The Harrowing ("1984" Part 1 Ch. 1-7 )

(harrowing:  adj,  acutely distressing)

Before I get started on what very well may be my most epic post (in size...I don't guarantee epic quality of content) I want to point out that with this post I am sure to go over one thousand pageviews.  The fact that anyone looks at my blog at all makes me happy.  When there are enough people looking at it that it has been viewed one thousand times...while I may not sure how to process that stimulation I do, however, know how to appropriately respond.

Thank You.

Now that we've had a puppy validate you with positivity and cuteness, it's time for the bleakness.

The world that George Orwell creates is not frightening because of its substance or structure.  If he set it on some alien planet populated by Zygons then it would be an amusing entertainment.  It is so frightening because it is so close to not only the world we live in but the world we are becoming.  Every technological step along the way, every change in how we consume information propels us closer to 1984.  There's a sort of vertigo that I feel, that fear as we get closer and closer to the edge and we can see Oceania below.

The story itself is not the point of the book.  It is quite rightly seen as a warning rather than entertainment.  Normally I try to give a sense of the overall storyline in my blog.  With this novel, there are so many more ideas than actual story.  I haven't marked up a book like this since Atlas Shrugged.  I openly wondered to my wife if this book would change me in a similar way as Ayn Rand's prescient masterpiece.  She shrugged and said, "Probably not".  Now that we are both reading 1984 together it's clear that it will change us both.

The basic story is that of a man, Winston Smith, who goes about his day and life as a member of the Party.  In this world there are two castes.  There are the Proles, the working class stiffs, who are pretty much anyone middle class and lower.  Proles make up 85% of the population and are essentially "slave" labor for the Party.  The Party is the government, the intelligentsia, and the media.  They are the college graduates, the blessed, the smart ones who are controlled and indoctrinated by the ubiquitous and mustachioed Big Brother.  It's fairly strange to think, but the Party is more indoctrinated and has more confining laws placed on them than the Proles.

Winston has strange feelings that there is something missing in life.  He has noticed for ages that Big Brother and the Party manipulate facts and even create them out of whole cloth.  The past, which he can barely remember, has been erased and changed in so many ways that he can't be sure what is true.  Truth, in itself, could just be another lie.

Without realizing why, Winston purchases a diary at a shop and takes it home.  He discovered a blind spot in his apartment where the all seeing Teleplate cannot observe him and takes up writing in it.  He's gripped with an exhilarating fear as he goes to write in it.

"The thing he was about to do was open a diary.  This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labor camp."

And that is our first taste of the great paradox of living in the world of Big Brother.  Sure, their slogans routinely pumped into them are:

"WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."

But that can be readily discarded as party propaganda.  This fear is how they actually live on a day to day basis.  It is the substance of their thoughts which is, after all, Big Brother's goal.  Dominance of thought.  ELIMINATION of thought, actually.  This is how they think.  It's not illegal because there are no laws, but I could be punished for it.  Insane?  Just wait.

Winston works as one who "corrects" the past.  He adjusts news articles so that Big Brother appears to be all knowing, non-contradictory, and perfect in all his words.  He sort of sees a problem with this but his indoctrination is so deep that it is easier not to think.  A good member of the party always chooses not to think.  There are things he can't not think on though.  For instance:

"Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia.  In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines.  Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia.  But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control.  Officially the change of partners had never happened"..."The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible."

Winston viewed it as HIS fault for remembering anything other than the way the Party said it. 

"If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened- that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture or death."

"Reality Control".

This serves as a primer to doublethink: "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies...to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it."

One only needs to turn on the TV, read a newspaper, or just pay attention to what is going on in the world to see all of this in action.  

