{"id":534,"date":"2012-11-01T14:07:11","date_gmt":"2012-11-01T12:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=534"},"modified":"2012-11-01T14:07:11","modified_gmt":"2012-11-01T12:07:11","slug":"gilbert-and-heathcliff-again-preventing-romance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2012\/11\/01\/gilbert-and-heathcliff-again-preventing-romance\/","title":{"rendered":"<strong>GILBERT AND HEATHCLIFF, AGAIN: PREVENTING ROMANCE <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>About a year ago I wrote an entry (20-X-2011) connecting Anne Bront\u00eb\u2019s Gilbert, the hero of <em>The Tenant of Wildfell Hall<\/em>, and Heathcliff, the hero-villain of her sister Emily\u2019s <em>Wuthering Heights<\/em>. I still think that Anne bore Emily\u2019s novel in mind as she wrote her own and that Gilbert is a more civilised version of Heathcliff. What puzzles me, and this is the question I asked my students, is why Gilbert is not a more obviously attractive character, like Heathcliff himself or Charlotte\u2019s Rochester.<\/p>\n<p>One of the girls answered that she found him soft, or bland; my personal view is that his manifest passion for Helen and even his brutal attack against her protector Frederick Lawrence belies this view. In the end, we agreed that his moderate attractiveness is the inevitable result of Anne\u2019s choice to narrate the story through first-person voices (or, rather, written documents). This makes it impossible for Gilbert to qualify himself as attractive (it would be ridiculous for him to comment on his own appearance in eulogising terms). Helen\u2019s diary is interrupted precisely at the point when she meets him, for she tears off the pages she\u2019s written on Gilbert before giving him the diary. She does describe her falling in love with a handsome man, but he turns out to be the villain of the piece, her abusive husband Arthur; thus, we female readers are prevented from forming the deep emotional attachment with a male character that Emily forces us to face in Heathcliff\u2019s case. Anne made the choice of not allowing Helen to narrate her falling in love with Gilbert and, so, without the expression of her desire for him we, as readers, cannot love him. It\u2019s either that or, as another girl said, we women actually prefer the bad guys, an opinion that, nevertheless, clashes badly with the fact that no reader loves Arthur.<\/p>\n<p>As a female reader I must confess that it\u2019s embarrassingly easy to manipulate our desire for a male character, as I have found out when reading Iain M. Banks\u2019s new Culture novel <em>The Hydrogen Sonata<\/em> (see next post). The female protagonist, Vyr, is accompanied in her adventure by the organic avatar of an AI, the Mind that runs a spaceship. The avatar, Berdle, assumes a male human appearance that Vyr perceives as \u201chandsome\u201d, strikingly so. Despite Berdle\u2019s annoyed response that he\u2019s not male, female or anything remotely gendered, Banks\u2019s omniscient narrative focalised through Vyr insists that he is desirable. She\u2019s hooked and so are we as readers female (I\u2019m not sure, but I\u2019ll assume that gay readers, I mean men, also react to this manipulation of readerly desire). In contrast, nobody tells us in <em>The Tenant<\/em> that Gilbert is sexy.<\/p>\n<p>I believe this is Anne\u2019s deliberate choice. Her novel deals with the dangers of falling in love for the wrong reasons and with the wrong person. Through Helen she advices us (female) reader to make choices based not only on irrational desire but on a rational examination of our prospective partner\u2019s behaviour. This diminishes no doubt the romantic substance of the story and the hero but stresses Anne\u2019s point: that true love may be kindled by desire but can only survive if fed by solid companionship. I agree. Still, I miss the sexiness&#8230; of the good guy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About a year ago I wrote an entry (20-X-2011) connecting Anne Bront\u00eb\u2019s Gilbert, the hero of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Heathcliff, the hero-villain of her sister Emily\u2019s Wuthering Heights. I still think that Anne bore Emily\u2019s novel in mind as she wrote her own and that Gilbert is a more civilised version of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46,37],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-534","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-tenant-of-wildfell-hall","category-victorian-literature","tag-gender-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/534\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}