Happy Birthday Emily Bronte: Sex & Romance Expert!

Please can we start a group called "What Would Emily Say?" I mean, Emily Bronte's birthday is July 30th and heartsick lovers everywhere need to celebrate--or at least consult.

Members of WWES already exist, even if they don't have an official name or offer official T-shirts (yet). This was proven to me by the fact that I was asked to complete a series of questions concerning love and romance in Wuthering Heights for a popular on-line dating site. With an eye towards making my comments revelant to what are somtimes called "singles" in today's world, I accepted the challenge because it was too funny to pass up.

Here, in celebration and in lieu of balloons (I don't think Emily Bronte would have been a balloon type, frankly) is my opening statement for newly-minted "WWES?" fans:

1. What's up with the whole class issue deal? The issue of class distinctions is an important one in the novel--almost as important as it is in real life. What's crucial here is to distinguish between "money" and "class": what Catherine realizes when she meets Edgar--who is the rival of Heathcliff for Catherine's affection and whom Catherine eventually marries instead of Heathcliff--is that she wants is to be a "lady" more than she wants to be in a passionate relationship. It's all about the trappings of gentility for Catherine: she wants the candlelight and silks and good manners that Edgar provides and decides to choose these over Heathcliff's grubby, pawing, greedy love. True, she also cries out in that famous phrase "I AM Healthcliff" indicating that she believes she'll never lose him because they are so deeply intertwined that they'll never really be apart. Catherine is wrong about that: Heathcliff leaves, goes away and makes his own fortune, and returns to marry Catherine's sister-in-law out of spite. Lessons here? Neither money alone nor passion alone are enough to make a relationship work. Relationships depend on a balanced, less-than-hysterical perspective on the world, and a romance where one person is embarrassed by the other or wants only what the other offers in terms of "show" is doomed.

2. Are Healthcliff and Catherine the perfect couple ? Let's start by looking at Catherine as typical of the woman who longs for drama in her relationships. She's a prototypical heroine of her day because her life had to revolve around her relationships and her family. There wre no other options for her. Yet women are still encouraged to regard relationships as the defining force of our lives, and that's scary. Certainly it terrifies men, who want to be part of a woman's life, but not necessarily at the torando-center of it. Passionate women sometimes fear that too tepid a relationship will not provide us with a sufficiently breathtaking plot or breathless pace. If our relationships are boring, we're afraid that means our lives will be boring. If our relationships are stormy, we tell ourselves the result will be that the days won’t so easily blend into one another. Such a woman will create crises in her emotional life in order to feel “more alive” the way a physician whacks your knee with a hammer to see if your reflexes are working. The crises of such a woman’s emotional life is indeed a sort of reflex response to her fear of boredom. When we feel this way, we need to get out more--and not, necessarily on a date, either. We need to explore other paths in life that lead to excitement and pleasure so that relationships won't be the only place to look for emotion. That's what killed Cathy, or caused her, to be more precise, to kill herself.

3. Does unresolved passion destroy their relationship? I think all passion, by its very nature, remains "unresolved" and that's why we call it "passion." I prefer attraction and desire to the idea of passion because passion invokes the argument that a lack of control indicates deep emotion. I don't agree; I think it indicates a lack of self-awareness and a lack of self-control, neither of which is a positive trait. The initial overwhelming longing you feel for a person at the beginning of a relationship is wonderful but that MUST become something else as the relationship evolves: love, affection, friendship, understanding, caring, comfort, to name a few. But that's why some folks who are hooked only on the imbalance of passion can't enjoy a relationship where the two people in it can actually relax. If that's the case--and it often is--then these are issues that start early and run deep, which means that they need to be addressed systematically and honestly, often with a counsellor. It's not a good thing, in my book, to need to feel a churning, breathless sense of cliff-hanging misery in your primary relationship. Relationships should offer a haven and be place of emotional safety. Keep the screaming declarations of love during violent thunderstorms to the Brontes. They knew how to get it onto the page, which is where those scenes should stay.

4. What does her financial status mean to Catherine? She would have been much happier if she'd made a good living on her own--if she'd controlled the money and status in the book instead of being defined by the social and class status of her husband, she would have had the autonomy she longed for and felt as a girl when she said : "I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy, and free ... and laughing at injuries, not maddening under them!"

5. Does this mean that people from different class backgrounds shouldn't date? No. Class, money, and status are significant in a relationship insofar as they work on the self-definitions of those involved. Like appearance, or education, or religion, or ethnic background, the elements that make up a person's vision of themselves in the world matter--but they only matter in terms of how the person "uses" those elements. To enter into an adult relationship, both individuals should have a good, healthy sense of their own financial independence. Money is power for some people, and for some people it's merely a way to bargain for food and music. You have to agree with it means before you start "investing" together emotionally.

6. How are revenge and passion related? In this way, Healthcliff and Catherine were perfectly matched, because she was determined to get revenge as well. Heathcliff gets rich and marries a woman primarily to make Catherine miserable. Nice, right? Actually, all of Wuthering Heights is about passion-as-revenge, I think, which means it should not be held up as the story of "great" romance for the real world. In response to Heathcliff's actions, for example, Catherine starves herself to death as a way to punish her husband as well as to punish Heathcliff for their inability to be friends and both be in her life. She declares on her deathbed "Well, if I cannot keep Heathcliff for my friend - if Edgar will be mean and jealous, I’ll try to break their hearts by breaking my own. That will be a prompt way of finishing all, when I am pushed to extremity!" She should have packed her bags, left town, and started a magazine in London. Now that would have been revenge. Revenge may be natural, but it isn't pretty. And it might be entertaining to read about, to watch movies about, and to plan silly fantasies around--I wrote a book called Sweet Revenge, which was translated into six languages, so it's a pretty universal impulse--but it has nothing to do with love and everything to do with control.

7. What do we learn from Emily Bronte's book? Wuthering Heights teaches us that: 1. You shouldn't marry only for money; 2. You shouldn't marry only for passion; 3. You shouldn't depend only your significant other for self-definition; 4. You need to get away from the moors, out of the rain, and into a warm circle of good friends who will laugh you out of your depression before you start yelling somebody's name in the middle of the night.

Happy birthday, Ms. Bronte, wherever you are.