In which I briefly voice very unpopular opinions, and then hope people stay to read the last bits

[meganbmoore]

I do not like Rochester.

Or Heathcliff.

Or Lovelace.

Lets see...wannabe bigamist who keeps his wife locked in the attic.  Man who gets so pissy about getting dumped that he devotes his life to destroying her family.  Man so bent on conquering a woman that when he can't, he sets out to destroy her, eventually raping her so he can "win."

I get the interest in the character, and the less evil/bastardy character types they spawned, but the adoration for the characters themselves, and wanting the women who should just run while the running's good to end up with them, weirds me out.

And now that that's off my chest...

I have Girl Scout cookies.  At some point today, I shall let you know if the new low-calorie Cinna Spin things are any good.

I also picked up an interesting looking manga called Purgatory Kabuki.  There is no proper descriptiob of it on the back, but flipping through it and reading the translation notes, it seems to be based on the legend of Benkei and the Gojou Bridge, only set in the underworld where the swods have spirits.  (Benkei was a warrior monk who posted himself at the Gojou Bridge in Kyoto and challenged every swordsman who passed and took their swords.  He had collected 999 swords when some punk named Minamoto no Yoshitsune came along and beat him.  So he became Yoshitsune's righthand man.)  The art kinda makes me think of Mononoke if it as designed by Amano.  Looking at the inside, though, I can't help but think someone was a little too fond of the shading tool.  I may read it after I read everything else I brought.

In other queries...has anyone read Jennifer Roberson's Tiger and Del books?  I keep seeing them around, but can't remember anyone ever mentioning them.

I will now read volume 2 of Hikkatsu! Strike a Blow to Vivify.  For anyone who has forgotten, it features a girl who was raised by pigeons who falls in love with an emotastic boy who lived in a Snowy Cabin of Emo Solitude atop Mt. Fuji...before he blew it up.  They now travel the world together, bsttling evil appliances as he struggles to perfect the appliance repairing One Shot No Fail Repair Blow.

Comments

[musouka-manga.livejournal.com]

I have to give Rochester a pass. Back then it wasn't as easy as just divorcing someone, and he obviously felt that he had a duty to look after her even though she was a violent, crazy lunatic. He wasn't a perfect guy, but the narrative and Jane punish him enough for his sins, I think.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I'd be willing to give him a pass, except that he kept it a secret from Jane. Even if he wasn't ever going to let anyone know, marrying Jane would have been effectively making her his mistress. If the truth had come out after, she would have been destroyed and an outcast. While I can sympathize with him not being able to get a divorce, I can't reconcile myself to a character willing to make the life of the woman he supposedly loves a fraud.

[musouka-manga.livejournal.com]

Well, he did it because he knew that she would reject him. I'm not saying it was right, just that it's an understandable, human reaction to hide something like that. (And again, the narrative did punish him quite severely for it)

If you really want to beat on Rochester, I'd think the better way is to point out what a dick he was about the marriage--doing all those things to test and see whether Jane was in love with him, then not even bothering to tell her it was her he was in love with until she was about ready to leave. (As much as I'm a sucker for "jealous misunderstandings" and as much as I love Jane Eyre, even I have to admit it was a spectatularly dickish thing to do)

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I'd say the fact that he knew she'd reject him is all the proof that was needed that he new he was in the wrong and did it anyway, regardless of what was good for her. And don't worry, I hold the tests even more against him.

I think, though, that it's the fact that he was willing to destroy her life(which, at the time, is what it would have been) for his own happiness is why I can never accept the narrative ever making him suffer enough if he still gets what he wants in the end.

[laura-holt-pi.livejournal.com]

How violent and crazy was she? He seems more threatening than her. Maybe she was crazy having found out he had been married when he married her, but had kept his crazy wife in the attic ...

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

To be fair, she is violent and nuts by the time we see her, but on the flipside, we have only his version of events of what she was like before being locked in the attic. She could have been like that, or she could have been mostly sane, we have no way of knowing.

[musouka-manga.livejournal.com]

Crazy enough to nearly kill her own brother when he came to see her. She was violent, had lost the ability to speak, and tried to murder people.

