I was recently taken to task by a commenter for being judgmental for replying that I didn’t want to read ‘yet another unoriginal retelling’ of a classic with the sex dumped in. This was in reference to recently produced and eroticised version of Wuthering Heights. This is the latest in a slew of sexed-up classics published in the last few years. There are a number of publishers releasing a whole raft of them.
The phenomenon of why books become classics and enter the canon in the first place is a very interesting one. I’m not going to address it here, because why certain texts become classics and who determines which texts deserve to be there is a cultural and social study in itself. This has been addressed by some of the most notable thinkers of the 20th Century.
Certainly, of more interest to me, because of my studies, is how eroticism has been written about through the ages. What choices and limitations authors practiced under in their times, and how they coped with those restrictions.
The particular book in question, in the comment, was Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights happens to be very dear to my heart for a number of reasons. To begin with, it has a strangely lopsided structure. It has two main characters, which was unusual for the time. And it continues to be, in my estimation, one of the most deeply erotic works ever written.
It’s not an easy book for modern readers to read, because the way Brontë used language is simply very different to the way we use it today. Admittedly, it’s not as hard to read as Chaucer or Shakespeare, but language does change with time and the very subtle ways in which we imply, hint, infer things have shifted radically. In any given time period, writers leave a lot out of their work; they make assumptions about what might seem obvious to a reader in their time. That also changes with the years. People don’t speak to each other in the same way as they did in 1850. So in the 21st Century, we are reading Wuthering Heights through something of a spiderweb of lost cultural nuance. Nonetheless, I believe one of the reasons it stands up so well, over 150 years later, is because the society Brontë is describing, the landscape, the atmosphere and the characters were probably quite strange, even in her time. In a way, Wuthering Heights is and has always been a piece of speculative fiction. (It is worth taking a look at a summary of the critical response to the novel when it came out – many contemporary critics found the language difficult as well)
Heathcliff is a particularly modern character. In the mid-19th Century, people didn’t often spend a lot of time obsessing about their identities in the way we do today. Usually, the main reason to ponder identity in those days revolved around inheritance, rather than our modern need to interrogate our ‘truths’. Yet both Emily and Charlotte Brontë do so; Jane Eyre is also very much a novel of identity. I’ve often wondered at the tremendous, subverted erotic tension that must have existed in the Brontë household, because both these women wrote about erotic desire in its most tempestuous and destructive form.
I first read Wuthering Heights at fourteen. Even then, I was perfectly aware of the sexual tension that electrifies the novel. By the time I read it again, at university, at the age of 23, I was fully capable of ‘filling in the unwritten’ eroticism in the novel.
Look, I’m a writer of erotic fiction, and you’d think I would be a staunch proponent of making ‘the implicit’ explicit. I’m not. I am first a writer and I honour the fact that, within the constraints of her time, Emily Brontë wrote as erotic a novel as she could. She used atmosphere, metaphor, dialogue, conflict and horror to eloquently paint a picture of an erotic desire so strong it survived past death. The eroticism is there, everywhere, in the text if readers would get off their cerebral asses and actively read the text. Just like in 1847, this is a novel where you, as the reader, are expected to use your very active imagination to make the implicit explicit.
Sexing up the classics, and especially this classic is, I believe, bad for our brains. In its original form, Wuthering Heights begs the modern reader to play ‘what if’ with their imagination. Time and cultural change challenge us to fill in the gaps of what could not be made explicit at the time. It exercises our erotic imaginations in a way that an explicit fuck scene never can.
Looking into the semi-opaque world of classic texts, and actively reading the eroticism into them as we read, is good for us. It keeps our minds fertile and questing. Reproducing those stories and adding in ten explicit sex scenes robs us of the opportunity to use our imaginative powers.
But more than all of that… what is it about us that we cannot value new stories? Are there no new stories left to tell? I don’t believe that.
Yes, I am a very judgmental writer. I don’t hide it and I don’t deny it. I think, if you are a REAL erotic fiction writer, you will find new stories to tell, not rehash old ones.
Eroticized or not, I despise retellings of classic stories, mostly because it gives people an excuse, an easy out as it were, so they can feel they’ve gotten ‘the advantages’ in terms of culture without the ‘work’ of reading the original. It encourages laziness and the continuing devolution of our collective intelligence.
