Kate Beaton made me read Wuthering Heights against my will
To be fair Heathcliff's brooding probably stunk up the place real bad
I know there’s a lot going on right now that I don’t really have the words to talk about yet. But for now I honestly just want to tell you about Wuthering Heights, which sucks. It sucks so bad dude. I read Pride and Prejudice and Emma and Jane Eyre last year, and Jane Eyre kicks so much ass. It still holds up as a perfect Gothic story with so many endearing quirks — her love interest dresses up like a fortune teller at one point to try to trick Jane into saying she thinks he’s hot!!! People are constantly telling her she looks like some sort of boring toad and her response is GOOD that only means my points should be taken MORE SERIOUSLY!! There’s a whole section where Jane basically goes on the run and camps in the woods and eats pine cones and stuff.
I thought that Wuthering Heights would be just as fun of a time (which might be my fault for Sister Profiling) but guess what, it’s not a fun time at all. All of the characters just suck generally, peppered with stunning stupidity. Catherine is interesting because she’s more or less completely feral in the first half of the book and a vapid psychopath in the second half but most of her time is spent screeching and then slowly dying, and Heathcliff should be interesting because as a child he was basically captured with some kind of net gun and dragged all the way to the moors of England to scrabble around in the rafters but turns out this makes him evil in kind of a constant, boring way. This is not what YA Romance promised me >:(
Thank god I had Hark A Vagrant to hold my hand through this. Hark A Vagrant is a web comic that has long been defunct and I get a security warning every time I try to load the webpage but I’ll take my chances because artist Kate Beaton has a one-in-a-million talent for finding humor in even the dustiest tome. I had read all of her comics a hundred times before I picked up Wuthering Heights, so much so that when I got to the part where Heathcliff catches a baby, like an asshole, it felt like the fulfillment of an ancient prophesy.
Beaton is incredibly well-read across classics and history, specifically minutiae of Canadian History, and draws such a good bead on these specific weird moments in ubiquitous texts that her work has embedded itself in my experience of reading a bunch of stuff.
Do I love admitting that I have essentially only read a handful of classics because of the influence of panels like “Did that really happen!!” and “What the fuck is their deal?” No. Is it the truth? Absolutely. I feel like when it comes to giving me weird frames of reference that I shouldn’t have based on my media diet, Hark A Vagrant is second only to watching too much of The Simpsons in high school. Read her books!
One more for the road, you say? If you insist!