I see no reason to doubt Rochester's story about the events. He tells it in a way that's self pitying, sure, but I think anyone would be in that sort of situation--trapped into marriage with someone you can't even talk to, nevermind one that has to be confined for fear of the danger she'll do to herself and others.

[laura-holt-pi.livejournal.com]

I find it very creepy that the writer was herself obsessed with a married man and rationalised it to herself by telling herself his wife was crazy and not good enough for him.

Rochester doesn't need to talk to women. Look at the contempt with which he treats Jane. He's just a deeply unpleasant man with no redeeming features.

[carrielh.livejournal.com]

I completely agree with this.

[kitsune714.livejournal.com]

I have Girl Scout cookies. At some point today, I shall let you know if the new low-calorie Cinna Spin things are any good.

WHAT. I ordered my cookies like two weeks ago and yet I am cookie-less. WHERE IS THAT BROWNIE WITH MY TAGALONGS. Also, low-calorie Girl Scout cookies are so wrong (I have this complex theory about how 100 calorie packs are the downfall of western civilization, but I'll save that for later). Let's face it, they're not so much cookies as much as they are candy in cookie form.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

These ones were standing at a booth outside Hastings.

I have not yet tried the Cinna Spins, as eating and reading Hikkatsu at the same time could lead to choking, and there's no one around to perform the Heimlich. (Ok, I know how to do it for yourself, but that's not the point.)

[kitsune714.livejournal.com]

Maybe the snow kept the little scouts away from my grocery store yesterday. But if I don't get my Tagalongs soon, I'm going to hunt down that little Brownie.

Self-Heimlich! Not necessarily a good idea, but...you know, whatever works in the moment, right?

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

When the choice is "OMG SEVERE PAIN AND PUKE OVER EVERYTHING!" vs "DEATH!"...

[laura-holt-pi.livejournal.com]

Not unpopular with me. So nice to find someone else who doesn't swoon over those three.

I always wish I could sit Jane down and explain in simple terms that a man who keeps his mad wife locked in the attic could very well be the person who drove her mad in the first place, if indeed, she is mad and not merely an obstacle to his skirt-chasing. I also believe that fire was too convenient to be coincidence, and he was badly burnt, presumably because he was very close to the fire's source. I think he done her in.

Heathcliff, I don't think his author intended us to like. Wuthering Heights is often treated as a romance, but it's actually a book about the dangers of obsession, possibly written partly for Charlotte's benefit, as she was very stalkerish in her behaviour. Heathcliff is a terrible man and a murderer (agreed, at least by me and the author of "Was Heathcliff a Murderer?"

Lovelace is a rat. Even when played by Sean Bean, he can't capture my sympathy (and Sean Bean is one of those actors who can have me making excuses for murderers). He's a vile man who destroys a woman's life. Again, his author tried to make him a villain, modern readers tend to like him (probably because the idea of a woman dying over lost virtue is so alien to them that they assume she got what she deserved).

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think that Jane should have just left Rochester to rot. Heathcliff I agree on.

Lovelace...yeah. I am perfectly fine with as written, because he's supposed to be appealing, but ultimately evil. We aren't supposed to want Clarissa to give in to him, but to stay strong and resist, and to be horrified by the lengths he goes to. While I am willing to believe he loves her, his need to possess and conquer her is much stronger. While Clarissa may be so pious I kinda want to strangle her at times, I am 100% on her side, from start to finish. I think in Lovelace's case, though, the fact that at first, it seems he might change and become better affects people liking him, but how anyone can root for or approcve of him by the end, or wish Clarissa had bent to his will, is beyond me.

Tiger and Del

[estara.livejournal.com]

I've read all of them and still own them all, unlike the Cheysuli books. She concentrates on those two characters across all the books revealing more and more of their backstory with some foreshadowing involved until the climax which is the last book - the story is told from the viewpoint of Tiger, though - but Del is no sidekick character at all - often the book dwells on how Tiger is trying to figure out what Del is thinking.

They're both tough and had to be, to survive what came/comes at them, Tiger in particular is proud of his skill in sworddancing. During the books many of the other major characters try to suborn their powers for various nefarious purposes until the focus shifts to Tiger's past in the last two books and strange powers he seems to acquire.

