← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
738 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (#15 Greatest Book of All Time)
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The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello dear listeners and my friends, this is Jack Wilson reminding you that the History of Literature Podcast is going on tour. It's still a few months away, but the deadline is this month, September. That's your chance to put down your deposit if you would like to go. Let me tell you a little more about the trip. In May of 2026, I will be accompanying a small group of travelers on a trip through London, Oxford and Bath with stops at literary sites, houses of authors, restaurants where they ate and so on. There will be a chance to meet some like minded people as we all enjoy literature and life. Nice hotels and restaurants, lots of meals and fellowship, traveling together in the land of Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, Dr. Johnson and more. And some special guests. People you've heard on the show will be joining us to shake our hands and answer our questions and generally participate in this celebration of books and writers and all the things we like best here at the podcast. As I said though, the signup is only open through September. That's so we can plan the trip. That's right, you have until the end of the month to secure your spot. So head over to John Shores Travel, that's our partner who's taking care of all the logistics and put down your deposit. That's John Shores S H O R S. Or you can go to historyofliterature.com and follow the links there. Join us for an experience you can't get anywhere else because you deserve it.
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I'm Alan Sisto, the Man of the west here at the Prancing Pony Podcast.
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And I'm Sean Marchese, the real life Lord of the Mark.
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Every week here at the Prancing Pony Podcast, along with Sean or other co hosts, I explore the works of J.R.R. tolkien, author of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, bringing along lots of pop culture references, plenty of nerd humor, and the occasional bad pun.
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It's just a couple of friends hanging out at the pub talking about our favorite books. We cover just a few pages every episode, reading important sections of the books and having a chat about what we've read.
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Now we do a ton of research for each episode so that we can bring as much background information to our conversation as possible. We do all the heavy reading so you don't have to.
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It's a great way for first time readers to learn the basics of Tolkien's world, while for Middle Earth veterans it's a deep dive into their favorite stories.
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The Tolkien fandom is like no other. So we spend time in the community giving talks at Tolkien events, recording live episodes, and hanging out with our listeners on Discord to engage with our audience every chance we get.
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So if you're ready to to dive into the most beloved world in fantasy.
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Literature and become a part of a vibrant, active community of listeners, then look.
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For the Prancing Pony podcast wherever you listen.
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Hello. Today on the podcast, part one of a two part look at Emily Bronte's classic novel Wuthering Heights, which lands at number 15 on our list of the greatest books of all time. Why do we find this strange book so compelling? What is it about repulsive behavior that attracts us? And why do nice guys like me always have to finish last? Or so it seemed when I was in high school, watching one girl after another choose a bad boy, sometimes with full knowledge of what that meant. The psychological underpinnings of a classic romance with classic in quotes and a classic novel. No quotes needed. Today on the history of literature. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. I'm so glad you're here. Today we continue our swim through the month of October, which has my spirits high in spite of all of the evidence and news to the contrary. Thank you, Mother Nature, for gracing me with the presence of my favorite month. You are too kind. Speaking of kind, do you know what's not too kind? Or in fact, not kind at all? Our topic today, Heathcliff, that rugged romantic hero of the moors, the dark star at the heart of the book, Wuthering Heights, which was named the number 15 greatest book of all time on our list of 25, which we're covering for the year 2025. Speaking of the calendar kind of racing against the calendar to get this done, we're going to devote a full episode, actually two of them, to this 1847 classic. Today we'll talk about the romance between Catherine and Heathcliff in the novel and why that has proved to be so enduring. There's a Hollywood version of the story, let's call it the Hollywood version. And there's an actual version that you find when you read the novel. And both of those have touched a deep chord within us, the sort of low chord that only a cello can make, maybe. Do cellos play chords? They play notes anyway, you know what I mean? A low rumbling sound that you feel in your bowels or in your groin makes you shiver at its power and the effect on you, the unsuspecting listener. Now, when I say Hollywood version. I have to catch myself because there's a new movie version coming out that I haven't seen yet, but it sounds like it's going to be a bit of a departure of the norm from typical Hollywood versions. One thing that they do in the new movie, in my understanding, is that they end about halfway through the book. Actually, that's fairly typical. The movies typically cut things off sometime. Spoiler alert. Sometime around the death of Catherine, one of the two main protagonists. And one of the things that surprises first time readers of the book is how long it goes on after Catherine's death. I'll have more to say about this, about the new filmed version, the new Hollywood version in a moment. There's a lot to unpack there, but let's get back to the main themes. A quick summary. Wuthering Heights is the only novel by Emily Bronte, the second oldest of the three Bronte sisters who were novelists. It was published in 1847 alongside her younger sister Anne's novel Agnes Gray. The two books were actually accepted for publication before Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre. Charlotte submitted a manuscript that was rejected, which led to some problems As a future guest of the show, we'll argue, but Jane Eyre came out first. So you see what I'm saying here, that all three sisters sent out manuscripts together. One was rejected, two were accepted. The oldest sister's novel was the one that was rejected. Ouch. Stepped on her toes a little bit. I'm the only failure and I'm the, I'm the number one. I'm the oldest. But then her novel came out first because her publisher was speedier and then it was a big success. So once Wuthering Heights came out in the wake of that success and the authors were still quite mysterious to the reading community of England because all the Brontes were at that point using pseudonyms. They were not Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte and Anne Bronte. They were Currer Ellis and Acton Bell. A lot of the reviews of Wuthering Heights speculate on that. Who are these people? Where are they from? Are they truly men or secretly women? Is it one person or two? Or three? Are they brothers? What's the deal? Emily died shortly after the book's publication, about a year afterwards, age 30. Anne Bronte, the youngest sister, died about five months after that, age 29, and Charlotte was left to oversee all the books through subsequent editions. And we might say she was left to oversee the subsequent editions of who Ellis, Emily and Acton Anne really were. Wuthering Heights is told in a series of overlapping narratives by multiple storytellers who jump around chronologically. But