#(and not just because Brontes is there)

[screechingfromthevoid]

nothing (besides everyone ignoring Orym's deal) has made me angrier than watching Dorian keep up this facade. Dorian Storm has always been a type of mask he's worn. At first he called himself a liar because of it. The happy go lucky bard was a way of escaping for him. He was escaping Brontë so he created Dorian. He didn't believe he was Dorian. Until the Crown Keepers made Dorian real. And for a while, he really believed he was Dorian. That he has this new family and new life and he could be who he truly wanted to be.

And then his brother came back and made his problems Dorian's problems. Until he had to put Brontë back on. Because even if the Crown Keepers + Cyrus called him Dorian, he was Brontë. He had to be who his brother thought he was.

When Cyrus dies, the thread to Brontë had snapped. He was going to see Orym, back to the Bells Hells, back to Dorian Storm. But the foundation of Dorian had shattered. Dorian was created in order to run from his place in life, family, Cyrus. Now he was gone. The Crown Keepers had fallen apart. His friends fell through his fingers and he couldn't do anything to stop it. He was once ready to side with a betrayer god for these people and now they're in the wind.

So Dorian shows back up to Bells Hella and he's completely broken. The foundation of both of his lives has been thoroughly rocked. No brother. No Crown Keepers. The two things that forged Dorian Storm. He wears that mask so fucking well. Because he still wants to believe in it. He said it live on stage that he should "believe his own backstory". The one he made up. The one where he was a bard.

He wants to be Dorian so bad. He spends all his money on Orym, he spins the bottle so he can kiss his friends, he flirts, he blushes and giggles at compliments. Exactly how Dorian would, should.

But he wears the gold of the heir. He has a festering animosity inside his chest. He doesn't sleep. He's thinner than he was. He doesn't sleep. He sicks abominations after their creators. He talks to God's without an ounce of self preservation, daring them to strike him down. He does not acknowledge them as they taunt him.

The god of beauty and magic calls him beautiful and he does not smile.

[laurapetrie]

She possessed an intensity of romantic feeling that very few people in this world can form the remotest conception of.

Charlotte Bronte, "Henry Hastings" (1839)

[yujeong]

"Can you stop by and keep me company more often?" "Of course." 4 Minutes (2024)

[terezamylove]

hey folks‼️ if you're into:

• interview with the vampire 2022

• dungeon meshi

• the x files

• the sims 2 premades

• hamlet

• ballet

• xena warrior princess

• nintendo games

• classical literature

• hamlet

• queer history

• queer cinema

• precode cinema

• art history

• chanson française

pleeeease, let's be moots! :)

[cupidgnome]

Kyle and Kendra got a visit by a disguised vampire at their house and Kendra had already flirted with him which left Kyle feeling worthless, but when they went out for dinner, Kendra and the vampire wouldn’t stop flirting and even shared a kiss in front of everyone. Kyle lost his cool and ended things with Kendra right away. Later that day, they divorced.

[queenlucythevaliant]

In Defense of Wuthering Heights

This is not an “I can make him worse” book. It’s a “we can make each other better in the face of tremendous pressure to do otherwise” book. I promise. 

I’ve already written extensively about my love for Charlotte Brontë’s Villette and while I love lots of other Brontë books with all my heart, what I really want to do tonight is try to make you fall in love with Emily’s Wuthering Heights (generally the most divisive Brontë novel among modern readers) the way that I did.

The thing that a lot of people don’t know which I really think ought to be printed on all the dust jackets is that the Brontë sisters were the daughters of a revered. They were PKs and it totally shows.  

So Wuthering Heights is not a romance; it’s a family tragedy. Specifically, it’s an astonishingly hopeful book about generational trauma. 

Heathcliff is Mr. Earnshaw’s bastard son. This is never explicitly stated, but it is implied so heavily that it might as well be. To boot, Mr. Earnshaw favors Heathcliff over his legitimate son, Hindley. When Mr. Earnshaw dies, Heathcliff is immediately and violently cast out of the family and forced into servitude. Mr. Earnshaw’s hidden infidelity is Wuthering Heights’s original sin.