The world we live in, this digitally predominant world, makes the past so easily malleable.  If we don't have hard copy then any administration could change something of the past.  People have been rightly worried about how easy it is to edit things like Wikipedia.  People look at it and believe its contents are truth.  However, if enough people agree that something should be changed it will be.  Our past could easily be destroyed.  I remember being in a discussion with someone about how my daughter was being taught that this leftist Union Leader in America was a hero.   They shrugged, said they didn't see anything wrong with it.  I mentioned, well except for the fact that he used violence, physical and financial retribution to achieve his goals.  If that was true, they reasoned, then they wouldn't teach about him to children.  We rationalize before we even dare to look it up.  It was not something that was included in the Wikipedia article and so what use was there in still looking?  Less than 5 minutes of doing a different search yielded proof.  With just ideology and a keyboard it has been wiped from the popular consciousness.

Recently I watched a TED talk where the speaker actually said the words "The era of knowing is over.  We don't need to actually have knowledge anymore.  If we need information we can look it up and then should forget it when we don't need it anymore."  

Creeping closer.

There are so many political issues on both sides of the spectrum that frighten me.  I have met so few people who even question their own party's line.  They'll give a pass on anything because it's "their guy".  They'll ignore blatant lies, forgive "readjustments" of their candidates history, and not bat an eye when he/she lies to them again, and again, and again.  If the other side does it then they are, quite naturally, scumbags bent on destroying the country.  We aren't that far from a single party in all but name anyway.  There is no consistency and no principles.  "Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think.  Orthodoxy is unconsciousness."  That, as far as Orwell's warning, is already here in many ways.

Personally I find the notion of Newspeak as particularly offensive.  It is the new language of Oceania, always being refined.  As a colleague of Winston's declares, "You think, I dare say, that our chief job is inventing new words.  But not a bit of it!  We're destroying words - scores of them, hundreds of them, every day.  We're cutting the language down to the bone."  Later her justifies, "After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other words?...If you have a word like 'good,' what need is there for a word like 'bad'?  'Ungood' will do just as well..."  

With some zealousness he later explains, "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?  In the end we shall make thoughcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it...Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller."  

So, what would be the fall out?  "Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron - they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they use to be."

There is so much here that my mind is all abuzz with multiple ideas all firing at the same time.  Let's see if I can organize them and tease them into some sort coherent mess.

Firstly, language is so extremely important.  Their goal of controlling the people through language is not as far fetched as it seems.  When I first learned about rhetoric my mind was completely blown.  Rhetoric is how people use language in order to effectively state their position on something.  Well, that's the Light Side of rhetoric.  The Dark Side of rhetoric is choosing carefully the words you use in order to manipulate the listener/reader.  It's one thing to have a news report with the headline "Fifteen soldiers killed in a firefight with the Taliban" and completely another to say "Fifteen soldiers slaughtered in a firefight with the Taliban".  Which one grips you more emotionally?  The second one clearly sells more papers and, intended or not, makes you feel more negatively about the Taliban, or on the other hand may predispose you negatively toward the war.

Every day, language is used to manipulate.  Your emotions are being toyed with in order to achieve a desired result.  Now, in the world of advertising we can just go "Oh, look, they're using sex to sell blue jeans again" and discard it if we want.  Language is more tricky.  Reading and hearing automatically sets up residence in our minds and few are trained, let alone have the desire, to put it in a holding tank to consider it and either hold it or jettison.

I learned this and paid attention on my own over the years and then one day took a high level philosophy course as an elective.  (Yes...I took philosophy for fun.)  I get bored fairly easily, and so one of my ways to fend off boredom is to play with language and ideas.  I squish them, stretch them, spin them on their head just to see what happens.  I like to hold two contradictory thoughts in my head at one time and then watch as they play Texas Hold'em...to the death.  It was during one of these 'bouts that I realized that the teacher was manipulating the whole class.  He had taught about rhetoric only from the perspective of "the enemy" as perpetrator.  There wasn't a single bit about how our own "party" our own "allies" manipulate us.  I watched as he manipulated the class from one side of the issue to the other side of the issue and every one of them followed like obedient little ducklings and agreed wholeheartedly without even considering that just five minutes ago they were agreeing wholeheartedly with the complete opposite.  I started chuckling and the teacher turned and gave me a wink, knowing that I'd caught it.  He asked me, for the benefit of the class, to tell what I was chuckling at.  I explained and watched as each person in that 30 seat classroom couldn't figure it out.  They defended each side, as they had heard from the teacher, and some people even managing to argue the validity both contradictory views at the same time.  