the heart of the narrative is the wild love between Catherine, a member of the landed gentry in Yorkshire, and Heathcliff, a wild foundling of indeterminate race brought home from Liverpool by Catherine's father. Heathcliff has dark hair and dark eyes and dark skin. He's called a gypsy. He might be from America, he might be from Spain. The father treats Heathcliff better than he treats his own son and daughter. And this sparks a rage in Catherine's brother in particular, who beats Heathcliff as a boy. Heathcliff and Catherine, though, become friends and they head out to the moors where they develop a kind of understanding with one another along with an understanding of the natural landscape. The father dies. The brother takes over as the owner of Wuthering Heights. That's the name of the estate, and makes Heathcliff his servant and treats him poorly. We're seeing more of a divide between the haves and have nots now. There's a lot in the book about class. And one day Heathcliff and Catherine are down spying on some of their more well to do neighbors. And the dog, the neighbor's dog attacks Catherine. The neighbors take her in to help, and let's just jump ahead and say that she ends up marrying one of the sons in that household. And Heathcliff is cast out. He vows revenge against all of them. Catherine confesses to a maid that she loves Heathcliff but can't marry him because of his social status. Heathcliff has disappeared. And when he returns many years later, he's wealthy and he sets about getting his revenge. He marries the sister of the man who's married to Catherine. He destroys Catherine's brother, his old enemy. Catherine dies and Heathcliff goes off the deep end, calling for her ghost to haunt him forever. Eventually, Heathcliff takes over Wuthering Heights, and that's where the new movie ends. Although in the actual book, Heathcliff continues on his revenge seeking and continues with his undying passion for Catherine, he takes his revenge on the next generation of kids. He's haunted by love. He's hell bent on destruction and revenge. And Catherine has loved him too, but she opted for someone else. They were married to others and they all have kids, and Heathcliff just rages against them all. There are a great many covers and movie posters of Wuthering Heights, the one I like best. There are several with this theme, but my favorite shows two lovers meeting outside on the moors. Clearly a man and a woman in silhouette. And they're framed by a tree with A wide trunk to the left of them, and the branches of the trunk are all blowing overhead in one direction over their heads. So we see the movement. The wind is blasting that tree, bending the tree to the wind's will, so to speak, but not breaking it. The lovers, too, we can tell, are resisting that wind, standing up against it. That's one of the beauties of the book, the landscape. I've talked about the Bronte Museum in Haworth several times, and I won't go into the parsonage and cemetery and church again here, but it's worth recalling the moors themselves. The wind blasted Wuthering moors, Wuthering being a word that has roots in words like wither and water, all old archaic words that conjure up the wind blowing. Emily Bronte and she. She used the word for she. There was no estate called that, just like there was no person called Heathcliff. But look at that. Look at that name. Heathcliff Cliff. Those are some. Some craggy, stubborn natural phenomena. When you visit Scotland or Ireland or the north of England, you'll see these island, on these island nations, the way that wind blows solidly and steadily, not gentle, but ferocious, along with storms and lightning and dark clouds and other challenges of weather. The book Wuthering Heights opens in a snowstorm, and let's talk about the weather and how it affects our psyche just for a moment, and hopefully avoid some cliches. This was an era when the great poets and painters and thinkers were interested in what they called the sublime, which had been a topic in literary criticism at least since the ancient Roman criticism Longinus, but which had new life breathed into it as a concept in the mid 18th century by Edmund Burke, who identified its power and connected it to the infinite, which can overwhelm us because it reminds us that we humans are finite, we're not all powerful. We don't endure forever. We have a limited role in the universe, and so too can nature do this to us. When we contemplate the ocean, or a dramatic waterfall, or a powerful explosive geyser, or a dramatic gorge or a really striking mountain, hurricanes and lightning storms and tornadoes, we see these in nature and suddenly we feel something like awe or shock. We're terrified, we're overwhelmed, but we're also thrilled, because to face such power requires a kind of courage within ourselves, a testing of our physical and mental strength, an active positioning of ourselves, not just as passive observers as we might regard something beautiful and delicate, but active participants in a drama where we are coming to grips with who we are and how we stand in the cosmos and just how. How dangerous that can be and just how strong we are to continue to survive as long as we can. The Mona Lisa might stun us with its beauty, or the Taj Mahal, or a butterfly's wings, but what those stir in us is not so much a test of our strength or a battle. It's more like a placid contentment, an awakening, a gentle feeling of uplift as we see something beautiful. Maybe that's the love of a couple that's been married for decades, but can still delight in one another's company when they gently finish one another's sentences or do something kind and familiar. Beautiful enough, certainly one of the great experiences of being alive, but also tame, domestic, refined, genteel, the sublime, though that's Sturm und Drang. That's the feeling of near death, risk, chaos, potential destruction. In terms of love, it's the feeling that you're not in control. There are forces blasting you like the wind that shakes you to your core, that threatens to lift you off the earth and hurl you against some craggy rocks against the heath cliff. It's young love, maybe that kind of stormy love. It's love against your own interests, Maybe it's uncontrollable passion, I guess I'd say no babies, no maybes about that uncontrollable passion. Virginia Woolf, talking about the Brontes, said, both Emily and Charlotte are always invoking the help of nature. They both feel the need of some more powerful symbol of the vast and slumbering passions in human nature than words or actions can convey. They seized those aspects of the earth which were most akin to what they themselves felt or imputed to their characters. And. And so their storms, their moors, their lovely spaces of summer weather are not ornaments applied to decorate a dull page or display the writer's powers of observation. They carry on the emotion and light up the meaning of the book. End quote. Wow. Let's take a breath. Let's talk about this type of love and why it's such a trope. And let's step outside of literature a little bit and talk about life. Why do good girls fall for bad boys? It's a question that gets asked a lot, and I have no statistics about how often this happens or even to prove conclusively that this is a thing. But it's out there in popular culture. It's a phenomenon of literature. And from my own anecdotal experience, it is a thing. It existed in the 1980s in Small Town Wisconsin, at least as it applied to one young Jack Wilson. I was the good guy, the good boy, the one to marry, the one beloved by mothers and grandmothers. We didn't have a term for friend zones back then, but it didn't matter. Nobody needed the term friend zone. It was the Jack Wilson zone and everyone knew it. I fell in love all the time. Hundreds, maybe thousands of times. Some of those loves were steady and unrequited for years. Some of them in great rushing waves, crashing on my shore. Some of them sparks that lit up the pan. My pan, not theirs. I was on fire. Over and over. And they. Those girls were not on fire. They appreciated the fire. They sat close, they smiled. They warmed their hands for a while and then sprinted away from me toward those dark spirits who lived in the shadows. The motorcycle engine roared, disappearing them both into the night, leaving me to crackle and burn alone. Or