Crossing Genres - Heathcliff and Cathy (but not Gertude)

 “Wuthering Heights” As a Cross-Genre Novel (Thornfield Hall) opens with 

I cannot count the number of times I’ve read Wuthering Heights. It’s a romance, it’s a Gothic, and it’s a brutal revenge story.  Emily Bronte’s novel is gorgeous and lyrical, but it is also violent – some Bronte fans find it too disturbing to include in their personal Bronte canon.

For some reason, my mother had this novel on our bookshelf. I do not know where it came from. Never did I see her buy a book, except one. Did my Aunt Mary Ellen send it? I have my doubts. I know Mom saw the movie Jane Eyre - Orson Welles coming out of the fog on horseback scared her. She had to have been young when she saw that. Or was it seen during a re-release? I read Jane Eyre, too. Whether from the school library or not, I cannot recall. I do not have the same certainty that Wuthering Heights was on the family bookshelf, and that I took it down, and I read, and was horrified. If my mother did not buy many books, it was because she spent little money on herself when we were young; she spent it on us kids. 

Reading the blog post, made me think of how I have become enamored of crossing and blending genre. I kicked myself when reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian that I had blocked myself into playing within the lines of genre. I was a little over 50 when I read McCarthy. It seems to me that I was too ignorant between my time as a teenager and age fifty to not see where others had blurred those lines long before. No, I am not nearly as smart as some people have thought me.

Anything, perhaps sillier, crossing of genres was the comic book Planetary. Yes, I spent time in the Nineties reading and buying comic books. Planetary crosses over many genre boundaries by examining elements of pop culture, past and (then) present.

I complain about the poverty of imagination in others, so I should confess my own. The cure was to undo what I had done to myself by reading further and deeper than I had for many decades, which led me to McCarthy's novel. You should do the same. But you need to add one more thing to your reading: pondering what you read.

(What about Gertrude? Just follow this link and watch the video.) 

sch 10/15