Friday, September 28, 2012

My Wuthering Heights Journey #3

Arielle's Wuthering Heights Journey, Part 3 of 3.

Look! It's Cathy and Heathcliff!

I finished Wuthering Heights last night! Hurrah!
I quite liked the ending.
It turns out, a good majority of the novel is about the younger Cathy - Catherine Earnshaw's daughter, whose name is also Catherine.
The book is definitely Gothic - loads of dreams, talk of ghosts, and a fair bit of violence too.
I made the mistake of watching the 2011 film adaptation by Andrea Arnold. It's not in theatres in Australia yet (it'll be released in October I think). They had younger versions and older versions of Cathy and Heathcliff, which I thought was unnecessary. Highly unnecessary. They were the only two characters who had different actors play a three year older version of themselves. And they didn't even look remotely similar.
Oh, and the film had loads of animal cruelty. It was quite disturbing.
And it didn't have enough dialogue. Which was definitely to its detriment. You can't convey the authenticity of Bronte's characters with the amount of dialogue Arnold's adaptation had. It was a poorly written film. Albeit, I didn't watch the last 20 mins. I assume a lot more happens in those last 20 mins, because the first three quarters of the film were drawn out way too long and tediously.
The cinematography was wonderful though.

Anyway back to the book. Like I was telling you last time, I was basically just waiting for the rest of the characters to die. Hindley Earnshaw, then Edgar Linton, then Linton Heathcliff, and lastly Heathcliff himself died. I feel like all the women die from the ordeal of childbirth  and all the male characters die from a cold/flu (I don't know what the different between a cold and a flu is). Oh, except Isabella, who died of some boring sickness like all the men.
I didn't really tell you much about the new Cathy. She was the only character that I remotely liked. She loved her papa (Edgar Linton) very dearly, and fell in love her with cousin Linton (Heathcliff's son by Isabella), who turned out to be a jerk and a coward, and then he died and Cathy fell in love with her other cousin Hareton Earnshaw (her mother's brother's son, whom Heathcliff sort of raised as his son and he regarded Heathcliff as his father - weird).
I totally shipped Cathy and Hareton, they're cute together.

Heathcliff kind of got his revenge; he wasn't completely satisfied because Cathy and Hareton started enjoying their lives after becoming friends (Heathcliff's whole aim was to torture the lives of Hindley Earnshaw and Edgar Linton until they and their children died - I think). Then Heathcliff thought, 'What is the point of destroying these two kids?' and must have figured it wouldn't give him joy to kill them; his life had no more purpose and he committed suicide by starving himself and letting his body grow cold and sick. Oh well!
Cathy and Hareton live happily ever after at Wuthering Heights, with Nelly as their housekeeper.

Nelly didn't turn out to be as bad as I thought.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I haven't read Wuthering Heights yet, or even watched an adaptation! I'm really keen to see this one, because I love Kaya's acting and think she seems like a perfect Cathy! (: x.