i'm not some shivering waif in the forest

At risk of getting too pedantic up here, one thing I’ve noticed is that often when we talk about metaphor, we’re actually talking about simile. We’re poetically likening one thing to another thing. And similes are very handy—I myself have bandied about more than my fair share along the way. But I’ve come to prefer the quiet authority of a true metaphor. Not saying that something is like another thing, but saying that it is that thing. And performing this feat of semantic transmutation so vividly and so concretely that the reader accepts it as truth. […] simile requires little more than imagination and intelligence. Simile by dint of its phrasing seems to doubt itself. It’s polite and socialized and it leaves room for the possibility that others see the world in a different way. Semantically speaking, metaphor doesn’t apologize or try to justify itself. A proper metaphor hurtles its audience deep into the private mythological landscape of the writer. It imparts upon its audience a sudden, bracing fluency in the writer’s private symbolic language. Metaphor is artless and unaffected and feral. You could say it’s raised by wolves, but more to the point, it’s raised outside of words. A good metaphor makes me shiver, as if a ghost has passed through my body, because in a way it has. Metaphor is a kind of immortal certainty. You might not agree lastingly with the words you’re reading, you might not even be able to later recall the electric sensation of summoning and possession and resurrection that shot through you when you encountered this writer’s words. But in that one moment, you walked freely within their symbolic domain, preserved and untouched and momentarily more tangible than your own. In that moment, the fog never could have rolled in on anything besides little cat feet.

At risk of getting too pedantic up here, one thing I’ve noticed is that often when we talk about metaphor, we’re actually talking about simile. We’re poetically likening one thing to another thing. And similes are very handy—I myself have bandied about more than my fair share along the way. But I’ve come to prefer the quiet authority of a true metaphor. Not saying that something is like another thing, but saying that it is that thing. And performing this feat of semantic transmutation so vividly and so concretely that the reader accepts it as truth. […] simile requires little more than imagination and intelligence. Simile by dint of its phrasing seems to doubt itself. It’s polite and socialized and it leaves room for the possibility that others see the world in a different way. Semantically speaking, metaphor doesn’t apologize or try to justify itself. A proper metaphor hurtles its audience deep into the private mythological landscape of the writer. It imparts upon its audience a sudden, bracing fluency in the writer’s private symbolic language. Metaphor is artless and unaffected and feral. You could say it’s raised by wolves, but more to the point, it’s raised outside of words. A good metaphor makes me shiver, as if a ghost has passed through my body, because in a way it has. Metaphor is a kind of immortal certainty. You might not agree lastingly with the words you’re reading, you might not even be able to later recall the electric sensation of summoning and possession and resurrection that shot through you when you encountered this writer’s words. But in that one moment, you walked freely within their symbolic domain, preserved and untouched and momentarily more tangible than your own. In that moment, the fog never could have rolled in on anything besides little cat feet.

what bothers me most about Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights is the discourse that continues to be propagated (often by women themselves!) that because it was written by a woman, the novel must reflect the kind of relationship the author secretly dreamed of, that she was quirky, dark, perhaps secretly romantic in a morbid way. if it had been written by a man, everyone would say: “oh, the author is analyzing toxic relationships through these characters. he’s criticizing them.” it always bothered me that Brontë was immediately branded as a weird lovelorn woman, when in reality there is not much in her biography to attest to that. she was just a very intelligent writer who thought about a very intelligent subject like any of her male counterparts.

This also comes back to the element that keeps striking me over and over again when I think about it: Heathcliff's and Cathy's love story really isn't that much of the book?

I read the book in the summer and was astonished by how much the book differs from how it's talked about. (Haven't seen the movie but am... horrified/amused). I can barely see romance in it at all, except maybe for the younger Cathy as mentioned. It's really a novel, it seems to me, about how absolutely awful and rude this isolated English family is. They have some wealth but they're all utterly wretched. I don't know how a dark romance is the takeaway anyone gets from this!