So, what does this have to do with 1984?  We're not so far from it.  The enemy is the one trying to manipulate you, they will tell you, while deliberately and blatantly manipulating you just as well.  It's the Democrats.  It's the Republicans.  It's the Libertarians.  It's Greenpeace.  It's Big Oil.  It's the church.  It's Atheism.  Language and loyalty are the blinders every institution uses.  Not every institution is bad.  Not every use of rhetoric is bad, but we need to be aware of it or we may as well be sidling up to Big Brother.  If your emotions are engage by those you trust in order to sway your opinion then remember the "Two Minute Hate" from this book.  I am immediately suspicious of anything that engages my emotions in an argument of ideas because that tends to mean logic won't win them their argument.

Pax,

Will Arbaugh

WIKA "1984"

What I know about 1984:

Pretty much everything I know about 1984 I know from osmosis.  It is literally everywhere in entertainment.  Whether it's Hodgins on Bones saying he's worried about Big Brother listening in the on the conversation or watching Minority Report and worry about the Thought Police, we cannot help but know this novel without having actually read it.   It directly informs THX1138, George Lucas' student film which is world the reading, and even my favorite novel of all time which I've never actually finished reading, Lanark by Alisdair Grey.  All of Phillip K. Dick's paranoid sci-fi fantasies find their root there.

One of the most acclaimed commercials of all time was a spot for the first Macintosh from Apple.  It's tagline declared that the Macintosh was the reason "1984 won't be like 1984", an endearing moment of marketing hubris that clearly wasn't the case.  Even our most recent scandal, the NSA spying on American citizens, is reported on by using buzzwords from George Orwell's work.  It has so fully permeated the culture that I believe that anyone could tell you the basic storyline without ever having actually read it.

George Orwell was, of course, the man who wrote Animal Farm which I also haven't yet read.  I can feel the judgmental glares now, stop.  I was homeschooled half my life.  I was reading Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Robinson Crusoe, and Pilgrim's Progress instead and they've done well enough.  I regret nothing.

I often get George Orwell and H. G. Wells mixed up in my head.  I'm not sure why.

I'm really looking forward to this one.  A dark novel about a totalitarian society is probably just what I need after Wuthering Heights.  At least it might be a bit of a decent comedown before I get to the next novel,  Little Women.

Pax,

W

A Good End to Bad Things (Wuthering Heights CH 22-34)

I'm in a strange mental space upon finishing this book, so forgive me if that is reflected in this blog.  I had intended to give a fiery denouncement of this book, and I still may, but it is less likely now.  It's rather like attending a funeral of someone who had done you ill in the past.  Death puts this weird perspective on things.  Even the prospect of someone dying makes so much forgivable and we see that person in a rosier light than we did when they were healthy and seemed to have all the time in the world.

Given that, I think it would be best to section this post on Wuthering Heights into certain themes.

The End
The final third of the novel was actually more interesting than the rest of the novel.  Cathy's father died and Heathcliff forced her to live under his roof and began to torture her especially after Linton died leaving everything to him rather than her...which of course was the plan all along.