Of course, Cathy and Heathcliff love each other, but it’s a violent and destructive like-recognizes-like kind of love between two people who, on the one hand, absolutely should not be together and, on the other, totally deserve each other. They’re capital T Tragic and capital R romantic: co-dependent, sharp-toothed sibling-lovers who don’t understand their own relationship as kids because their father lied to them. That lack of understanding follows them into adulthood; they don’t really know how to make sense of what they feel for one another, but boy do they feel it. 

Cathy tells Nellie “I am Heathcliff” and “He’s more myself than I am” and “whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” and it’s half a reaction to the fact that one of her brothers (Hindley) has cast her other brother (Heathcliff) out of the family with a vengeance and half a statement of the fact that although she doesn’t know what Heathcliff is to her, she doesn’t know how to live without him. And while Cathy’s love for Heathcliff definitely fills romantic roles once they’re adults, it’s doesn’t really read as sexual. To use Lewis’s parlance: it’s not eros/gift-love, but rather need-love in the most emphatic sense. It’s storge. Actually, it’s really posessive storge that thinks it’s eros. Hence the problem. 

From the other side, Heathcliff is an outsider from the moment he enters the story. He’s an intruder and a presumed bastard. He’s coded as non-white, maybe Romani or similar. (Probably not actually African-black, but kudos to that one movie for at least making the attempt.) He’s… probably kind of a psychopath in that he displays cruelty to animals and then later on becomes a charismatic, manipulative monster. You can make a nature vs. nurture argument—Heathcliff is definitely on the receiving end of a lot of cruelty—but there’s also something Off about him and that too is othering. And after Mr. Earnshaw dies, Cathy is the one person who still loves him.

But of course, they can’t actually marry. On and off the page, that simply cannot be. Heathcliff runs away, Cathy marries Edgar Linton. They hurt each other badly in the process. Neither Heathcliff nor Cathy can escape the harm that Mr. Earnshaw began and Hindley perpetuated. Cathy dies, Heathcliff marries Isabella, and then things get really interesting.

Because the beating heart of Wuthering Heights, the place where you can profoundly see the fingerprints of the reverend’s daughter, is in the third generation. Cathy and Heathcliff devour each other in life and in death, but the children survive. They forgive. The patriarch died without knowing what he had wrought on his children, the second generation died in anguish, but the third makes it out. Or at least Hareton and Cathy II do.

Cathy’s daughter is named for her mother. Heathcliff’s son by Isabella Linton is named Linton Heathcliff. Heathcliff forces Hareton, Hindley’s son and the only one among the third generation not named for his parents, to live in the same debasement that Hindley once forced on him: he denies Hareton any education and forces him into servitude while simultaneously courting his admiration. In essence, Cathy and Heathcliff implore the next generation to go on living their parents’ tragedy and it. Doesn’t. Work.

Heathcliff tries to force them both into awful situations in which they must act out his trauma, his revenge, to go on perpetuating the pain and bitterness. And at first, it looks like they’re going to play their parts. For a time, they’re as awful to each other as everyone else is.

But then they change. Hareton tries to stand up for Cathy II while she’s essentially being held captive as part of Heathcliff’s 12-Step Revenge Plot. Cathy teaches Hareton to read. She laughs at him, but when she realizes that she’s hurting his pride she apologizes and learns to be patient.  

“I didn’t know you took my part,” she answered, drying her eyes; “and I was miserable and bitter at everybody; but now I thank you, and beg you to forgive me: what can I do besides?”

And after this, they both stand up to Heathcliff. They say, “This ends here. This far and no farther.” Heathcliff is their dragon and they face him together. And when everyone else is dead in grand, tragic fashion, Cathy II and Hareton are left living.

