Love Saves the Page

On Valentine’s Day, love takes center stage, and the students of ENG/WGS 327 and their professor, JoEllen DeLucia, wanted to celebrate by shining a literary spotlight on the holiday. Inspired by their close study of the novel Wuthering Heights, they designed a bookmark, as well as opened their classroom to visitors to share candy, cookies and Valentine’s trivia and discuss the tempestuous love affair between characters Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw at the center of the 1847 Emily Brontë classic.

“We wanted to share our conversations with the campus,” DeLucia said. “The students selected a quotation for the bookmark, one that gets at the way the novel forces us to ask question what love is and how it works. They chose, “I gave him my heart, and he took it and pinched it to death.”  

During the event, students and professors from across campus strolled from table to table as  ENG/WGS 327 students distributed their bookmarks, answered questions about Victorian-era Valentine’s trivia, displayed an array of beautifully designed Valentine’s Day cards they’d made for the occasion, and discussed the novel.

“Wuthering Heights is like the anti-Valentines Day in my eyes,” said Autumn Cleary, an English major and senior from Oscoda. “Think Christmas in July. It is an incredibly passionate book in the emotional sense. But rather than the passion of love leading to a happy marriage and loving relationship, it gets to a point where it’s purely destructive.”

Caylee O’Rourke, an education major from Harrison, agreed, saying the book concerns a “messy, obsessive, and emotional” type of love that “fits Valentine’s Day themes, even if it’s not a traditional romance.”

“In the same way that horrific acts of war cause us to question humanities capacity for good and evil, Wuthering Heights evokes questions about love and its truest nature,” said William Fagan, a Logistics Management major from Midland. “We see the tragedy of Heathcliff and Catherine's romance, and question where the line has to be drawn between obsession and passion. To contrast, we are given the stable and nurturing relationship between Edgar and Catherine and question if a marriage of convenience will one day ring true of heart.”  

When asked why Wuthering Heights is an enduring classic, DeLucia spoke to the intriguing complexity of relationships in the novel.

“One student in my class said that reading this book was similar to overhearing the wildest gossip you could imagine,” she said. “After we mapped out the novel’s tangle of relationships on the board, our map was stranger than anything you might find in a soap opera’s writers’ room.”

Beyond the compelling complexities of love portrayed in the novel, DeLucia credits Brontë’s passionate language.

“Emily Brontë writes like she’s on fire and uses the most startling, horrific, and beautiful language and imagery to describe love and the way human beings act on this feeling. I’d echo the sentiments of one of Brontë’s nineteenth-century readers. ‘Wuthering Heights is a strange sort of book—baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about it.’”

The class’s reading of the novel is especially timely this year because this Valentine’s weekend movie-goers will flock to see the dramatic love story play out on the screen in the opening weekend for a new film adaptation of the novel, directed by Emerald Fennell and starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie as as Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw.

Planning on purchasing your tickets for the film but haven’t read the book yet? ENG/WSG 327 students have thoughts on that.

“The book gives deeper insight into the characters’ emotions, relationships, and motivations, which movies often simplify or leave out,” Caylee O’Rourke said.

Autumn Cleary cited three reasons to read the book first.

“One, to see the differences and similarities between text and film. Two, because I think that the movie will be significantly different from its source, and it is important to have the conversation of accurate interpretation of text in tandem with creative liberty. Three, because the book is just good. It can be funny and tragic and just as entertaining as the movie has the potential to be.”

So, there you have it. If you’re excited to see the film but Wuthering Heights still sits on your list of classics to read some day, the students are unanimous: today’s the day. Head down to Sleepy Dog Books, buy the novel, pick up a Wuthering Heights Valentine’s bookmark in the English Department office, and let yourself be swept off your feet by Emily Brontë.