There's this very subtle shift that occurs after Linton dies and Heathcliff wins.  It's so subtle that I almost wonder if I'm making it up.  There are moments and beats, shades of ways Heathcliff says things that seem to show that deep down he realizes how very hollow his victory is.  He's fought, railed, abused, and tormented everyone his entire life.  Now that everyone he could have been victorious against is dead and he's "won" there's nothing left.  His life's actually without any sort of meaning.  Certainly he continues to abuse Cathy and Hareton, but there are moments where he stops himself in the middle because he sees the dead looking right back at him through the eyes of the children.  He's won...and nobody could care less.  Indeed, the children have gotten to the point where they are just waiting him out.  They don't say as much, but it's clear they can see an end to their torture, and so are less fearful of him.

Cathy's situation is particularly interesting to me.  Here she was an intelligent and empathetic creature always trying to do right even if she got confused by romance, and once under Heathcliff's thumb she began to shift into this terrible creature.  She causes discord for fun, delights in mocking Hareton for bettering himself by learning to read, and is generally spiteful to all.  Here we go again, I thought, the apple isn't falling far from the tree.  I was genuinely surprised to find what resistance there was in both of their hearts to this darkening.  There were a few genuinely hopeful moments in the last third that indicated that these children (well, I say children but they were 23 and 18 years of age) would not make the same mistakes as their parents.

Heathcliff tells her that he will torment her as payment for living under her roof.  She boldly looks at him with the eyes of her namesake and says "Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and however miserable you makes us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery.  You are  miserable, are you not?  Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him?  Nobody loves you - nobody will cry for you when you die!  I wouldn't be you!"

Right next to that piece is my notation in black ink, "Daaaang, sister!"

Later Hareton and Cathy start to fall in love when both realize their toxic ways are less than beneficial and apologize to each other.  They begin to show kindness and tenderness in a house of abuse and naturally they are drawn to it.  They decide to make a little flower garden to please each other.  Unfortunately Hareton digs up the wrong bushes.  They explain and Heathcliff turns on Cathy.

'"And who the devil gave you leave to touch a stick about the place?...And who ordered you to obey her?" he added, turning to Hareton.

The Latter was speechless; his cousin replied - "You shouldn't grudge a few yards of earth for me to ornaments, when you have taken all my land!"  (Oh, snap!)

"Your land, insolent slut! You never had any," said Heathcliff.'

He goes to hit her, Hareton stands by her side and he pales.  It's as if they're saying, "We're just waiting you out old man.  You won't be able to torment us forever".

For Earnshaw, Catherine, Edgar, Isabella, and even Linton, to a lesser degree, Heathcliff was something they had to endure in one form or another for the rest of their lives.  His obsession and abuse shaped them and there was little hope of a reprieve.  For the kids, they can swallow it down and not be permanently shaped by it.  With Linton dead, he realizes, he leaves nothing of his own behind.  Neither of the titles or lands were ever truly his.  He was a foundling replacement in the stead of a child who died at birth.

Any remorse he may have had fades quickly at the prospect of being reunited in death with Catherine...which was pretty weak in my estimation.

The book does end happily and I was quite pleased with the ending, but it is not even remotely a book I would read through again just for that ending.  I'll but the book on my "100 Books" bookcase and it will travel with me wherever I go, but it will never be opened again.  It's too infuriating and it's main characters too vile.  Most of my favorite books I return to in order to welcome my "friends" with open arms.  This book I'd only be capable of returning to with a clenched fist.

Love and Obsession/Passion
Much is made of the "Love Story" supposedly found within these pages.  I've looked at so many reviews that say "Oh, how I wish I had a man who loved me like Heathcliff" and I can't help but wonder what they mean by that.  He was abusive to every woman in his life including Catherine and terrible in general to every one else.  If you want a man to beat you about the face and neck, threaten your relatives, and attempt to murder your pets then I'm pretty sure that your average psych ward could grant you some prospects.

Now, naturally, no one wants those terrible things.  So, what could they possibly mean by that?