But it’s not just that Hareton and Cathy II survive. They specifically un-do the failings of the previous generations. There’s a kind of atonement to it. They’re honest with each other, unlike Mr. Earnshaw. Cathy recognizes Hareton’s humanity, something Hindley never did for Heathcliff. Hareton lets go of his bitterness and resentment, while Heathcliff let his fester into cruelty and Elaborate Revenge. Cathy II is willful, like her mother, but she is also kind. Hareton is proud, like his father, but he is also compassionate. They forgive each other, while Cathy and Heathcliff only ever held grudges.

At the beginning of the book, Cathy is dead and has explicitly not gone to heaven; with the Brontës, you’ve gotta take these things seriously. Cathy is not in heaven and Heathcliff is a monster and they both seem to be damned, but they do not succeed in damning their children. And in that (I would say because of that), even Cathy and Heathcliff find peace after death.

I also do think that the fact that the story is narrated by Lockwood (weirded out by all of this) and Nellie (unreliable, cares deeply about everyone involved) can make it difficult to see the redemptive arc in the story as clearly as we might if it had an omniscient narrator, or if, say Cathy II was narrating. We're presented the Cathy and Heathcliff love story as this great, horrible, compelling saga (and it absolutely is), but then the following generation can almost seem like a footnote. They're adapted out of most of the film adaptations. But they're the whole point!

I do get why Wuthering Heights just isn’t to some people’s taste. Really. Some people just don’t go for Big Romantic Family Tragedy and that’s fine. But too many people come to the Brontës looking for Jane Austen or Elizabeth Gaskell and that’s just. Wrong. You’ve gotta at least read Wuthering Heights on its own terms before deciding that you hate it (not directed at anyone specific on here, but I do know people irl...). And you really ought to read it with an eye towards Emily’s faith. It makes a world of difference.

TL;DR- There’s a beautiful, very Christian center to Wuthering Heights and it’s one of forgiveness instead of revenge and kindness instead of cruelty. It’s a book about people who are destroyed by the sins of their fathers and those that manage not to be. In a way, it’s almost a fairytale.

[arsenic-lobster]

'I inhabit a den, miss -- a cavern, where you would not put your dainty nose. As for my "establishment of servants"' (mimicking my voice) 'they number ten; les voila.'

[melit0n]

So, unfortunately, because I've had to over-study Jane Eyre and analyse every quote word by word to death, I'm not a massive fan of the book. If I had read it outside of education, especially since I adore a good 1800s Gothic book, I'm sure I would have loved it, but my liking for it died the moment I had more than 20 quotes that looked like they didn't even mean anything shoved in my head by my English teacher.

But when Jane said; "To be privileged, to put my arms around what I value- to press my lips to what I love- to repose on what I trust: is that to make sacrifice? If so, then I'd gladly delight in it." Like. That one's got a good kick to it. Jane didn't need to be spitting moral fire like that in late 1800s

[garbagequeer]

i stand with the woke mob 🫡. but fr i hate when people oversimplify catherine and heathcliff to be a tragic love story that wouldn't have been tragic if they'd married each other as they wanted to. like 1 what about the great way that wuthering heights comments on the interconnection of family (including marriage) as violence and domination because of its relationship to private property. 2 what about the very purposeful incest themes which are key to the atmosphere of repetitiveness confusion and oppressive isolation and stagnancy created by the 2 generations and the 2 houses and the 2 intertwined bloodlines. you can't say heathcliff and catherine are related but you also can't say they are not related. you can't say they love each other as a husband and wife or as a sister and brother or as best friends and sometimes you can't even say they do love each other but you also can't say that they don't. heathcliff's otherness cannot be assimilated in the models of their society in any one way in a way that adds to his dehumanization and relationship to the landscape itself and his role in the story. and 3 to me it erases what's so interesting about catherine which is a level of awareness about the limitations of her society and the undefinable nature of her relationship to heathcliff in that she presents two modes of love in how she loves heathcliff who is herself and her childhood and who she can't stand to be parted from but from who she does not need or even particularly want marriage or sex or even niceness and then in how she loves edgar which is a pragmatic love in that she likes him and how he is with her and what he offers her and she never makes a point of being unhappy with him but she doesn't try to make marriage a love epic either. like they're all way more complex than a love story gone wrong and i hate when people try to reduce it to romance alone

[marlocandeea]

im trying to take possession of the country house and transform it into a studio. but my brothers and sisters in christ it's going to be aa situation

[subcoolture]

Men really don’t seem to understand that they have to prove themselves to women if they have an interest in them. We don’t live in a neutral world. Men are untrustworthy until proven the contrary. People always new that and that’s why something called ‘courtship’ exists. A woman’s love is the most valuable thing in the world. Mediocre men throw it away. Gentlemen fight for it.

