Wuthering Heights: Masterpiece or Turgid Rubbish? by Millon de Floss
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| Thanks to Visit Britain |
Author: Millon de Floss
Publisher: Not known
Source book: The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde (Thursday Next #3)
Millon de Floss writes: ‘Wuthering Heights was the only novel written by Emily Brontë, which some say is just as well, and others a crying shame.’
I have to admit I’m in the ‘just as well’ party. I was, naturally, forced to read Wuthering Heights at school and absolutely hated it. I couldn’t stomach the way all the characters have the same names. They’re all called (a) Heathcliff, (b) Catherine, (c) Linton, or (d) Earnshaw, or a combination of the above. It’s very annoying. I could never remember which was who.
Thursday Next and Miss Haversham jump into Wuthering Heights to conduct a Jurisfiction Rage Counselling session for the characters. Everyone absolutely hates and despises Heathcliff except Catherine Earnshaw, who loves Heathcliff more than life itself. Come on! Get a grip, Catherine.
Maybe Heathcliff is so angry because he doesn’t get a second name? But, hey! He’s been moonlighting as a Hollywood movie star under the name Buck Stallion. He must have made shed loads of money.
Miss Haversham is forced to yell ‘CAN WE HAVE SOME ORDER PLEASE’. All the characters hate each other.
‘One thing is certain; whatever feelings are aroused in the reader by Heights, whether sadness for the ill-matched lovers, irritability at Catherine’s petulant ways or even profound rage at how stupid Heathcliff’s victims can act as they meekly line up to be abused, one thing is for sure: the evocation of a wild and windswept place that so well reflects the destructive passion of the two central characters is captured here brilliantly - and some would say, it has not been surpassed.’
Bold title though.
However, without Wuthering Heights we would not have the joy of the fabulous Monty Python sketch: Wuthering Heights, the semaphore version. Produced by 20th Century Vole. If you haven’t ever seen this sketch you should have a look.
And my goodness me! Millon de Floss is a busy writer. There’s also Who Put the Poe in Poem? Millon’s thoughts on Edgar Allan Poe: ‘The Raven was undoubtedly Edgar Allan Pope’s finest and most famous poem, and was his own personal favourite, being the one he most liked to recite at poetry readings. Published in 1845, the poem drew heavily on Elizabeth Barrett’s Lady Geraldine’s Courtship, something he acknowledged in the original dedication but had conveniently forgotten when explaining how he wrote The Raven in his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” - the whole affair tending to make a nonsense of Pope’s attacks on Longfellow for being a plagiarist. A troubled genius, Poe also suffered the inverse cash/fame law - the more famous he became, the less money he had. “The Gold Bug”, one of his most popular short stories, sold over 300,000 copies but netted him only $100. With The Raven he fared even worse. The total earnings for one of the greatest poems in the English language was only $9.’ Says Millon.
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| Thanks to www.brontecountry.com |
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