoughts on Wuthering Heights. I’ve read it for pleasure three times in my life (so far) and taught it to A Level classes twice. Each time I plummet into its amoral freakery I learn something new, though what struck me when I first read it is that the novel’s heart lies in the character arcs of Hareton and young Cathy and I’ve never changed my mind about that. Most dramatisations fall short by focusing on the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff and diminishing all else; whereas, I think, Emily Brontë has a more profound story to tell about young people yearning to make the world a better place. Heathcliff, Catherine, Hindley, Frances, Edgar and Isabella represent an old-fashioned world of primitive attitudes and Hareton and Cathy are the next generation, redeemed and able to break free from the sins and weaknesses of their parents. Linton is a necessary (and eventually welcome!) sacrifice that enables the promise of peace to reign.

Breaking free from the sins of the previous generation....

Storm and Calm

Some critics interpret the book as portraying the oppositional forces of storm and calm as represented by the two houses of the Earnshaws and Lintons: Wuthering Heights versus Thrushcross Grange. But careful reading reveals an underlying primitive beauty in the descriptions of the physical objects at the remote farm and a disturbingly aggressive tension at the posh house.
Contrasts
Contrasts do riddle the narrative: young and old, children and parents, female and male, powerful and weak, outdoor and indoor, tenderness and savagery, wealth and poverty, education and ignorance, love and hate – all these contrasts play alongside and amongst the calm and storm.
Symbols
And symbols also play a subconscious role in worming into the reader’s imagination: doors and windows, plants and rocks, the elements (air, earth, fire and water), nature and weather, landscapes and horizons, the flesh and the spirit, the living and the dead, dreams and the supernatural. Like all great novels, no single interpretation is possible because Wuthering Heights has a bottomless pit of variables depending on the reader’s context.

Can it be categorised?

People who have only seen the 1939 William Wyler film with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon as Heathcliff and Catherine think the novel is a Romance. Readers know different. The explicit violence and unbearable cruelty are more extreme than you would expect in a conventional romantic novel.

• Is Wuthering Heights therefore a novel of male revenge?
• Or a deeply-subversive feminist text about the futility of male revenge?
• A Marxist novel about the oppression of the rich?
• A Psychoanalytic novel about the battle between the id (Heathcliff), the ego (Catherine) and the superego (Edgar)?
• A Formalist novel where everything is taken at face value and everything happens because it happens because that’s how it is (and how it was written)?
• Or a Structuralist novel where the the patterns of repetition, destruction and resurrection are meant to be taken as a whole so Catherine’s dealings with Heathcliff and Edgar are meant to be seen in relation to young Cathy’s dealings with Linton and Hareton?
• Or is it all these things? Unique in itself? Like nothing else?
• Just a story, for heaven’s sake!?

A fop at sixes and sevens

The biggest surprise when reading the novel rather than watching a dramatisation are the two main narrators, both of whom are potentially biased and unreliable. In 1801, the foppish Lockwood arrives from the south to pay a call on his neighbour, Mr Heathcliff. Lockwood is instantly muddled, distressed and befuddled about who and what he finds at the lonely farmhouse on the moors and on a second snow-bound visit, horrifically, has a dream in which he confronts a ghost begging to be let in at a (broken) window.

And a gossiping housekeeper

Lockwood’s misunderstandings start to make sense when Mrs Ellen Dean the housekeeper at Thrushcross Grange begins to tell him a tale from about 30 years before when Mr Earnshaw, a previous owner of Wuthering Heights, returned from a trip to Liverpool with a young homeless boy, Heathcliff. Over the next two years (1801–1803) on his return visits to the area, Lockwood recounts more of the story, narrating what he learns from Mrs Dean, or Nelly as we come to know her, and also what he or Nelly learn from Isabella, Heathcliff, Zillah the maid, Dr Kenneth and young Cathy. As a reader we start the story as confused as Lockwood and the questions he asks help us become drawn into the tangled web.

Bold narrative device
It is a story of three generations living in two houses in a small geographical part of Yorkshire. Nelly’s narration eventually dominates our minds almost to the point of forgetting that Lockwood exists and even Nelly sometimes seems to become invisible as the semi-mythic characters take on their own monstrous lives. The narrative structure is audacious, original for its time and, in my opinion, quite quite brilliant.

Questions abound

• How much of the violence and drunkenness in the novel had Emily Brontë witnessed in life?
• Was Emily Brontë imagining Tabitha Aykroyd (Tabby), a servant who stayed at the Haworth Parsonage for the best part of 31 years, when she created Nelly Dean?
• Do we believe everything Lockwood and Nelly tell us?
• Was Heathcliff based on the “mad, bad and dangerous to know” poet, Lord Byron?
• Is Heathcliff more sinned against than sinning?
• Why does Hindley resent Heathcliff so much?
• Why is Edgar attracted to Catherine, rather than to a more “peaceful” personality?
• Why does Isabella fall for Heathcliff, given what she knows about him?
• How much sympathy should the reader have with Catherine?
• With Heathcliff? Isabella? Edgar? Hindley? Frances?
• With Linton? Young Cathy? Hareton?

How Byronic is Heathcliff? Devil or Hero? Abuser or victim of abuse?

Shakespeare’s King Lear and Wuthering Heights

Given that Lockwood specifically compares himself to King Lear being imprisoned and maltreated by servants, I’ve wondered how aware Emily Brontë was of the parallels between her novel and Shakespeare’s grim tragedy:

• the sudden and brutal acts of violence
• the familial jealousy
• the accelerating onset of behaviour that could be perceived as insane
• the suffering of a character named Edgar
• the wild landscape of the heath/moors
• the geographical movement between contrasting houses
• neither Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights nor Edmund in King Lear are accepted as fully-fledged members of their adoptive families and wreak havoc in the stories

Whatever Emily Brontë consciously thought she was creating in writing Wuthering Heights there is no doubt that it has “stood the test of time” and the main characters and their wild setting are imprinted in the common cultural knowledge, not least because of Kate Bush’s famous song. It is 170 years since Wuthering Heights first hit the bookshelves of the UK – and I expect it will be around for a great deal longer.

A text open to interpretation: images from 1939 and 2011 movies