Lost the Plot

roane72:

greencarnations:

charliebravowhiskey:

I think I only agree with one of the selections in this list.  The others?  Well, that’s up for debate.

The problem with Catcher in the Rye is that teachers think giving kids books about how much their lives suck will be relevant to them. They fail to account that kids hear enough of that whining from themselves and their friends.

I will FIGHT this writer on Gatsby though.

I will fight them on Wuthering Heights. They’re right: it’s NOT a romance, and there’s no indication that Emily Bronte meant for it to be one, or that it was RECEIVED as one initially. She saw firsthand how obsessive love and alcoholism can fuck up a family, and so she made it part of her story—using characters that (one can argue) she had been developing since childhood, one of whom shows every sign of having been her alter ego.

Bronte didn’t write Wuthering Heights from the perspective Cathy—crazy in love and tormented—oh no. She clearly thinks Cathy’s a crazy bitch (and,  you know, she is). No, Bronte wrote it from the perspective of Heathcliff—an outsider with more emotions than he can cope with, more ambition than society will allow him to have, and the bitterness all that entails. And based on what we know, that fits Emily Bronte to a freaking T.

Ironically, it wasn’t until Bronte’s gender came out (the book was originally published under a male pseudonym, like her sisters’) that critics started viewing it as a romance and making Cathy the main character instead of Heathcliff.