at least that's how it seemed. It was. It seemed as if these people I knew, girls, appreciated me as someone who was intelligent and would do well in life. Someone reliable, Someone they could talk to, someone they could laugh with. A nice guy in scare quotes. But why scare quotes? Why was that so scary to them? And why did I care? You only need to find one person to form a couple. And I had time on my side, having lots of girl friends. Two words would surely lead some way someday. Someday. And some way to a girlfriend. One word. Why did it bother me that these friends of mine were going for the baddies, the dangerous ones, the risk takers, the ne' er do wells, the dropouts, the don't bring home to mothers, the Heathcliffs. It felt unfair. For one thing, I knew these guys as bullies, as jerks, as idiots. And I was not alone. The whole town condemned them. These guys will never amount to anything. They'll wind up broke, jobless, in jail. It's just a matter of time. But for now, in the meantime, the girls flocked to them. The girls I knew from math class. The athletes and cheerleaders and National Honor Society members and student council representatives. The girls had it all together, like me. And yet they did not like me. Not in that way. Jack, you're like a brother, a good friend. But Heathcliff over there. Whoa, there's just something. I don't know what it is. I know I shouldn't, but. But what? I would say. I would say on the phone. I would hang up the phone and howl it into. Howl it into my night. But what? Why? Why? Why? I distinctly remember driving to a friend's house to pick her up to go to the movies. I was in love with her. Why not? She was cute and I was avid. We laughed together and had a lot in common. And it seemed as though having a girlfriend would be a positive force for good. So I pulled into the driveway to pick her up. And she came out to the car. And she pointed at the window and laughed and waved. And she said that her mother and grandmother were eager to catch a glimpse of me. And that they really, really wanted her to date me seriously. Date him. Date him. Date Jack Wilson. That's the one for you. I was astounded to hear this. How could she turn them down like that? How could she show them that kind of disrespect, to mock their urgings? Because her response was not to give in to these wise elders. Her response was to laugh as if this was the farthest thing from her mind. And then to inform me that some guy. Let's call him Heathcliff. Although he has another name, and I remember it very well. Well, let's call him Heathcliff. Heathcliff was going to pick her up later that night. After she and I had concluded our evening at the movies. I was evening Guy there to be applauded by the mother and grandmother. In the twilight. Still. Sun's still out. Heathcliff was nighttime guy. She'd be sneaking out to see him. Plater. Why, Kathy and all you Kathies of the world. Why do I'm making up the name using Wuthering Heights names for these people? Why do that, Kathy? Why do that to me? Let's go through some of the reasons. The truth, I believe, is not confined to just one reason. There are many possible reasons. And these can also form in combination. There may be some or all of these reasons at play in any given situation. There's no one particular explanation. And while we're caveating, let me make sure to say that this does not apply to all girls or all women. I'm sure there are many who were never drawn to bad boys. And find this phenomenon as strange as I did. And there's a whole category of good boys drawn to bad girls. That we're not going to talk about today. But I do believe that is a thing, too. Here's why we care. I think it's strange to see someone drawn to someone who is bad for them. It's why we find or drawn to anything that's bad for them. It's why we find addiction so compelling. Even as it's painful to see in others what makes this person lose their sense of Control what can overpower their will and what will the consequences be if it's a woman who's falling for someone else? There's an element of jealousy if we think they should be falling for us instead. And there's also a sense that desire has overtaken her, broken down her ability to think clearly or reason or exist in a rational world where she's governed by normal thoughts. There's very little in this world that's of more interest to the male mind than trying to understand female desire, what unlocks it. And for straight women, it's probably just as interesting. I've felt that too. Or that reminds me of my crush on so and so. Or now I understand why my friend was so in love with that awful person. Or I'm dating the nicest guy in the world, but I remember so and so who wasn't like that at all. And hey, what if I've known marriages that have ended because a woman grew up, she got beyond her crush on the bad boy, married a nice guy. In the case I'm thinking of, he was a police officer, member of the community, decent, very decent guy. And then she threw it all overboard when the bad boy crooked his finger. Samantha Ellis, a writer who calls herself a recovering Heathcliff addict, has talked about reading Wuthering Heights at the age of 12 and falling in love with Heathcliff as she loved other bad boys, like Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. And she writes, quote, heathcliff had it all. A dark past found starving on the streets of Liverpool. A wild soul. Even his name says how much he loves the moors. And of course, he was tall, dark and smoldering. Heathcliff also loves big. His love is not mealy mouthed. It's never careful. It's operatic, it's lunatic, it's vast. Wuthering Heights makes you hope that Heathcliff and Kathy's love could survive if everyone else wasn't so small minded and persnickety. I wanted a love like that. I wanted a love so intense it could send me into a brain fever. Or make the man who loved me gnash his teeth and. And dash his head against a tree till he bled. Dig up my grave and be so blinded by love that he'd swear that even after seven years in the ground, my face was still. My face uncorrupted. End quote. Now that's getting into the book. That's not the Laurence Olivier film version, unless I fell asleep and missed a big chunk of it. Hollywood, the old Hollywood, anyway, tends to tame the strangeness of wuthering heights. The strangeness, though, that's in the novel this Heathcliff dashing his gnashing his teeth and dashing his head against a tree till he bleeds. That kind of strangeness puzzled reviewers at times repulsed them, and readers too, but only at times, only attached. For for many readers, it's been what draws them to the book. Here's someone who's going all in on this question, Emily Bronte. I mean, because psychologists will tell us that. Good. Well, you know what? We've been talking for a while. Let's take our first break and then we'll come back with what the psychologists have to say about good girls falling for bad boys. There's a lot of theories about why this happens. We'll run through those theories and then we'll hear from Virginia Woolf and Joyce Carol Oates and several others who are all wrestling with this concept. What exactly is Emily Bronte tapping into in this novel? Why does a book with no real likable characters, that's the most common criticism of it. How did it wind up on the list of the greatest books of all time? What is in her or us that makes it so? But before we take our break, let me tell you about our new feature of our Patreon account, a low ad version of the podcast. We're trying this out for all of our Patreon members. If it sticks, if people use it and like it, we will make it a permanent feature. Here's how it works. When you're a Patreon member, which means you've signed up for a monthly subscription, like $5 a month, the cost of a coffee, which surely, dear listener, you would buy me if we happened to encounter one another at a cafe. Isn't that the case after all these 700 and some episodes? I hope so anyway. And I'd buy you one too, but. Well, that's. Let's get back to the script. The cost of a coffee or a beer, and you not only support the show with your generous donation, but you'll have access to a version of the podcast that does not have these ads inserted into it. So when we take a break and go to the music and then you hear the interruptions, you will just hear music and then go straight back to the podcast for Patreon members who have signed up@patreon.com literature you'll already benefit from this. You can take advantage of it through the Patreon app or the website. We'll get right back to the topic at hand. For those of you you'll just hear a little snippet of music. And for the rest of you, we'll take our break now and see you again shortly. Hey folks, it's my favorite season, autumn, and that means the weather is getting cooler. I love getting dressed in the morning, putting on layers and I love wearing clothes that get the job done. Quince delivers every time with warm, durable pieces that have breathability and a little stretch for comfort. I'm back at the office five days a week, which means I need to mix things up for my co workers. So I picked up a few Quince items. A nice chore jacket in a warm tobacco color which looks fantastic with that organic cotton fisherman's sweater to wear underneath. Rugged but stylish. Perfect for a casual Friday. Layer up this fall with pieces that feel as good as they Look. 