.. while there is a touch of "saving the world messiah" on Tiger at the end, the interesting thing is that Roberson doesn't run with the usual epic worldsaving fantasy ending, but finds one that fits both characters nicely.

Aside: they both remind me of Western gunslingers quite often.

Re: Tiger and Del

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Western gunslingers is a good thing.

[crumpeteer.livejournal.com]

I myself have never understood the fascination with Rochester. I've never liked him and always thought he was a jerk. Heathcliff I remember my entire class hating when we were in high school, but then all the characters in that book were rather charm free. Heathcliff was just more interesting than some of the other characters. Interesting in the "oh GOD HE'S A BASTARD" type of way. I understand they inspired a character type that I like, but I really only like that type of character when they reform somewhat (or domesticate in some circumstances) in the end. Rochester and Heathliff don't really redeem themselves to me.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I like the characters they inspired, but not the characters themselves. Lovelace is potrayed as 100% evil and someone the heroine should be saved from, so I have no problems with that narrative. It's been so long since I read Wuthering Heights that I can't recall exactly how Heathcliff was portrayed, but I remember thinking that it seemed I was meant to somewhat side with him(though, oddly, I have no problems at all with Edmund Dantes...but then, he has much, much more done to him.) Rochester, though, we're meant to like, and to want Jane to be with him. I just can't do that.

[crumpeteer.livejournal.com]

While I'm not sure Bronte wanted us to like Heathcliff, I think she was at least aiming for the audience to understand and get behind his mad passion for Cathy. Rochester I still think knocked off his first wife. Run, Jane! Run far away from there!

Dantes I have no issue with liking. I love him in fact. I don't see his revenge plotting as evil or violent really (even though it was VERY cruel) because he was dishing it out to the people who really did destroy his life for no good reason. Heathcliff was just going after people who didn't really wrong him so he could manipulate Cathy into regretting that she dumped him.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Dantes was never reacting to being dumped, but to men betraying him and sending him to hell on earth for years to achieve their own ends. I can understand that, and he has more issues with hurting Mercedes(who married his enemy) and her son(the son of his enemy) than most vengeance characters do, and ultimately, tries not to.

[lesbiassparrow.livejournal.com]

I'm with you on Lovelace, Heathcliff and Rochester (though I think at least the narrative does make Rochester suffer horribly and the ending is presumably about levelling out the power narrative. Plus Jane's other option is the horrible St. John so I think he improves by comparison).

I don't get anyone rooting for Lovelace especially in the book, where you realise how rotten he is from his letters. You can see what charms Clarissa, but at the same time you understand that this a thoroughly ruined human being. I know that Richardson was horrified by people wanting Lovelace to end up with Clarissa and revised the book so that he was even more evil.

I have to admit that I'm not that keen on the character types these three have spawned because they've more or less dominated the heroic types in certain genres of fiction/media and it would be nice to see some different ones creep in there.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking Jane needed to find a nice, sane family with sweet kids to be a governess to.

I suspect making Lovelace even more evil only made people like him more.

And every once in a while, we do get interesting nice boys.

[vierran45.livejournal.com]

Have you ever read Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea which is supposedly told from the viewpoint of Rochester's wife. I've only read a few excerpts from it, but thought it might be an interesting counterpoint to the older story.

A lighter and more parodic reference can be found in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next books. IIRC, this particular reference appears in the first book, The Eyre Affair.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I've heard of Wide Saragasso Sea, but never had a chance to read it.

[vierran45.livejournal.com]

And regarding the Tiger and Del books, it's been years since I read them, but I still retain a very positive image of them. Maybe I should reread them, since they they can still be found on my bookshelves...

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

I hated Jane Eyre and everything in it with a fiery passion. As it happened, I had a choice of reading that or Wuthering Heights and I chose Eyre because I thought I'd hate Wuthering Heights more. These days, you couldn't pay me to read either one.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Word for word.

[mscongeniality.livejournal.com]

I think the only books I've ever hated more were Catcher in the Rye and, my least favorite book of all time, Lord of the Flies.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Catcher in the Rye I also didn't like. Lord of the Flies has never interested me.

