At first blush, Wuthering Nights seems more like a clever marketing concept than an
authentic literary inspiration; yet another symptom of the terminal herd
mentality infecting contemporary corporate publishing. Certainly, in the hands
of a less-accomplished writer such an ambitious undertaking might have proven
mediocre, if not downright disastrous, and, given the depressingly vast glut of
second-rate, copycatted BDSM-centered erotic romance currently on the market,
probably eluded notice altogether. But I.J. Miller at his best is no ordinary
writer. In a respectable body of published work that includes novels like Seesaw and Whipped, as well as the very fine short story collection Sex and Love (soon to be reviewed here),
Miller has demonstrated a talent for probing psychological complexity, often
revealing the pain and poetry of dysfunction in surprisingly entertaining ways.
If Wuthering Nights was to be
published in any case, Miller was the logical—and, as it turns out,
fortuitous—choice for the project.
Miller has taken a refreshingly intelligent approach
to genre mash-up, referring to Wuthering
Nights not as an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 Gothic classic, but as
an erotic reinterpretation of the
original material. Gone are the first-person raconteurs—Lockwood and
Nelly—exchanged here for a single omniscient voice. The new narrator is able to
go places and see things that Nelly could never have known—nor ever dared
repeat. Many scenes have been specially tailored to accommodate this new,
expanded perspective, altered or recombined to take advantage of the original
story’s “erotic potential” (Miller’s words).
And if ever there was a novel with
erotic potential, it is Wuthering Heights,
that sprawling, soapishly addictive saga of passion and pain, unrequited love,
misery, cruelty, madness and revenge. Brontë’s Heathcliff is probably one of
the most ingeniously conceived, complex, and complete characters in all 19th
century English literature; the ultimate archetypal “meta-male”; virile,
magnetic and implacable, handsome, dark and dangerous. Only Catherine can match
him for impulsiveness and the sheer intensity of her passions; she is the great
grandmother of all those quirky, headstrong heroines populating the
Contemporary Romance section, cloned and copied a thousand times a month. Of
course, in their day Victorian-era propriety, enforced reticence, and the
society’s obsessive-compulsive need to moralize precluded any possibility of
explicit consummation, a thing not even acceptably left to the reader’s
imagination—until now.
To some, seeing these familiar,
well-beloved characters getting “down and dirty” may be akin to the discovery
of one’s parents in flagrante delicto,
a difficult thing to accept at first. One might experience mild pangs of
distaste followed by a fevered moment or two of denial. But readers mature
enough to understand the difference between innocence and ignorance—a
distinction intentionally blurred by the Victorians and still muddied by their
philosophical heirs even to this day—will be rewarded. Deep down, we’ve always
been curious about Heathcliff and Catherine; Isabella, and even Nelly;
daydreaming about “what really happened” behind Brontë’s straight-laced curtain
of prettified euphemism.
But, while intentionally “sexing up” the
story, Miller has retained each character’s broad biographical arc and unique
psychological profile so that we may still care about them and feel with them
as more than mere objects. He has achieved
this largely by keeping Brontë’s language and style intact. I jumped back and
forth on my Kindle between Miller and Brontë from time to time, finding on the
whole a near-seamless consistency. Here is a taste of the original, Wuthering Heights, excerpted at random:
The stolidity with which I received these instructions was, no
doubt, rather exasperating, for they were delivered in perfect sincerity; but I
believe a person who can plan the turning of her fits of passion to account,
beforehand, might, by exerting her will, manage to control herself tolerably,
even while under the influence. I did not wish to “frighten” her husband, as
she said, and multiply his annoyances for the purpose of serving her
selfishness.
(Nelly seems quite well-spoken for a country
servant girl from 19th-century Yorkshire, doesn’t she?) Here is a
similarly reflective moment from Miller’s Wuthering
Nights, related in the third person:
She (Nelly) knew better than to provoke Heathcliff when he was in
this state, but Cathy was not so well educated to his demeanor. “Are you mad?”
the lass exclaimed.
Perhaps so, thought Nelly, but if so, it was a madness peculiar to
him that she knew too well, for he was one who took pleasure at invoking his
physical presence to achieve his ultimate goal, which, as always, was having
his way.