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Foreign we left off where we were about to discuss the psychological underpinnings of good girls falling for bad boys. Let's just march our way down the list of things that could be at work here. First, there's a rejection of order of one's parents, of discipline. It's very appealing for teenagers especially. It's the same reason why girls fight with their mothers about what they're going to wear or whether they'll get piercings or tattoos or how late they'll stay out. Mothers know best. We all know that. But daughters say, I don't care if you know best. I know me. I am me. Going for the bad boy is a form of asserting that independence. Sorry, mom and Grandma. Your love for my friend Jack Wilson is exactly why he's going to be in what will someday be called the Friend Zone. I can't be your little girl forever doing just what you want. And poor Jack Wilson gets caught in the crossfire. But it's not just teenage rebellion at work. There's something very satisfying about liking someone we know is not good. Someone who's damaged, who's fractured, cast out by society. That gives us a project, doesn't it? Someone to help. They need us in a way that a stable person does not. We can complete them. And sometimes they have a way of making us feel special, too. Here's someone who's nasty, who's good at hating things, and yet this person likes us. They must see something special in us, something fundamental to us that's different from the rest of the world. They see how special we are. In Catherine's case, there's also just a tenderness. This guy Heathcliff started out life with the odds stacked against him, an orphan on the streets of Liverpool. And maybe he's a foreigner with some racial cards stacked against him too. His looks suggested. Anyway, maybe he was abandoned as his father was ashamed of his black mother. That's all a possibility and very real at the time. It takes a Catherine to see that this is not Heathcliff's fault any more than it's the fault of a gnarled tree for being gnarled. That tree is merely trying to see the sunlight to survive and thrive. And there's all this ugly and destructive wind out here blasting against it all the time. No wonder the tree gets gnarled. And now I should talk about the controversies of the new movie coming out. That's one of the. Since I brought up race, that's the. That's been a big criticism. Heathcliff is played by Jacob Elordi, a pretty typical white actor. Although he does seem to be sporting a pretty dark beard in what I've seen of the trailer and so on. But he's from Australia and you know what? This is common for Heathcliff's in the movies. Heathcliff's been played by and in television and on the stage he's been played by Ralph Fiennes, Tom Hardy, Laurence Olivier, and so on. There are more, more white Heathcliffs than mixed race Heathcliffs in the world of Hollywood. But the book is clear that he has dark hair, dark eyes and dark skin. And it kind of seems like an opportunity missed in 2025, an opportunity to explore, as the book does, that one of the reasons why Cliff is considered a bad boy in the first place is that he's not as white as the two families who together share this little corner of the Yorkshire moors. That he might in fact be a gypsy or part black. And he's been mistreated because of the prominent racism at the time. And this is part of what leads to his almost supernatural thirst for revenge. I would call this an opportunity missed by the movie makers, not a crime against literature as some seem to see it. The casting director, Carmel Cochran, said, sure, we have Margot Robbie, who's a decade or so older than Catherine, and I cast Jacob Elordi, who doesn't give us that air of racial ambiguity. But in her words, you really don't need to be accurate. It's just a book that is not based on real life. It's all art, end quote. She also says, there's definitely going to be some English lit fans that are not going to be happy, end quote. I agree with her in part. I'm not with the Instagram poster who said that she should be shot. My goodness. I don't really care who plays who in whatever movie. I saw a version of the Great Gatsby on stage with a black actor playing Gatsby, and it was amazing. I also suspect that the Laurence Olivier, Othello or the white guy played the black king. I bet that was amazing. And I don't mind that either. I'm in favor of casting different actors in different parts because we're switching them around, casting men to play women and women to play men and so on, because I think that makes us question our viewing experiences and become more actively involved in why we react a certain way to seeing certain things. I'll make an exception for blackface or casting only white people to play Asians and so on. But you know what I mean. When you have an interpretation of a character and you use the actor's physical qualities to explore something different about that character, that is an opportunity to make us think about these things in a Fresh way. And in this case, it was an opportunity missed. But my real objection to what the casting director said is she says, it's just a book. No, no, it's not just a book. It's the key to understanding certain things about life. And I feel I owe it to the Jack Wilson who sat in that car on that driveway with the mother and grandmother smiling and waving at him and their beloved daughter, granddaughter. I feel I owe it to that guy who was confused, baffled and confused about what he was supposed to do. I owe it to him to take this book as seriously as I take anything else. Just a book. Might as well say it's just food or just oxygen or just the sun. Back to the psychological underpinnings of good girls and bad boys. We haven't yet discussed the notion that maybe in some cases these good girls. Girls aren't so good and they might know that maybe there's a part of good girls who identify with the bad boy. This is who I'd be if I could only let myself or I know there's a side of me that I want to explore. This is who I am. Catherine says in the most famous passage in the book, and maybe the most famous passage of romantic love in English literature, heathcliff is more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same. She's arguing with her maid at the time, and Heathcliff overhears part of the argument. That's part of the plot. Her maid is saying, why are you married to Catherine? Why are you marrying Linton for money? If you love someone else, that's not a very nice thing to do to Linton or to Heathcliff, for that matter. And she says, won't it be hard for Heathcliff to bear the separation? And Catherine replies, how can we be separated? She says, every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff. And then comes this famous passage, quote, my great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries. And I watched and felt, felt each from the beginning. My great thought in living is himself. If all else perished and he remained, I should still continue to be. And if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods. Time will change it, I'm well aware. As winter changes the trees, my love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath a source of little visible Delight, but necessary. Nelly I am Heathcliff. He's