[fairest1.livejournal.com]

Word. So, so much word. I had trouble reading Wuthering Heights in high school because there was absolutely no character that I felt like rooting for. Well, none who were relevent to the main plot. The guy who rents the house and is hearing the story? He's cool. But pretty much all the rest were just nasty, and showed no sign of improvement. Even the kids you just feel a kind of pity for because you realize that either through nature or nurture (they're being raised by those who spawned them) they're doomed.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It's been a long time how I read it, but that's how I felt. I just...don't see the appeal.

[fairest1.livejournal.com]

I mean . . . I'll read a story that focuses on the villains and enjoy it. I can read about characters who are unrepentantly evil and cheer them on. But they have fun with it, they enjoy being who they are and can cackle madly with a sense of glee in what they're doing. It's like with Crowley in Good Omens -- they're evil, but they're not jerks. Wuthering Heights . . . if a shrink were sent to try and help the characters get over their numerous neuroses, they'd probably flee soon after and advise that the property be completely walled in and just let them fight among themselves until they kill each other off.

[laura-holt-pi.livejournal.com]

That's why I love Wuthering Heights. It's all about how obsession and selfishness can destroy whole families. It's a fine antidote to romance that pretends that love (or any near approximation) makes anything acceptable.

[surgingshark.livejournal.com]

Heathcliff had issues...

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

They all had issues.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I got Purgatory Kabuki and while I liked the art, I found the story thoroughly incomprehensible. If you can figure out what's going on, let me know.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Ah. Figures. Well, we'll see. Despite earlier claims to the contrary, I probably won't get to it for a bit.

[madame-manga.livejournal.com]

I think one big problem with Rochester is that he's visibly not a real man. He's a Byronic fantasy figure who is there as a challenge to the heroine and an object for her reforming efforts and need for love. If you ever take a look at Charlotte's juvenilia (which I guess isn't likely! ^_^) you can see exactly where he came from: the wild, overromantic pulp she read and her own immature self-obsession and insular imagination. Jane is the only real person in that book, because she's the author; everyone around her is a cardboard cutout pushed to the background. I speak as a one-time Bronte junkie, you understand. :)

Heathcliff is again not really conceived as a human being. He's a destructive force, and his "love" for Cathy is one of the weirdest passions in literature. It's more like demonic possession. Emily Bronte had an even wilder imagination than Charlotte's, though strange to say she was a much more disciplined writer and better observer, and in her case that imagination is almost completely unleavened by conscious sexual feelings. (I think that's one reason I liked Jane Eyre so much as a teenager; it's a very good explication of physical passion as a goal in itself for a woman, which at the time it was written was REVOLUTIONARY. Charlotte had one hell of a sex drive, and that element of the book is 100% authentic.)

For Emily, love was no less than a complete loss of boundaries and merging with the loved one ("I AM Heathcliff," says Cathy) and the way she looks at this with clear, unblinking eyes, as if it were something normal when it so obviously is not, can be spellbinding. The sequence in which Heathcliff has the sexton take the lid off Cathy's coffin so he can see her again, and talks about being buried next to her with the sides of the coffins removed so that they can merge in death... well, you could think of it as a horror novel and just savor the spinal chills.

The Brontes are just... the Brontes. They're justified in their own minds, and that's the only context in which they make any sense at all. The context that most English teachers try to force them into -- oh God. When their basic motifs and characters are prettied up into Great Glorious Romances, those relationships look even more obviously ill. Then there's the endless retellings by much less talented writers -- you get manipulative Rochester-figures who keep secrets and play power games, you get violent Heathcliff-figures who stalk and destroy (and rape) and this is depicted as some kind of ideal. O_o They've obviously got a kind of power for many people, having lasted this long, and I certainly felt it myself at one time. I think I was fortunate in NOT having either of those books as a class assignment, possibly in more ways than one...

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...yeah, I think the fact that they're viewed as romantic characters by the readers is a lot of my problem. Liking a less bastardly version of the character who isn't effectively centered around destroying women in one way or another? I'm good with that. I LIKE the character types they've spawned. But the actual characters, and wanting any woman to end up with them, gives me the squick.

Which is why I will never be able to accept the end of Jane Eyre...