So far, so good. It’s when we get down
to the details of the newly added “juicy parts” that things become a bit more
problematic. How does one write explicit scenes employing vocabulary from an
era best-remembered for its prudery? Doing so successfully requires painstaking
attention to linguistic and historical detail along with engaged, thoughtful,
erudite editing. Unfortunately, the language in these scenes has been colorized
by modern genre convention, weighed down with careless anachronism (such as,
among other things, repeatedly referring to “nickers”), and a tendency towards
erotic hyperbole. Here, by way of example, is an excerpt from the scene of
Heathcliff and Isabella’s wedding night:
Seductively he pulled back his shirt and revealed again the full
manliness of his chiseled torso. He shook his long black hair out of his eyes,
and it was with great willpower that she did not give in to this sensuous
action and rush to his arms. He enjoyed her reaction to even his slightest of
movements, enjoyed the power each part of his body held over eyes as they
remained transfixed. He unbuttoned his pants, but hesitated. She realized she
had been staring, frozen, at the bulge between his legs and did not look up
until he laughed, causing renewed blush at her eagerness to feast her eyes on
this grand rooster.
“You will learn to enjoy the pain.” He delicately cupped her full
breasts, sensually kneading them with his strong hands, and she closed her eyes
and swooned slightly. He licked along her earlobe, letting his hot breath brush
against her neck. “Yes, my love,” she whispered . . .
“That’s it, Isabella. Don’t fight it. Give in to your body and
more gratification than you ever dreamed of will be yours.”
Oh please!
Must every detail of Heathcliff’s physique repeatedly be described as
“incredibly” this or that, chiseled, long, huge, thick or what have you? Must
Edgar always suffer by comparison, the Romance-genre stereotype “sweet guy”
with a sensitive soul and a tiny dick?
And why must the intimation of female pleasure always be “like nothing
she had ever known before”? One might expect this sort of tiresome purplish
prose in any humdrum mass-market bodice-ripper; it’s lazy and it’s boring, and
it undermines the uniqueness of these characters, reducing them, in the bedroom
or dungeon, to carnal caricatures, one-dimensional automatons motivated solely
by sex.
Yes, it’s a clever idea—if not much of a
stretch—to turn Heathcliff and Isabella’s relationship into a freak show of D/s
codependency, complete with public humiliation and a fully-accessorized dungeon
in the cellar of Wuthering Heights. So why not describe it in a way that truly
makes it feel “like nothing ever before”?
Miller is clearly capable of better. (One suspects his editor didn’t
much care about correct vocabulary or authentic period detail so long as the
manuscript came in on time with the requisite percentage of gratuitously sweaty
beefcake and damsels swooning at the sight, fingers firmly planted on throbbing
quims. Still, whether this kind of mediocrity was due to commercial or temporal
constraint is beside the point.)
Where the sex scenes are overly stylized
in much of the book, they virtually disappear towards the end. Things cool off
considerably in those latter sections dealing with the relationship of the
cousins, Cathy, Linton and Hareton. The explicit content is noticeably toned
down, the sexual tension slackened. By comparison with what has gone before,
the last quarter of the book feels positively chaste. (Due, perhaps, to the
publisher’s squeamishness about “incest” issues, though, ironically, no such
qualms seemed to have affected the early Victorians.)
At times, the narrative is bogged down
by a need to explain each character’s motives; often in torturous, blandly
obvious detail. This may be Brontë’s doing as much as Miller’s; but, when
attempting to retell the story from a new, unabashedly erotic point of view,
such quaint sermonizing simply kills the mood.
“For you see,” she continued, “you showed that true repentance is
when the inner soul recognizes the path to true redemption and acts
accordingly. Until this happens the person will be blind to all opportunities.”
Ultimately, the loose ends in the plot
are tied up quite well. In some ways Miller’s ending is more satisfying than
Brontë; it is certainly more melodramatic, and he even manages, at the last, to
out-moralize the vicar’s daughter from Haworth.
Not recommended for sticklers, pedants,
prudes, perfectionists or those skeptical of high-concept marketing techniques.
But for everyone else, especially those craving a more refined approach to
erotic romance, Wuthering Nights
should make for an agreeably seductive divertissement, and is well worth a
look.
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