always, always in my mind. Not as a pleasure any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. I am Heathcliff with M in italics. Daphne Merkin, a critic who will be forever associated with her essay on how she came alive when she discovered how much she liked to be spanked for sexual pleasure, wrote this. So that gives her a little bit of credibility and insight into this book. As you might imagine, she wrote this in an introduction to the novel. Quote, the first thing you will notice about Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is that it is like no other novel ever written. It reads like the work of someone who had direct access to her unconscious, or, as the New Agers might put it, was able to channel her unconscious. Perhaps the most striking triumph of the novel is that although it is a very particular fever dream concocted by one very specific and overheated imagination, it manages somehow to take over and become your own fever dream, which is in essence what happens with all great novels, the exact contents of which are hard to recall once you wake up. Not everyone agrees with this interpretation and this reading experience. Some say it's a phenomenon of young love, something that you age out of. Here's novelist Anne Tyler. I have tried several times to read Wuthering Heights, but it just strikes me as silly, so I always quit it. I don't tell any of my friends this because women have very fond memories of reading it when they're young and I don't want to hurt their feelings. I somehow made it to adulthood without ever reading Wuthering Heights. But then I found out that several of my women friends considered Heathcliff their all time favorite romantic hero. So I read about 3/4 of it as a grown up and immediately developed some serious concerns about the mental health of my friends. End quote. Even those who are inclined to view it that way as something you age out of are not so quick to dismiss its power. Even if we're not all Jack in the driveway, we remember that jack in the driveway and we remember the girl next to him who was powerfully in love with someone who was not him. We remember that all those people are real humans too. Those are real human emotions. Just because they're young and or strange doesn't mean they're not identifiable, recognizable. Novelist Alice Hoffman writes, quote, my favorite novelist of all time is Emily Bronte, author of the greatest psychological novel ever written with the most complex characteristics ever conceived. Read Wuthering heights when you're 18 and you think Heathcliff is a romantic hero. When you're 30, he's a monster. At 50, you see, he's just human, end quote. Well, that's a little scary when you think about just human, but I guess, I guess maybe that's true. We're all little. All have a little Heathcliff inside us, we humans. The novelist Anne Rice, famous teller of vampire stories, which is highly apropos because one observer says that about Heath. Is he a ghoul, he muses, or a vampire? You can say that figuratively. Both Heathcliff and Catherine are vampires sucking life from the world and its humans. Like Dracula with his teeth and a tasty neck. Anne Rice wrote this in an Amazon review, of all places, quote, is there anybody out there who hasn't heard of Heathcliff, the dark villain hero of this high pitched and utterly committed work of madness? Oh, I Love was difficult for me at first. I'm a writer, but not a natural reader. But once I was into this book, once I stopped asking questions of the narrative and just entered the shadowy world of Catherine and her doomed household, I was quite literally spellbound. Bronte died believing this book was a failure. What a dreadful irony that this quiet, disciplined woman who lived in a cold parson's house with her brilliant sisters, her drunken brother and her eccentric father, the man memorized Paradise Lost, imagine, and outlived all his children. This woman never had an inkling that this outpouring of her heart and soul would become a classic, overshadowing even her sister's highly successful Jane Eyre. Both Bronte sisters had the capacity to create archetypes, to imprint upon the culture seminal patterns that endure to the present time. One last point. The father was Irish. Madness and genius in the blood indeed. Enjoy it. I read it over every year or so, sometimes twice in a row. I study it, I watch all the film versions. I just love it, the way it works, its strange cruelty and enchantment. And this, dear listener, is what makes me hopeful about the forthcoming film of Wuthering Heights. Casting choices aside, one of the pleasures of being alive in 2025, hopefully, is that a film can be bold enough to deliver an unsanitized version of this cruel and enchanting story. A version that will do justice to the darkest recesses of what this all means. It wasn't just that poor Jack Wilson in the driveway was hearing that he was going to go home that night and be in bed by 9:30 while his friend was just getting started. Aw, shucks, poor Jack. It was that what was getting started. Was something deep and powerful and frightening. Something we almost can't find face directly. George Carlin used to say of the seven words that you can't say on television, half mockingly, oh, these are the words that will curve your spine. Wuthering Heights has scenes that will curve your spine. Scenes not able to be shown in prime time, rated R, scenes rated X. Emerald Fennell, the director of the new version of Wuthering Heights, had some thoughts. This is from a Guardian article. Quote, emerald Fennell has revealed details about her, quote, primal, sexual, end quote adaptation of Wuthering Heights following controversy over the film's casting choices, erotic trailer and aggressively provocative screen tests. Speaking publicly about the film for the first time at Bronte Women's Writing Festival over the weekend, the Oscar winning Saltburn director said Emily Bronte's twisted classic cracked me open after reading it at 14 years old. I've been obsessed, I've been driven mad by this book, she said. I know that if someone else made it, I'd be furious. It's very personal material for everyone. It's very illicit. The way we relate to the characters is very private. End quote. That's so funny that she says that. If someone else made this movie, I'd be furious. Public domain. God bless her passion, this is not her book belongs to the world, but it feels to her as if it is. That's the kind of reader I like. Back to the article. Fennell said her first adolescent experience of the novel inspired her approach to the sex charged retelling of Catherine, er, Shaw and orphan Heathcliff's relationship set on the moors of 18th century Yorkshire. It's an emotional response to something. It's primal, sexual, she said. Fennel added, it is an act of extreme masochism to try and make a film of something that means this much to you. There's an enormous amount of sadomasochism in this book. There's a reason people were deeply shocked by it. Working on it has been a kind of masochistic exercise, she said, because I love it so much and it can't love me back and I have to live with that. End quote. That's so beautiful. That's so beautiful. There's the masochism for the director. She loves the book so much and it can't love her back. She has to just live with that love me back book. This book is her Heathcliff or her Catherine. I love it so much and it can't love me back and I have to live with that. I want. Oh, you can just imagine her play this out a little bit. I want to bury it and dig it up again just to see its decomposing form. I'm begging this book to haunt me forever so I won't be separated from it. I will love it forever, even if it destroys me. I will swear revenge upon all my enemies and destroy them in the name of my love for this novel. Wuthering Heights. Well, Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. Coming to a theater near you in February 2026, and a psychiatrist's couch sometime shortly after that, one suspects. Okay, let's take our last break and then we will hear from four heavy hitters, four women who all know something about this book, who know something about good girls falling for bad boys, about Emily Bronte and about us as readers. We'll hear from Virginia Woolf, Joyce Carol Oates, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Hardwick after this.
