Within the pages of diaries “half savage and hardy and free…”
There has been a lot of news lately concerning Britain’s decision to ban a range of popular social media apps for anyone under 16. This is a growing trend worldwide, and while I am personally against government taking what I would like to be a parental role, I do acknowledge how troubling so much we hear about social media is for young people, and especially for young girls.
Often, when looking back to my own teenage years, I find myself sighing with genuine relief that we did not have social media. Once upon a time teenage girls kept diaries. Inside the pages we wrote down our deepest secrets along with our hopes and insecurities and even mundane recordings of daily life. Your diary was for your eyes only, even if some stories and secrets were confided in friends, you never actually showed your diary to another soul. There was something comforting in writing down your feelings and then safely hiding them away from other people’s judgements and interpretations. Today girls are compelled to reveal everything from triumphs to insecurities and worse across social media. It feels there are no secrets anymore, in fact the goal seems to be to get as many people as possible to see your posts, to read your inner thoughts and then have them judge you, hopefully with “likes” and words of praise. A secret dialog with oneself seems incompatible with modern life.
Aside from our diaries, girls of my generation also loved to lose ourselves in the pages of novels. My high school friends and I read most of the staples of our day – books like SE Hinton’s “The Outsiders,” Paul Zindel’s “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,” JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye” – but we had never read anything quite like Wuthering Heights. It was the first book I read that was told by a narrator, housekeeper Nelly Dean, who may or may not have been relaying the events in an unbiased manner. It was, in a lot of ways, like reading someone’s diary. Our imaginations, fueled by our teenage hormones, ran wild through the wiley, windy moors of Emily Bronte’s dark, gothic novel. I just reread Wuthering Heights. I’ve been thinking about doing so since the latest film adaptation was released earlier this year. I didn’t watch it, but there was a brief period of publicity and controversy, and I found myself thinking about the novel and wanting to read it again.
As a University student, living in an Austin, Texas that was very different from the one I reside in today, I had a friend named Del. Actually everybody seemed to be friends with Del, who spent hours every day in coffee houses, sketchbook in tow, drawing the people drinking coffee, reading books, laughing in conversation all around him. A dedicated artist he also became a keen observer of human nature. I remember him once earnestly telling me, “We go on living for the same reason we go to the opera. Passion and revenge.” I have no memory of the rest of that conversation or what even prompted those words, but I don’t suppose it matters. “Passion and revenge,” I often find myself thinking as I too observe the humans around me. And I thought of Del’s words recently as I wandered amongst the shelves of Barnes and Noble on my way to purchase a new copy of Wuthering Heights.
Like a lot of teenage girls of my generation Wuthering Heights was the first gothic novel I read. But we didn’t just read it; we devoured it, dreamt of it, wanted to write our own versions of it. Decades later I can report that Wuthering Heights, while its pages do still drip with passion and revenge, reads very differently through the eyes of an adult than it did when one was still a teenager. Rereading Emily Bronte’s one novel has filled me not just with a story that I had forgotten quite a bit of, but has also brought back memories of being an angst-ridden teenage girl wide-eyed and mesmerized by a novel that would lead me down a path of books I found so intense it would be hard to put them down even as I panicked that reading longer into the night would lead me to finishing the book before I could bear to have it end.
Those were the days of passing handwritten notes to friends between classes. Scrawled across the bottom we often included quotes from songs and novels and poems that we felt we understood in ways “other people” never could. Emily Bronte gave us some choice ones. “I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me.” “He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.” “Be with me always - take any form - drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” Thus inspired we wrote our own ardently melodramatic, terrible poetry, which we confidently shared with each other and which I happily have no remaining copies of.