To my mind what they are saying is that they want someone who feels strongly, passionately, about them, and I get that.  I know so many people who say, "Man, if the fireworks aren't there then there's no point at all."  The problem with that is that fireworks inevitably fade.  They HAVE to.  The proverbial "fireworks" are nothing more than chemicals in the brain.  "Love" shoots us up with a crazy cocktail of hormones that are not unlike a drug.  It is AMAZING to feel that way for weeks or even months.  We easily become addicted to it.  Just like any drug our bodies necessarily acclimate to it and need more in order to just feel buzzed.  Instead of taking more hits we escalate situations in order to get the high.  This leads to fighting, and abuse.  As someone who was once the victim in an abusive relationship I can tell you that this happened to me and I stayed.  Why?  The mental and physical abuse was hell, but the makeup time was just the dose I needed to get high.  One of my friends at the time described it perfectly.  He said, "Imagine being in a cold, black box.  You're in there for weeks at a time and then she opens the lid letting in the warm sunshine.  You hope she'll take you out of the box, and she swears she will.  You believe it every time because it feels so good."  When you are addicted to passion you make the other person your "dealer" and you'll bow to nearly any whim for another high.

What Heathcliff and Catherine have is not love in any way shape or form.  It can be loosely described as "passion".  It is a wind storm devastating everything in its path leading to nothing in the end.  There's nothing tangible or real about their "love".  It's abusive to one another and everyone around them.

The real tragedy is that Catherine had love and didn't want it.  Edgar Linton treated Catherine with dignity, respect, and doted on her in every way he could.  Even to the end he was at her bedside refusing to leave or even sleep.  It wasn't loud, it wasn't exciting, but it was healthy, wholesome and, if she had let it, it would have nurtured her.  Genuine love is recognized not by how it feels but, rather, by what it does.  Passion will get you high, but love will sustain you when you are in the depths.  The fireworks do not last, and I thank God that they don't.  When you're high on endorphins you can be the blindest you've ever been.  You'll drink poison and swear it tastes like champagne.  When the passion fades you can see things rightly.  You can see what the two of you need to work on and how best to be each other's helpmate.  Getting high on passion is always self centered and genuine love is other centered.  Without some sort of morality healthy love cannot exist.  It's merely passionate, self centered obsession.

Why, Emily?  Why?
I've scanned a few articles on the net as to why Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights and have discovered that there is nothing on the subject directly from Emily or any of her sisters.  We are left with, as I declared in the first place, a terrible story about terrible people who do terrible things to each other.  Now I am compelled to add, "with a little hope at the end."

I do not believe that Emily Bronte wrote this book in order to celebrate this abusive "love".  It's much in the same way that Trainspotting was not, as many moral people believed and declared loudly, a book/movie that glorifies heroine usage.  Seriously, all you have to do is watch the first fifteen minutes of the movie to get that it's about the horrors of heroine usage.

All we need do is to look at who the "hero" of the book actually is; Nelly.  She is our perspective through 90% of the novel (the other 10% being made up of the unnecessary Mr. Lockwood).  Nelly endures the sufferings, celebrates the joys, and accurately predicts the demise of every character.  She's the only one throughout who cares about the others.  She's the only one who holds any hope of redemption for anyone.  Even Heathcliff she calls a Goblin or a Devil from the moment she sees him as a child and still keeps hoping she can nudge him into some sort of morality.

Charlotte Bronte, in speaking of the novel after it was published...sadly after the death of Emily, stated that it was the most accurate portrayal of life in those obscure manors that were such a distance from town.  Isolation from the rest of the "herd" produces these strange abuses and odd behaviors.

Once I realized that it is a critique of such people and life then it became infinitely more tolerable.  Still...not tolerable enough to read again.  How this book is on the top 100 of all time is still a mystery to me, but then again so is Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials.

Thank you one and all for sticking through this lengthy process of reviewing this book.  I appreciate how frustrating it must have been to wait so long between posts, but I just couldn't handle it all at once as I normally try to do them.