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This episode is brought to you by 20th Century Studios New film Springsteen Deliver Me From Nowhere starring Golden Globe winner Jeremy Allen White and Academy Award nominee Jeremy Strong. Scott Cooper, the director of the Academy Award winning movie Crazy Heart, brings you the the story of the most pivotal chapter in the life of an icon. Springsteen Deliver Me From Nowhere Only in theaters October 24th. Get your tickets now.
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When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone. Learn more@WhatsApp.com we are back. Did we cover enough of the psychological underpinnings of our topic today? Opposites attract. Maybe it's just as simple as that. We like what is not us, or we like the thrill of what is not us. We want to be something else, explore someone else. Maybe we don't like ourselves or we're a little bored by who we are. So we want to throw Jack Wilson overboard. Then go find Heathcliff. Older guy or Heathcliff lousy grades. Heathcliff pothead. There are a lot of Heathcliffs out there for me to compete with where I lived. And they were so confident. Jack Wilson in the driveway never met an opinion he couldn't see the other side of. Never met a position he didn't find in some way a little too bold. Never a confrontation he didn't seek to defuse. That's reasonable. It's not necessarily sexy. Sometimes strong emotions Strong positions, even if wrong, are attractive. Especially if you yourself lack that confidence. Maybe you're low in self esteem and are drawn to people who aren't. Or maybe you have an abundance of confidence and aren't attracted to others who don't have that. Bad boys are a project. I'll help you. I'll heal you. I'll tame you. Who doesn't enjoy a challenge? And especially if the project. The bad boy is also a mystery, which is in fact a bad boy specialty. Why are you like this, so unpredictable and erratic, governed by passions? Nobody ever asked that of Jack Wilson, smiling and coming to the door with flowers for Kathy and a kind word for mom and grandma. But that resentful guy who roars past in his muscle car squealing tires out of anger and jealousy and energy and passion for something. For what? Who knows? But don't you want to know? And maybe there's something about that period between adolescence and marriage where you know what your life has been and will be. But you want it to be something different. Temporarily, briefly, a short term plunge into something icy before you settle back into the warm bath of being a good mom and eventually grandma yourself. Warm baths turned lukewarm in a hurry, as we all know. And before you know it, you're uncomfortable. But there's nothing else left for you in life. It's too late. It's just monotony until death. But that icy plunge. You're alive during that, aren't you? There's drama, and that's fun. If you've been raised on novels or television or soap operas or movies. Seeing the protagonists, seeing yourself as a protagonist is fun. Nobody's a protagonist in a novel starring amiable milquetoast Jack Wilson. No conflict there. Writers fall asleep trying to write that character. They quickly cast him aside for the one who will bring all the conflict with him. Heathcliff, sexy cheat. Or Heathcliff, time in jail. More of my foes. Heathcliff lies a lot. How can I compete with someone who will say whatever he wants to get whatever he wants? We vote in large numbers for politicians like that. There's also something compelling about the bad boy. Not really needing the good girl. Or should I say, not needing the opinion of others. He doesn't sit around worrying about it the way Jack Wilson does, or the way the good girl herself does. For the good girl. There's something powerful about that, that freedom. Imagine being an adolescent girl. Maybe you were one or are one right now. How much awful pressure there is for you to do the right thing, be the Right thing, say the right thing. Not screw up and ruin everyone's opinion of you. The stakes are so high. Well, how freeing is it that the bad boy does not care about any of that? He thumbs his nose at all of it. And how exciting it is if the only thing he does care about is you. He doesn't care about the opinion of the world. He's in love with you. Jack Wilson wants the two of you to be equals. Ho hum, ho hum, Jack. Call me when I'm 39 and ready to be my mom. For now, I'll go with Heathcliff hates the world. But let's leave Jack in his little car. A Ford Taurus it was back then. Unless it was the Ford Fiesta with a stick shift or the coolest of all, the Honda crx. Couldn't believe my dad bought that one for himself. But he was always looking for good gas mileage and that certainly provided it. Instead, let's leave Jack there and let's turn to these amazing women I mentioned. Who have some analyses of Emily Bronte, her novel and its readers. Our first quote is from Virginia Woolf, who published an essay in 1916 called Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Now, let's put this in the context of the way these books affected the Bronte family. We'll have a lot more to say about this in part two of our look at Wuthering Heights, which we'll have in a week or a couple of weeks. We're going to space them out so you don't get overly bronted. But in that episode, we're going to explore the reviews that Emily Bronte clipped and kept in her desk drawer. But to remind you, the three Sisters. This is the writing career of the Brontes. The three sisters published a book of poems with all three of them as poets on the COVID That book sold two copies. Two more poets than sales. Which might be unprecedented. I guess. Well, no, I guess if. I guess if a book of poetry sold zero copies. Which, alas, I'm sure has happened. But anyway, you would think that the Brontes could have sold a few more than two. But reviewers picked up on it, getting their free copies. And the sisters were not discouraged exactly. They just felt that they should try publishing novels instead of poetry. Then as now, that's a path to more fortune and fame in most cases. So they sent out their novels. Emily's novel was accepted for publication. Anne's novel was also accepted. Charlotte's novel was not rejected. Not good enough. The oldest daughter and her book was rejected. So she wrote a Different novel and sent that one off to a different publisher and it was accepted. And that novel, Jane Eyre, came out and was very successful. So that's internally within the Bronte family. Charlotte, who for a few months was the worst novelist, smarting as she was by the rejection, now she had a triumph. Keep that in mind. When Virginia Woolf compares Charlotte and Emily. I mean, it's not as if the Brontes could read Virginia Woolf, who was writing decades after they died. But we don't have many families with the kind of multiple successes that these sisters had. And the comparisons are inevitable and potentially instructive. So which of them is better? That would have mattered to the Bronte sisters as they made their way into the world of literature. Here's Virginia Woolf quote. Wuthering Heights is a more difficult book to understand than Jane Eyre because Emily was a greater poet than Charlotte. When Charlotte wrote, she said, with eloquence and splendor and passion, I love, I hate, I