Young girls are not the only ones attracted to Wuthering Heights. There have been 39 film and television adaptations of the novel to date. Almost all of them have been advertised as a great, even the greatest, love story. But Del was right; it is much more a story of passion and revenge than it is of love. Fiery, disturbing, and at times violent it is also a story of generational trauma. Wuthering Heights chronicles wounds which never heal and are instead covered over with bitter narcissism. The adult me can see this in a way the teenage me could not. Today I even reread some passages and wonder how we could have been so intoxicated by depictions of such vile behavior and unlikeable people. A teenager’s interpretation is a lot more fun; it is wild, passionate and ethereal, no therapy needed or wanted.
I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that this is in great part because Wuthering Heights, for women my age at least, will forever be entwined with Kate Bush’s single of the same name. I was surprised to learn she wrote the song after watching part of the 1967 BBC miniseries staring Ian MacShane and Angela Scoular. She read the novel after she wrote the song. Even so she captured the feelings we teenage girls felt reading Bronte’s story. She purposefully sang it at a higher octave than her “normal” voice to give it an eerie ethereal quality, and when we listened we were convinced she had channeled Cathy. Her song encapsulated teenage drama and torment and desire. But of course it did; Kate Bush was just a teenage girl herself when she wrote and recorded the song. Making it all the more perfect Bush, who shared the same birthday as Emily Bronte, July 30, claimed to have written the song in a single evening sitting at her piano under a full moon. What teenage girl could want more than that?
From Wuthering Heights we ventured into Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre,” Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Along the way my friends and I shared poems by gothic bad boy Lord Byron and of course Edgar Allen Poe. At University I threw myself into the depressing existential pages of Camus, Sartre, Kafka. For a bit of diversity I added a little Virginia Woolf, but was more inclined to be seen carrying around a Sylvia Plath collection. (It is only years later I admit that although they are fine books and I benefitted from reading them, I chose them mostly because I felt they paired well with my all-black wardrobe and my thickly lined eyes.)
Not long ago I read an alarming report out of the CDC that said 57% of high school girls “report feeling sad or hopeless for two weeks or more in a given year.” Hopeless. The article went on to say that 30% have seriously considered suicide. I read those statistics and my heart hurt. I thought again of my own teenage years. We were so dramatic. We declared ourselves distraught over boys, and traumatized by curfews and not having a private phone line. But we were, behind the drama and tears and truly awful poetry, actually very happy. And yes, innocent and sheltered in ways young girls today are not allowed to be. I am not so naive as to think if young girls just read more gothic novels, or novels of any kind, they would not suffer from depression and insecurities. But I can’t help but think it would at least help. Losing oneself in the pages of great literature takes you away from yourself and your problems in a way no other media can. Or perhaps I am just nostalgically looking back and romanticizing a time so very different from the one we currently live in. Maybe a part of me misses the energy of being young and not fearing the world even in all its dark and mysterious unknowns. An exciting world I wish young girls today could know as well. To quote Cathy from Wuthering Heights, “I wish I were a girl again, half-savage and hardy, and free.”
Emily Bronte never wrote another novel after Wuthering Heights. She died when she was only 30 after succumbing to tuberculosis. Many years after her death British writer Michael Stewart, in conjunction with the Bradford Literature Festival and funded by the Arts Council of England, devised a unique project to honor Emily and her sisters Charlotte and Anne. Four contemporary female writers were commissioned to write poems to be carved in large stones by fine art letter carver Pip Hall. One stone would be dedicated to each sister and one would celebrate the Bronte Legacy. They would be featured as art installations, the Bronte Stones, in the rugged landscape of Yorkshire forming a literary walk. Kate Bush was commissioned to write the tribute to Emily. This was in 2018, 200 years after Emily’s birth and the 40 year anniversary of Kate Bush’s song. “To be asked to write a piece for Emily’s stone is an honor,” she said. “And, in a way, a chance to say thank you.” I look back at all the amazing journeys I have been able to take by simply opening a book. Words written by people I feel I know intimately but have of course never actually met. That is the power of literature. Passion and revenge and beautiful words. Saying thank you, is the least we can do.
If you wish to know more about the Bronte Stones here’s a link:
https://www.bradfordlitfest.co.uk/blf-projects/the-bronte-stones/