Entries tagged with wuthering heights

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For Kicks: My List of Favorite Love Stories (Pairings)

I’ve been compiling a mental list of favorite pairings for years, and I thought I’d write some of it out. We can also make it a “meme”: I’d love to see your list linked in the comments!

What I mean by a “love pairing”: two people who come to love each other so deeply that this relationship is pivotal to their lives. I’m a friendship bonder, and I’m not distinguishing between sexual and non-sexual love. I am leaving out literal and metaphorical close family relationships (parent-child, siblings). Expect big spoilers (like character death & ending) for any story mentioned. Below the cut are some favorite picks, some ranked, some unranked, with explanations.( Read more... )

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A Wuthering Heights/Mirage Thought

I have been rereading Wuthering Heights (actually getting to teach it - yay!), and it has made me think again about how the story resonates with Mirage. This is not exactly a new thought, but it's coming home to me powerfully: perhaps the crucial difference between the two (besides thousands of pages in length) is morality. The core crazies at the heart of WH, Cathy and Heathcliff, aren't very concerned with moral or ethical issues outside their own crazy. Heathcliff positively enjoys being bad (a lot of the time), and Cathy is basically good-ish but very, very childish and lacking in insight into others. The core crazies in Mirage, however, are inextricably entangled with moral and ethical concerns: a sense of higher duty to a higher good is basically why they're there in the first place.

I adore WH, but this is probably the essence of why I adore Mirage more. They're both about obsessive love and the harm (and good) it can do, but Mirage has a significant layer beyond that: it's about obsessive love trying to coexist being a good person in the world. And that's a whole other ballgame.

Cross posted at Asphodel's Mirage Forums.

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Review & Rant: Wuthering Heights (Andrea Arnold film, 2011)

Disclaimers at the end of this review*

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to adapt a novel by Emily Brontë without using a single one of Emily Brontë’s words. Amazingly, this has been done and done brilliantly! I refer, of course, to “The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights” (Monty Python, 1970). More recently, this challenge has been taken up by Andrea Arnold (2011)–with less success.

The film is not all bad. In fact, parts are quite good…

Read the rest at The Geek Girl Project.

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Jane Eyre in the Light of Wide Sargasso Sea

I suspect that Wide Sargasso Sea has forever damaged my ability to enjoy Jane Eyre. Mind you, I have never unreservedly enjoyed it and there are still many aspects of it I love, but Rhys's novel has reweighted the scales. It elevates what I always saw as the comparatively poor writing to egregious moral failing. (Fair warning: if it's not already plain, this is a bit of rant.)

( Read more... )

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Blade of the Immortal: An Anotsu/Makie Essay

"Anotsu/Makie: One of Those Love Stories"

I'll preface this post with an apology as I'm about to commit the error of writing meta about a series I don't know very intimately yet. Having been firmly schooled over my early misapprehensions about Mirage of Blaze, I'll approach Blade of the Immortal with a healthy degree of disclaiming: everything I'm about to say could be wrong or wildly incomplete. (I have only read brief summaries of the last 5 or so volumes.)

There's much to love about BotI, but I'll focus here on the relationship between Anotsu and Makie, which has peaked my fannish interest more strongly than any text I've encountered for quite some time. Their relationship, for me, has become part of a triad of related love stories. Compared to Naoe/Kagetora in Mirage of Blaze and Cathy/Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, the Anotsu/Makie subplot of BotI may be a junior sibling, but a sibling it is. Each of the central relationships in the triad resonates with the others. MoB and WH resonate along the axis obsessive love that transcends everything. Anotsu and Makie aren't quite there; rather, they resonate in terms of interpersonal dynamics.

( Fairly Light Spoilers for BotI )