—   Léia Katràud

[axels-corner]

Councillor Bronte presentation

Hello, my name is Axel. This presentation is on the arc and development of Councilor Bronte from the book series Keeper of the Lost Cities. Most of Bronte's arc happens between books 1 Keeper of the Lost Cities, book 2 Exile, and book 3 Everblaze, but other books still develop him so each slide will be about a book from the series.

Presentation under the cut

Note: I couldn’t get the slideshow to work, it kept glitching out the pictures so I took screen shots of the slides, the last two and first slide are typed because I think you can only have ten pictures per post. There also are not many pictures besides the title slide because I couldn’t get them to work with the text, and if I did you couldn’t see the font even after changing the color.

I do hope you enjoy the presentation though and have wonderful days! I’‘ve had a lot of fun in this class!

@camelspit​

Book 8.5 and 9: Unlocked and Stellarlune

Bronte is in very few scenes in these two books, he was mentioned in Unlocked after Sophie asked if Bronte would know how to open the cache, and in Stellarlune he was in one of the cache scenes in Kenric's cache.

Conclusion

To summarize Bronte's arc takes him from the first two books and the first half of Everblaze where he is an antagonist to Sophie, and opposes her. To slowly becoming one of her strongest allies and someone she relies on later in the series.

[bookwyrminspiration]

Hi, I’m seriously starved for Bronte crumbs, have any headcanons or anything remotely Bronte-related to share?

Hello! I can certainly try! I'm not typically a Bronte or a headcanon person, so fair warning.

He has little to no outlet for his inflicting, so perhaps when he holds all that negativity and pain inside it starts to leek out and affect him. Idk what manifestation of chronic pain he may deal with, but it's there

To ease the pain, he's developed a taste for herbal teas. Except when he started making them he refused to tell anyone or learn proper preparation, so they always came out awful. And he always drank them. And now he only drinks them like that. Don't accept tea from him

The reason he has his cropped haircut is because he tried to cut his long hair himself once--he is not going to let someone else touch him or express to another person what he wants are you mad--and failed so miserably he had to shave it all off. But instead of admitting the mistake he claims he wanted his hair like that and so he's kept it. for centuries.

He knows more about make-up and makeovers than he will ever admit because he's been witness or fallen prey to Oralie's ministrations.

There's no one more awkward about interior decor than him. His council chair looks super uncomfortable and plain? There's hardly any furniture in his tower? That's because he doesn't know how to design or decorate anything and just does the simplest, sparsest thing possible--even when it's uncomfortable, like the chair--and acts like that's definitely what he wants and what he meant to do. He'd never admit it's just because he doesn't know what he's doing.

Those are a few headcanon ideas I tried to extrapolate from canon, I hope they are adequate crumbs that ease your starvation :)

[artemismatchalatte]

I could have chosen ANY (or almost any) books to do my paper on and I settled on Fear of Flying by Erica Jong and Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

Gilman is a much better short story writer. I did one of my other grad papers on her short stories.

I thought Jong was one of my favorite writers but after that I don't think so. Her poetry was much better than her novel but also I read her poetry when I was literally manic so I don't trust my old opinion of her. :/

[dreaminginsteadofsleeping42]

It’s so interesting to me that the big, like, ~reveal~ of both Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall concern one of the main love interests already being - surprise! - married, but they are such VASTLY different circumstances with totally different connotations and consequences. Just Bronte girlie thoughts.

[poetlcs]

emily (2022) was my 9/11 as a literature girly... as a lover of the brontes... as a charlotte apologist..... like what was all that. I'm furious!