(This is my first post for Amber's, Lizzy's, and my blog; for anyone who doesn't know what happened, I moved from my one-person blog to their group. From now on, I'll be writing every third post. Hi everyone!)
**spoilers for Cassandra Clare's Mortal Instruments books**
It is undeniable, laughably and obviously undeniable, that whatever feelings exist between Catherine Earnshaw Linton and Heathcliff are unhealthy. To say the very least.
When I first started reading Wuthering Heights, I'd heard reviews quite to the contrary of the actual material; of course, there are always going to be fangirls who make Heathcliff out to be some sort of brooding bishounen with hidden spots of softness, but even aside from these extremists and Heathcliff apologists, the status of WH as a swooning, grand romance is lauded far above the crooked abusiveness of the relationships depicted in it. I knew, for one, how I thought the story was going to go: I knew beyond all knowledge that Heathcliff, after having been treated terribly by Hindley Earnshaw, would sweep back in from his three year absence on a white horse and sweep Catherine away from her husband, who would turn out to be A Terrible Person Indeed. There would be all sorts of social and class conflict, and maybe someone would die, but only tragically. And maybe Heathcliff would commit a few acts of brutality along the way, but he'd end up being a good person after all.
Haha. Ha. Hahaha. Haha.
The blaring warning sign -- what began to tear down my childish expectations -- was Catherine's "I am Heathcliff" speech, where she asserts that, unlike loving Edgar Linton, she needed Heathcliff; she identified with him. This essay does a good job of exploring that particular facet of their relationship, which is, I think, one of its most telling aspects. It's almost as if Heathcliff and Catherine see the other as an alter ego, empathizing and identifying with one another to such an extent that they seem like individual parts of a whole.
Further, the Freudian sense of the word 'identification' (other than going down into a horrible dark rabbit hole full of Oedipal complexes and political incorrectness) lends WH's central relationship an even darker, more socially backwards tone: Not only does it insinuate a mental strategy that reflects dangerously low self-esteem, but it also paints the picture of two individual personalities barreling ever closer toward one another, losing sight of the individual 'self' in favor of assimilating as much of the other person and the couple as possible. More on that here.
I don't want to get into psychology because that's not what this blog post is about -- I'm merely bringing these things up to ask you, as a reader, if they're at all familiar. Are they? If you're saying 'yes' right now, then I agree with you; and if you're saying 'no', I'd recommend you rent any Twilight movie or read the first book -- or, more to the point, pick just about any brooding vampire romance for teens off the shelf that you can find.
I've never read Twilight, so I can't say one way or the other whether it actually DOES follow this pattern, but I read a lot of things like Twilight back in middle school and early high school. Girl meets brooding boy who thinks he's a monster, there's an immediate attachment, girl becomes so smitten with him that she can barely think of herself, boy tries to acquit himself from the relationship but fails because he's so absorbed in her, they do lots of creepy things like watching each other sleep and sniffing each other's hair and trying to kill themselves for each other, and eventually...
...what, did you think I was going to say it usually ends tragically? No. They usually wind up happily ever after -- and if not, with just as much unhappiness as it takes for the author to churn out another novel and make loads of money off of their lovelorn wretchedness.
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| The Mortal Instruments: Obligatory Shirtless Man Cover |
One of my favorite fictional relationships way back when was Jace and Clary from City of Bones, who function quite a bit, in retrospect, like Edward and Bella, or Heathcliff and Cathy. Of course, Jace and Edward both are much kinder love interests than Heathcliff -- it doesn't take much, surprisingly -- but the rhythm of the story still stands. Clary winds up so utterly smitten for Jace that she's willing to do all sorts of unpleasant things for him; if I recall correctly, they wind up resolving to ignore the fact that she's 100% convinced that he's 100% her brother. She shoves herself through all sorts of damaging trials for him. As the story goes on, it feels almost like she's losing herself to this great tempest that is I love Jace I love Jace I love Jace and as a young girl, reading that, I started to feel very, very weird.
And that's the point. She loves him so much that incest is okay. She loves him so much that killing herself is okay -- even preferable to a life without him, as Bella suggests in Twilight with her "him". She loves him so much that she'd like to lose herself in his shadow; in fact, that's what love is about, isn't it?
That's what love is about, isn't it?
I think Catherine Linton would say so. I think Heathcliff would tell you directly that the relationship is unstable and ugly and he likes it that way. So do a lot of people. And I understand why you might want to fantasize about a relationship like Catherine's with Heathcliff: The world is so turbulent, our identities so full of self-loathing, so ever-changing, that to shelter oneself in the persona of another, even if he is a wicked and terrible man, is preferable to living in our own skins.
Let me ask you a question, though. We've all already seen how Brontë depicts her savage, selfless romances: Destructively, and exactly how they are. But that's not the story you get from Clare's books, or Meyer's, is it? There seems to be an entire genre now devoted to telling the story of a young woman who falls in love with a man/woman who's bad for her but can't leave him/her because they are entirely become one another -- and how it's all okay, because it's love, and young people (even adults!) are that way.
Is it love? Do we need to be telling our daughters this same story over and over again?
That to crawl inside the persona of a destructive man or woman, to be incapable of living without him or her, is just part of their existence as a woman with romantic feelings?
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