I couldn’t agree with you more. But our culture is full of things for sale to fool us we’re getting the real thing (without the pain) when we’re not. It’s like believing in the ‘magical’ diet.
I knew this was coming when I saw that comment. 🙂 I don’t know if I should admit that I’ve only read the Cliff Notes on this book, and that a long time ago. But I am going to pick up the real thing at the next opportunity.
Have you read “About Writing” by Samuel R. Delany?
No, I haven’t. And please, don’t pay for Wuthering Heights. There are a ton of different free versions of it online. Enjoy it, be patient with it, but persevere. Think of it as if you were reading a novel set in a completely different culture. It helps.
RG,
I’ve not read these classics therefore I dont have any real input into the essay other than perhaps that’s why the sexed up versions are finding success? I do like how you are a writer first and foremost and a critical one at that. You inspire ones to find new reading material, perhaps I will try these classics. Thank you, and btw the new image on the site is nice too!
RG,
These books were required reading at school, I agree with you absolutely.
Paul.
I couldn’t agree more, and in addition I feel that adding sex scenes to these stories diverts attention from the inherent eroticism in the rest of the text. A sex scene is inevitably going to overshadow the tension in Brontë’s text and erase its potency.
“writers leave a lot out of their work; they make assumptions about what might seem obvious to a reader in their time”
It was obvious to contemporary readers; it’s one of the difficulties today reading such classics that we don’t always have what was common knowledge at the time.
The BBC recently screened a production of the Netherfield Ball from Pride and Prejudice; and not just the dancing, but the supper. They showed, for example, that you had to bring your dancing pumps with you and change into them — it seems obvious but it’s the sort of detail that didn’t need to be mentioned. Similarly, the etiquette of the dance, who you danced with and who you didn’t was a sexual code, as were the chats between partners. A dance then was one of the few times when men and women could socialise, even to the extent of some bodily contact, without censure; they really were sizing people up.
Not to mention Jane Austen, sea monsters, and zombies!
To me, the only reason anyone would engage in such travesties is in an attempt to make a quick buck/quid with minimal effort. I cannot imagine that these “authors” are checking the notices for praise and adulation. Rather, they are checking the mail for their expected gains, all the while plotting their next assault on the all too gullible consumer.
Full disclosure: I have not read any of these modern rewrites, so I may have missed-out on some redeeming qualities. I doubt it.
I did read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And while it wasn’t great, it was humorous. But that’s ADDING zombies to a story that had none. ADDING erotic content to Wuthering Heights is not ADDING something that wasn’t already there. It was always there, for those who cared to look for it.
I finally remembered to read this article (sorry for taking so long RG) and I’m going to take the radical step of disagreeing with one of the wisest and most eloquent people I know.
Preface: I’ve done this. I’ve committed this sin. I took a certain early twentieth century planetary romance, and imagined myself recovering what some editor had removed way back then. (The author and title shall not be named in any place where the litigious estate’s lawyers can find it; even though the novel is in the public domain, they continue to sue people.)
First: I think you’re reading too much into this. I doubt anyone will be reading the ‘amplified’ versions in another ten years, whereas the original versions will keep on getting dropped in the laps of unappreciating students for decades to come. If there’s damage being done to these novels, it’s like graffiti on the base of Big Ben; only visible if you look close, and ultimately forgettable.
Second: Transformative art is, in fact, art. Nobody would argue that Andy Warhol’s versions of La Giaconda are as great as the original, but they do have a message and they do speak to the world Warhol lived in every bit as much as the original did to Da Vinci’s world.
The erotic subtext of the novel I reimagined is no doubt less sophisticated than that of Wuthering Heights. Instead of seeing it through a distorted, hazy pane of glass, I saw gaping holes where (to my eyes, at least) something had been unceremoniously ripped out. My manuscript is my attempt to say, “I see these missing bits, and this is what I imagine could have originally gone there.”
Yes, any other reader of the un-adulterated novel could imagine their own things to go in those holes. Isn’t that true of any fiction, though? If someone wants to imagine something, they can just imagine it…they don’t need an author to do it for them.
And yet here we are…not only writing stories for other people, but (at least occasionally) getting paid for it. Why? Because some people have the talent and skill to do a better job of it than people could do for themselves.
If there’s something wrong with that, then why are we writing fiction at all?