[madame-manga.livejournal.com]

Interesting! I see that almost the other way around: that Rochester ought to stay where he was put, and ESPECIALLY Heathcliff. :D They have their natural environments and their natural partners; Jane's got the ascendancy handed to her at the end of her book and I'm not worried about her. It's when those characters' edges are smoothed over so that their inhumane elements are better disguised that I get squicky. :D

[laura-holt-pi.livejournal.com]

Emily did not see love that way, from what I have read. In fact, Wuthering Heights has always seemed to me like an attempt to tell her sister how dangerous such a view of love can be. We're not meant to identify with Cathy and Heathcliff, but to be appalled by them. Wuthering Heights is not a romance, but a horror story about the terrible things that can happen when people are not in control of their passions, whether lust or anger.

[madame-manga.livejournal.com]

Emily was such an enigma, even to her own family, that I think it's difficult to tease out what her intentions could have been in anything, other than expressing her personal vision. Cathy and Heathcliff are certainly not depicted as nice people or anyone to emulate -- god forbid! But that whole book is set in such a matter-of-factly cruel and harsh environment that they seem to have sprung from it like nature spirits; they fit it perfectly. Moral instruction seems irrelevant to a mind like Emily's -- she seems almost pre-moral, or had moved beyond it, much farther than Charlotte ever ventured. Anyway, I don't think Charlotte needed too much instruction on holding back passions -- have you read Villette? That's one hell of a locked-down set of emotions; she didn't name her protagonist Snowe for nothing. :)

[laura-holt-pi.livejournal.com]

I'm not talking about morality, but sanity. Emily was the most rational of the three and the most insightful. Charlotte may have written about locked-down emotions, but in her life, she had no control whatsoever. She said to a friend, "If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up ... you would pity and I daresay despise me."

In one of many letters to a married man she was stalking, M. Constantin Heger, she wrote, "Day or night I find neither rest nor peace. If I sleep I have tortured dreams in which I see you always severe, always gloomy and annoyed with me. I do not seek to justify myself, I submit to every kind of reproach - all that I know - is that I cannot - that I will not resign myself to losing the friendship of my master completely - I would rather undergo the greatest physical sufferings. If my master withdraws his friendship entirely from me I will be completely without hope ... I cling on to preserving that little interest - I cling on to it as I cling on to life." This was to a man who gave her no encouragement at all. These days, restraining orders might well be issued.

[bzoppa.livejournal.com]

I don't have anything to say but well put. This was a pretty comment.

Just the other day I made a Jane Eyre reference at work. The girl across the hall gave a maniacal laugh and I IMd my friend to tell. I said she sounded like Bertha locked in Mr. Rochester's attic. I'm happy to have friends with some literary background.

late to the party

[bzoppa.livejournal.com]

I'm late here so I'm not going through comments am just adding in my two cents.

I liked Rochester, a lot. I didn't like Heathcliff. I don't think I know who Lovelace is although the name sounds familiar.

I read the first few Tiger and Del books when I was about 13 and really liked them. She took a 7 year break between 4 and 5, and by 1998 I'd gotten out of fantasy. Besides, I didn't remember what happened. I did read the Cheysuli all the way through and thought they were good, but again, I read them very young. They might not be up to snuff for an adult audience.

[dangermousie.livejournal.com]

I don't like Heathcliff (talk about a psychopath). Don't care for Lovelace but even he is more fun that that insufferable prig Clarissa. Ugh.

Re: Rochester. I like him. A lot. He is a flawed, damaged man madly in love and in an untenable situation. Would I want to be Jane in real life? Nope, but in fiction I adore him. And, confession time: in his place I would have done the same.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I am forgiving with Clarissa because, much as I wanted to smack her for being so pious, I can at least understand her sticking to her principles and that she was struggling to have even the smallest control over her own destiny.

I'm just disturbed by the people who think she should have given in to him. I mean, wtf? It became obvious pretty quickly that he wasn't interested in loving her, but in conquering her.

I think the thing with Rochester that I can't get past is that he was willing to make Jane's life a lie, knowing full well that, if they were married and the truth came out, she would be destroyed in every way possible. It makes his love too selfish for me.