We’ll let you guess how we felt about it.

But really, this is a pod about the ways in which we feel everyone (of all opinions) is (still) misreading the book, which is what TLDR really is all about.

Companion piece to the pod is this montage of clips from the 2009 adaptation, a time in which we were still whitewashing but literate enough to understand that Heathcliff and Cathy WERE canonically f*cking. ~ENjoy~ the chemistry between Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley, which was so real it led to their IRL marriage. Hot!!

this has been—

xxx your twin flames

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Wuthering Heights is a confusing story. I don’t even necessarily mean following the actual events, though that can get confusing too—and knowing who the fork Nelly is even talking about when she says “Master Heathcliff” around page 250—but rather trying to grasp what the story is doing and why. Readers then and now have been unsure how to feel about the characters and their unhinged choices, and why, upon reaching the end, they’ve been made to read a decades-long saga of them.

As I began my own re-read, I found myself trying to find the “point” of the book. I was ready to cast aside the way I had (probably?) romanticized my first reading at 17, when I most DEFINITELY wrote into my journal, “He’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being.”

No, this time I was being all smart, and my first writerly observation came in wondering why Emily Bronte had chosen such a bizarre narrative structure, and I surmised that she had purposefully chosen Nelly as our removed narrator to these events so that we, as a fellow “sane” person, will identify with her rather than with these insane people. But as the story progressed, I realized that I low-key couldn’t stand Nelly, and that the craziest of the crazies—Heathcliff and Cathy the Elder—were my favorite characters, and I lamented that I so rarely had access to their actual thoughts, and hung on their every word when they spoke.

In talking with Regan about this book, and even listening back to this as I edited it, I feel like I have come to understand the story better and better.

Because it’s not a “moralistic” story, which is how it might be easiest or most tempting to think of it, especially when we’re looking for reasons why Bronte wrote about such “unlikable” people. It’s not about the dangers of a “toxic” relationship, or about the evils of materialistic greed, or even REALLY about how revenge is bad, though it’s kind of about all of those things. More accurately, it’s the opposite of a moralistic story; instead of imposing a moral judgement upon a person or situation, it’s asking you to maybe not impose judgement at all.

We get into Emily Bronte’s background on the pod, but our understanding of her today is that she was considered, even by those who loved her, to be an eccentric person. Emily would have understood how it felt to be judged—not just by cultured outsiders looking in on your isolated, rural moors life (Lockwood), but also by fellow locals / neighbors / intimates living that life alongside you (Nelly). To be deemed brutish, savage, or immoral by either of these camps, when who you are wasn’t something you chose, could easily invoke ire. I can hear her in what Heathcliff says on page 257: “It’s odd what a savage feeling I have to anything that seems afraid of me!”

The fact that Heathcliff is suggested throughout the story to possibly have both Indian and Chinese parentage, places where England was either waging wars or beginning to colonize during Emily’s lifetime, is no small detail; an abandoned multiracial orphan in Liverpool in the 1770s is a pretty potent symbol of imperialism, and for him to be briefly accepted as an equal, only for that to quickly devolve into continued mistreatment, is heartbreaking, but not historically incorrect. The cruelty in this book begins with the off-stage acts of its “civilized” society—one that Emily clearly resents.

At different points, I felt bad for everyone in this story, but Lockwood and Nelly least of all. In using them as our dual narrators, Emily is giving us that outside judgement and denying us the chance to really get to know our main characters. Now you WANT to know them, don’t you? Emily is saying. It’s pretty much exactly like how much of what we know about her, we know secondhand from Charlotte or Charlotte’s circle.

For Emily’s real inner life, we have her writing.

I Am the Only Being Whose Doom

I am the only being whose doom No tongue would ask, no eye would mourn; I never caused a thought of gloom, A smile of joy, since I was born. In secret pleasure, secret tears, This changeful life has slipped away, As friendless after eighteen years, As lone as on my natal day. There have been times I cannot hide, There have been times when this was drear, When my sad soul forgot its pride And longed for one to love me here. But those were in the early glow Of feelings since subdued by care; And they have died so long ago, I hardly now believe they were. First melted off the hope of youth, Then fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew; And then experience told me truth In mortal bosoms never grew. ’Twas grief enough to think mankind All hollow, servile, insincere; But worse to trust to my own mind And find the same corruption there.

whatever our souls are made of—

xxx your twin flame

Fan Cast

Cast photos are of, in order: Joe Alwyn; Gemma Whelan; Dev Patel; Keanu Reeves; Emma Mackey; Christian Bale; Jacob Elordi; Lewis Pullman; Claire Danes; Samara Weaving; Harris Dickinson; Willem Defoe

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Below is the fan cast companion to the episode. Enjoy!

Bonus photos: The Nantucket Hotel & Resort, the hotel that inspired Hilderbrand’s novel (and which now hosts the pod-mentioned Elin Hilderbrand bucket list weekend!!)

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Photos are of, in order: Amanda Seyfried, Jesse Metcalfe, Bradley Cooper, Kirsten Dunst, Amanda Thripp, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Hailee Steinfeld, Whitney Peak, Alfred Enoch, Liza Colón-Zayas, Austin Butler, Margaret Qualley, Olivia Munn, Billy Eichner, Billy Eichner, Sean Connery, Marilyn Monroe, Cate Blanchett, Jesse Plemons, Daniel Craig, Chad Michael Murray. Hotel photos are taken from Meaghan Murray’s linked review!

After going off air, Margaret and Regan watched music videos for an hour. Enjoy a curated sample!

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