#edgar linton

[the-tig-essay-writer]

Isabella Linton

Wuthering heights is my favourite book of all time. All the characters are awful but the one character that I have sympathy for is Isabella Linton. She is in her own way strong because she ran away while pregnant away from her abuser and started a new life just before she died.

I haven't watching Emerald Fennell's adaptation and I have no intention to, just like anyone who has respect for Emily's Bronte's work. However, my curiosity did get the better of me and I went on wikipedia to read the plot line, which says that Heathcliff and Isabella have a BDSM relationship where he treats her literally like a dog and she likes it. I was beyond disgusted and appalled that someone could read a book clearly stating that Isabella is a victim of DV and thinking to her self "You know what I interpret this as? Isabella enjoyed her abuse". Like Isabella literally calls him "the devil" and "not human", what part of that made you think she likes him in any way shape or form? This was just blatant disrespect to Isabella's character and Emily Bronte's work.

I studied this book in university and my lecturer told me that the context behind Isabella's character was that all the Bronte sisters were governess's (tutors) and DV was very normalised. So if they tutored a child in a house and the husband was beating up the wife, that was considered normal. This is what inspired Isabella Linton's character, Bertha's in Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell hall.

To boil abuse down to sex is just disgusting, I hope this adaptation flops so bad.

[inheroes--wetrust]

the most unintentionally hilarious bit of wuthering heights is when edgar linton is dying and with zero trace of sarcasm he's like "don't worry i'm off to be reunited with my loving wife catherine in heaven". what level of delusion has this man been living in for the last seventeen years. what drugs is he on in his last hours that he thinks a) catherine earnshaw somehow ended up in heaven and b) she is waiting for HIM. meanwhile cathy is hanging outside heathcliff's window (she's so cold let her in) in all her ghostly finery, tapping on her watch waiting for him to get on with the world's most anticipated suicide, and hasn't thought of edgar linton once since the day she died. god give me the confidence of a mediocre white man who despite every piece of evidence to the contrary still thinks that he's the main character of this love story.

[charlemane]

thinking about the way that Heathcliff always called Cath1 'Cathy' and Cath2 'Catherine,' while Edgar always called Cath1 'Catherine' and Cath2 'Cathy.'

like, 'Cathy' is a diminutive; it implies a lot of closeness but it also feels somewhat childlike. so it makes sense that Heathcliff would use it for C1; they were childhood friends, and everything about their bond goes back to that childhood. she'll always be Cathy to him. and it also makes sense for Edgar to use that name for C2; she's literally his daughter - and given the way he limits and infantilizes her, he's very reluctant to acknowledge the idea she could ever be anything but a child.

and then 'Catherine' is adult, respectful, but also implies a certain distance. so Edgar uses it for C1, whom he came to know when they were both on the cusp of adulthood. he treats her like a lady, but he'll never have Heathcliff's wild closeness with her. and Heathcliff uses it for C2 because he's deliberately putting that distance between them (and partly, I think, because he's holding her to an adult level of culpability in things she wasn't even born yet for).

but it's also interesting to me that they both change the name they use at all! it's like each of them is trying not to see or treat C2 as if she's C1. which is wild bc in a generational revenge / obsession story like Wuthering Heights, you'd expect C2 to be treated as a stand-in for C1! and in some ways, narratively, she does end up as a double for C1, but it's like Edgar and Heathcliff are both trying to fight that — whether to protect her or to punish her.

[bethanydelleman]

“And then we shall fight to the death, sha’n’t we, Nelly?” she returned, laughing. “No! I tell you, I have such faith in Linton’s love, that I believe I might kill him, and he wouldn’t wish to retaliate.”

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

What a lovely sentiment, Catherine

But more seriously, I really think Edgar's love gets undervalued. Sure, Heathcliff wants Catherine to haunt him and decompose into her coffin but Edgar never really recovers from her death. This is Edgar before he dies:

I thought the memory of the hour I came down that glen a bridegroom would be less sweet than the anticipation that I was soon, in a few months, or, possibly, weeks, to be carried up, and laid in its lonely hollow! Ellen, I’ve been very happy with my little Cathy: through winter nights and summer days she was a living hope at my side. But I’ve been as happy musing by myself among those stones, under that old church: lying, through the long June evenings, on the green mound of her mother’s grave, and wishing—yearning for the time when I might lie beneath it. [Edgar Linton]

It's a different kind of love from Heathcliff's, but I don't think it's any less strong.

[besotted-with-austen]

Nelly Dean: do not come to see Catherine again, you do not want to become part of this family!

Edgar Linton, on the floor, lips trembling: *valiantly* I am not afraid of her brother!

Nelly Dean: *valiantly trying not to bang her or his head on the wall* it is not of her brother you should be afraid of!

[meet-me-at-box5]

What I say: Everything’s fine.

What I’m thinking: why does basically every Wuthering Heights adaptation completely ignore the second gen? Even when the adaptation spends time on the second gen, it doesn’t even give the second gen justice. Time between the first gen and the second gen should be equal, just like in the book. Heathcliff’s revenge on Hindley is just as important, even less than, his revenge on Edgar. And the effects of Heathcliff’s revenge on those around him is incredibly relevant in the second gen. But hey. It doesn’t have the toxicity and obsessiveness of the Heathcliff/Cathy “romance”, so what do I know.

[lavndrmint]

I think BookTok has a larger stake in this “adaptation” than Tumblr…..

English teacher here— this isn’t an adaptation of the novel, it’s a rewriting and overly romanticized wattpad fanfic with Barbies (Robbie literally) being moved around a dollhouse with fancy, outside time period, dresses and all.

[elephantlovemedleys]

Cathy stayed at Thrushcross Grange five weeks: till Christmas. By that time her ankle was thoroughly cured, and her manners much improved. The mistress visited her often in the interval, and commenced her plan of reform by trying to raise her self-respect with fine clothes and flattery, which she took readily; so that, instead of a wild, hatless little savage jumping into the house, and rushing to squeeze us all breathless, there ’lighted from a handsome black pony a very dignified person, with brown ringlets falling from the cover of a feathered beaver, and a long cloth habit, which she was obliged to hold up with both hands that she might sail in.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1992) dir. PETER KOSMINSKY