Next is George Orwell's 1984 which I expect will be a read that delights me.  Sadly, I will only be able to get a copy sometime after the first of next month.  Until then I'll be reading classic sci-fi magazines from the 60's in order to recover from this 100 Brontes on the Austen/Bronte scale...which only goes up to 10.

Pax,

W

A Case To Be Made (Wuthering Heights Ch 11-21)

Gentle ladies and, to a lesser extent, gentlemen of the jury, if you will indulge me, I would like to present my case.

There have been many love stories written over the eight millenia or so since human beings invented written language.  From those first chicken scratch cuneiform syllables to the garish modern implementation of Comic Sans and even upon entering into the all forgiving, healing light of Helvetica there has been much debate on the subject of what does and does not constitute a love story.  Certainly it can take many forms.

Some would have us believe that for a tale to truly be a love story it must end happily.  Romeo and Juliet, arguably the greatest of all love stories, would then be out of the running entirely.  Indeed, the modern romantic classic Possession by A. S. Byatt would only count because the modern couple gets together though the past couple does not.

I submit to you that for a love story to truly be that in name, it must actually show the protagonist couple in love and doing loving things to and for each other.  At it's very base element this must be present.

I further submit, therefore, that Wuthering Heights is the furthest thing from a love story since Machiavelli's The Prince or perhaps Mein Kampf.  I don't use these comparisons lightly at all.  When we look at Wuthering Heights what do we see between Catherine and Heathcliff?  Only passion; animalistic and self serving passion.  I do believe that I could excuse the novel as merely a tawdry little work if it was just animalistic passion.  Tawdry but not nearly a love story.

Seriously, though, what am I supposed to think about this Heathcliff?  A brute from the moment we meet him, cast into a family of brutes and selfish prigs, who has a certain amount of passion for a beautiful, sniping, selfish, conniving...wench.  All he knows is beating people into submission and all she knows is manipulating people for her own uses.  Why am I supposed to cheer for this couple?  At all?

I last left these people with Heathcliff having returned to find Catherine married Linton, who is now one of two people who actually seem virtuous.  It seems that Linton actually loves Catherine though her standards of "passion" are clearly not met in that relationship.  She teases and taunts Heathcliff with the marriage and disrespects her new husband in many respects by allowing/demanding that Heathcliff be allowed to visit whenever he likes.

Heathcliff reveals his plan to destroy Earnshaw through the son he neglects, Hareton, and then gets the bright idea to revenge himself on Linton, for marrying Catherine, by taking up with his little sister, Isabella.  Catherine correctly sees what Heathcliff is up to and says, not considering for a second that the same might be said of her, "Your bliss, like his (Satan's), lies in inflicting misery."  The husband overhears all, steps in, Heathcliff threatens to beat him, she says it's all his (Linton's) fault and how dare he accuse Heathcliff of being horrible...Seriously.  She declares "If Edgar will be mean and jealous then I will break their hearts by breaking my own."  Yes...she's intentionally going to pitch fits because her husband won't allow her to see a man who is passionately in love with her and has threatened to beat her husband bloody.  And this is love?  She spends the next few chapters being not so much a Drama Queen as a freaking Drama Empress.   She claims she'll kill herself and it's only out of selfishness that Linton wants her around.

It's about this time that Heathcliff comes around, scoops up Isabella to elope and, as any lover would do, hangs a dog by the neck so that it should die.  It would be belong to his new wife, Isabella.

When news reaches Catherine then she predictable falls into a brain fever.

This section is where I pretty much lose it.  Before, at Wuthering Heights, it was terrible people doing terrible things to other terrible people.  Now they are leaving a trail of broken hearts and damaged psyches in their wake because they insist on involving decent people.  Linton attends to Catherine and dotes on her before, during, and after the illness.  Sure, he's not the most passionate guy, I mean her prefers books to strangling puppies to death, but he cares.  Isabella warmly invited Catherine into their lives and she ends up repaid with abuse, physical and mental.

