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

[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.