suffer. Her experience, though more intense, is on a level with our own. But there is no I in Wuthering Heights. There are no governesses, There are no employers. There is love, but it is not the love of men and women. Pause there. That line makes the hair on my arms stand up. Not the love of men and women. Do tell, Virginia. Back to the quote. Emily was inspired by some more general conception. The impulse which urged her to create was not her own suffering or her own injuries. She looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book. That gigantic ambition is to be felt throughout the novel. A struggle, half thwarted, but of superb conviction. To say something through the mouths of her characters which is not merely, I love or I hate, but we, the whole human race, and you, the eternal powers. The sentence remains unfinished. It is not strange that it should be so. Rather, it is astonishing that she can make us feel what she had it in her to say at all. End quote. Wow. That's. That's what you sense when you read this book. That's what draws. That's magnets. I say the book is magnetic. Magnets work like that, too, right? You feel their power. You also feel the incredible mystery and the incredible connection that these things have with nature. Why do compasses point north? What the heck? There. I can hold it in my hand. How's it connected to the world, to the planet? I'm tempted to give Wolf the last word, as I so often do, because that is so good. But we have some others to get to. Joyce Carol Oates knows a little something about good girls falling for bad boys. We saw this in her agonizing story where are you going? Where have you been? Which we read and discussed during the pandemic with our guest Evie Lee. Oates tips her cap to Emily Bronte and analyzes Wuthering Heights. And in so doing, she explains why, even though Heathcliff is a monster, we readers are drawn to him nevertheless. Quote Heathcliff's enduring appeal is approximately that of Edmund Iago, Richard iii, the intermittent Macbeth, the villain who impresses by way of his energy, his cleverness, his peculiar sort of courage, and by his asides, inviting, as they do, the audience's or reader's collaboration in wickedness. Bronte is perfectly accurate in having her villain tell us by way of Mrs. Dean and Lockwood, that brutality does not always discussed, and that there are those persons, often of weak, cringing, undeveloped character, who innately admire it, provided they themselves are not injured. Though in Isabella's case. Side note here Isabella was the woman Heathcliff seduced and married as part of his revenge tour. In Isabella's case, it would seem that she has enjoyed and even provoked her husband's experimental sadism. Heathcliff presides over a veritable cornucopia of darksome episodes. He beats and kicks the fallen Hindley, he throws a knife at Isabella, he savagely slaps young Catherine. He doesn't trouble to summon a doctor for his dying son, as he no longer has any use for him. Unfailingly cruel, yet sly enough to appear exasperated with his victim's testing of his cruelty, Heathcliff arouses the reader to this peculiar collaborative bond by the sheer force of his language and his wit. For is he not, with his beloved gone, the life force gone wild? He has no opposition worthy of him. He has no natural mate remaining. He is characterless and depersonalized, will a mask like grimace that can never relax into a smile. Significantly, Heathcliff is grinning as a corpse, grinning at death. As old Joseph notes, very few readers of Wuthering Heights have cared to observe that there is no necessary or even probable connection between the devoted lover of Catherine and the devoted hater of all the remaining world, including, and this most improbably, Catherine's own daughter Catherine, who resembles her. For certain stereotypes persist so stubbornly. They may very well be archetypes, evoking, as they do, an involuntary identification with energy, evil will, action. The mass murderer, who is really tender hearted, the rapist whose victims provoke him, the Fuhrer, who is a vegetarian and in any case loves Dogs. Our anxieties, which may well spring from childhood experiences, have much to do with denying the actual physicality of the outrages, whether those of Heathcliff or any villain, literary or historic, and supplanting for them, however magically, however pitiably, spiritual values. If Heathcliff grinds his victims beneath his feet like worms, is it not natural to imagine that they are worms and deserve their suffering? Is it not natural to imagine that they are not us? We feel only contempt for the potential sadist Linton, who sucks on sugar candy and whose relationship with his child wife parodies a normal love relationship. He asks her not to kiss him because it makes him breathless. Consequently, our temptation is to align ourselves with Heathcliff, as Bronte shrewdly understands. End quote. As we mentioned before, Emily and Anne died young, and so did Branwell, Bronte, their brother, all in the year after Wuthering Heights came out. That left Charlotte as the only sibling who was able to tend to the literary flame. Wuthering Heights was republished in 1850, a couple of years after Emily's death, and Charlotte wrote a preface to it. Although she at times kind of undermines Emily's achievements, at other times she defends them. In the excerpts I'm going to read now, she essentially argues that Emily was helpless against the power of the story, that it almost emerged from the landscape where they grew up. Here Charlotte is writing as she's still writing as Currer Bell and writing about Ellis Bell, so her pronouns are male. I have just read over Wuthering Heights and for the first time have obtained a clear glimpse of what are termed, and perhaps really are its faults, have gained a definite notion of how it appears to other people, to strangers who knew nothing of the author, who are unacquainted with the locality where the scenes of the story are laid, to whom the inhabitants, the customs, the natural characteristics of the outlying hills and hamlets in the West Riding of Yorkshire are things alien and unfamiliar to all such Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production. The wild moors of the north of England can for them have no interest. The language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts must be to such readers in a great measure unintelligible and where intelligible, repulsive. With regard to the rusticity of Wuthering Heights, I admit the charge, for I feel the quality it is rustic all through. It is Moorish and wild and knotty as a root of heath. Nor was it natural that it should be otherwise. The author being herself a native and nurseling of the moors. Doubtless, had her lot been cast in a town, her writings, if she had written at all, would have possessed another character. Even had chance or taste led her to choose a similar subject, she would have treated it otherwise. Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know. I scarcely think it is. But this I know. The writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master, something that at times strangely wills and works for itself. Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop with simple tools out of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary moor. Gazing thereon, he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head, savage, swart, sinister, a form moulded with at least one element of grandeur. Power he wrought with a rude chisel and from no model but the vision of his meditations. With time and labor, the crag took human shape, and there it stands, colossal, dark and frowning, half statue, half rock. In the former sense, terrible and goblin like. In the latter, almost beautiful, for its coloring is of mellow gray and moorland moss clothes it, and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance, grows faithfully close to the giant's foot. End quote. Heathcliff coming right out of the landscape through Emily's imagination, described by Sister Charlotte. We are deep in something fundamental, elemental here. And finally we'll let Elizabeth Hardwick tell us why we're reading this book. 100 years, 150 years and soon to be 200 years later. There is nothing quite like this novel, with its rage and ragings, its discontent and angry restlessness. Wuthering Heights is a virgin's story. The peculiarity of it lies in the harshness of the characters. Kathy is as hard, careless and destructive as Heathcliff. She, too, has a sadistic nature. The love the two feel for each other is a longing for an impossible completion. Consolations do not appear. Nothing in the domestic or even in the sexual life seems to the point. In this book, Emily Bronte appears in every way indifferent to the need for love and companionship that tortured the lives of her sisters. We do not, in her biography, even look for a lover, as we do with Emily Dickinson, because it is impossible to join her with a man with a secret, aching passion for a young curate or a schoolmaster. There is a spare, inviolate center, a harder resignation, amounting finally to withdrawal. End quote. And that's the key. That's the undiluted key. There's nothing quite like this book, book. It's dark and unrelenting and unremitting. But that mirrors the book's obsession, which is dark and unrelenting and unremitting. It's the only book by the Brontes to make it in the top 25. And it's the fiercest and the least polite, the most full of rage, the most passionate, the most plummeting and the most committed to the descent. I heard once that Christian leaders prefer satanic worshippers to agnostics. Those namby pamby agnostics, of which I am one, are too hard to convert. At least Satanists believe in something. It's easier to convert them. Imagine that you believe in God up above and Satan down below. Satan's a pretty bad dude. Then you'd rather have someone believe in him and his dark materials than encounter someone who looks at both God and Satan and says, eh, maybe. Probably not. But maybe. And it's that way with love too. Do you believe in love as an all consuming thing? Does it have to be right? Does it have to be good? It has to be real. Love in this book is at the point where it most resembles hate. It's a love that shares a universe with deep jealousy and obsession and revenge. Like a worldview with a cosmos divided between the Holy Father and the beast. Rage, anger, undying passion. Those are the strong emotions that can match the feelings that love produces within us. It's not lustful because maybe because lust can have consummation and relief, some joy and some mild disappointment. And the book is really not about sexual. Or if it is, it's something we readers supply even as the author does not. But it doesn't have to be about sex. It's about magnetism and the power of the human spirit when in love and longing for connection with another. Not for connection in general, but a very particular other person. And how being drawn to a person can be as combustible and all consuming as a great blazing fire. Nothing can match that kind of love unless it is that kind of hate. We read Wuthering Heights because we believe in that kind of love and the power that it has over us. We read Wuthering Heights because we are Heathcliff and we are Catherine too. And maybe we can go a step further and say that we don't just read this novel, we read Jane Eyre. We are Wuthering Heights. Okay, there we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the history of literature. We will be back again soon with so much more literary goodness. We have some more from the Brontes and we have Mel Brooks and other eminent Jews coming along to lighten things up a bit. Even in October we won't be all doom and gloom. We have some more on love and sex. That sounds light enough. Except oh wait, it's love and sex. And Frankenstein. Hey, October's gonna October, people. Not much I can do. Here's something you can do. Head over to our patreon page@patreon.com Literature where you can sign up for a small monthly contribution and receive a low ad version of the podcast. As many as nine fewer ads clogging up your ear holes for just five bucks a month. Not a bad deal. And we're still signing people up. We have a few latecomers can get in just under the wire if you don't delay. Our tour of literary England might still have a open slot just for you if you visit John Shores Travel. That's Shores S H O R S with no e or historyofliterature.com we have a link to the itinerary and sign up information there. Join us for a May 2026 to remember with Emma and me and a small group of devoted literary pilgrims. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
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The town of Milton may seem normal at first glance, but the shadows are cursed and the expanse of woods surrounding town are forbidden. They call it the void and nobody comes back alive.
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You're headed straight for the void.
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Knowlton lives suspended in time, trapped by a darkness that seems to be creeping closer and closer.
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It's safe. The void is kept at bay. Is it though?
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Join three friends as they embark on an epic journey into the heart of darkness. The Void Wherever you get your podcasts.
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This is just the beginning.
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What does it mean to live for the common good? Introducing the Garrison Institute presents the Common Good, the brand new podcast from the Garrison Institute, a leading, not for profit organization exploring the intersection of contemplation and engaged action in the world. Hosted by me, Jonathan F.P. rose, a co founder of the Garrison Institute, the series dives into the threads that bind us all. First, you'll discover the interdependent nature of life with environmental entrepreneur Paul Hawkins and trailblazing plant intelligence researcher Monica Gagliano. Next, we unlock the mysteries of the mind with renowned psychiatrist Dan Siegel and Pulitzer Prize winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee. Finally, we experience compassion in action with social justice activist Conda Mason and environmental leader Bill McKibben. We invite you to listen, reflect and join us in acting for the common good. Follow the Garrison Institute presents the Common Good on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you are listening now.