Isabella writes a letter to Nelly and asks if Heathcliffe is a man.  If not is he insane or a devil?  Seriously, honey, if you have to ask...you're in deep Bantha poodoo.  Upon Nelly pressing Heathcliff for an explanation he declares it was all Isabella's fault.  Hanging up her dog, beating her, no brutality had any effect on her so he continued to be brutal.

Gosh, he's dreamy.

Catherine takes ill even more.  Apparently her fake tantrums took their toll especially in light of her pregnancy (surprise) and near to giving birth Heathcliff gets wind of her illness and stands outside the house, hidden.  He's lurking, waiting until the husband isn't home and the door is accidentally left unlocked.  (So freaking gallant and not at all creepy!)

"Oh, Cathy!  Oh, My life!  how can I bear it?" he says upon forcing his way in.

"'What now?' said Catherine, leaning back and returning his look with a suddenly clouded brow:  Her humour was a mere vane for constantly varying caprices.  'You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff!  And you both come to bewail the deed to me, as if you were the people to be pitied...(ain't she a gem?) You have killed me-and thriven on it, I think....How many years do you mean to live after I'm gone?'"

Chapter sixteen begins with the fact of Catherine's death in childbirth...to which I could only manage to say, "Then why is there so much freaking book left?!?!".

Loving, chivalrous Heathcliff responds as anyone would expect a caring individual who just lost the love of his life would.

"May she wake in torment!...Why she's a liar to the end!...haunt me...only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you!"  Yeah, cause you treated each other so well when she was alive.  I mean, she must be in hell not being abused by you or be able to watch you tormenting her sister in law with a freaking KNIFE shoved between her teeth (actually happened).  She must be missing you something fierce.

As ever Nelly has the right of it when she says, "Treachery and violence are spears pointed at both ends; they wound those who resort to them worse than their enemies."

We fast forward...Isabella escapes Heathcliff and Earnshaw to London, pregnant but more than happy to make it on her own than around those two.  She gives birth and names the child Linton, hoping that will disuade Heathcliff who only declares, as a good father would, "When I want it, I will have it."  Edgar Linton has named his child Catherine, after her mother, and sixteen years pass.  During that time Earnshaw died leaving Heathcliff with Hareton.  Isabella dies and Edgar goes off to fulfill his sister's wish of having Linton live with him.  Heathcliff objects and the poor, sickly child is brought into his care.  And why would he want him?  One simple reason; to have the ultimate in pathetic revenges; Linton to marry Cathy and then when Linton dies, because of the language of the law, Heathcliff would rule over both estates.  Of course he can't help but encourage Hareton to try for Cathy and thereby cause even more discord.  It's not enough to play with and ruin the lives of adults, but now he has to destroy the lives of children.

The worst part of it all?  There is still one hundred pages to go, and we already know how this ends because the beginning is the end; Heathcliff abusing both Hareton and Cathy around a fire.

I could spill all of my feelings about this book, what all it's taught me, and that sort of thing, but I think it's best left for the final entry.

I will say, however, that I got on multiple sites and read reviews for this book by many people.  The one thing that amazed me was how many people think that this is such a good love story, and how amazing Heathcliff is.  Seriously?

Renee commented on my last post about how there's a sort of Heathcliff arc in fiction.  Edward Cullen, Four, Christian Gray and all these guys who are dark, brooding, abusive types are so lapped up by readers as so dreamy.  I'd even go so far as to put Lestat in that category.  I guess it's likely human nature on some level.  When I was in high school who did all the girls want?  That guy who was no good for them at ALL...but gosh they want them.  They give their bodies and their lives to them and then when they are used up, abandoned with kids, past their "prime" they wonder where all the good guys are.

Now the interesting question, of course, is what would Charlotte Bronte think of her sister's work and does Rochester apply as the dark, brooding, abusive type?

I'll leave that to your gentle hands, dear jury, to type out into the comments below.  :)

Pax,

W