Imaginary Dinner Party, Part Fifteen
By Lynn Crawford
I rarely feel more human than just before, during, and after, my trapeze sessions with Rose.
The walk to the library, climbing its stairs to her office, our good mornings to each other before the movements start, our goodbyes at their end as we head downstairs; Rose to library stacks, and me, back up the hill to my home, where I settle in with the trees and my books.
Trapeze routines get my heart pumping, efficiently, generating the strength and fragility my readings require.
If I’m to do them justice.
On my way to practice this morning I spot two skywriting planes, and briefly stop to watch them. “Our Sea is Fragile,” writes one. “Our See is Fragile,” writes the other.
Frankenstein [The Modern Prometheus]
By Mary Shelley
Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones, 1818
Fiction
Wuthering Heights
By Emily Brontë [Ellis Bell]
Thomas Cautley Newby, 1847
Fiction
The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me—I have no others.
–Thomas Bernhard, Concrete
This fifteenth iteration of Imaginary Dinner Party introduces two books to the conversation: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). If the first books I discussed in this series—Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, Georges Perec’s Things, and Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane—are “cool,” addressing serious issues and emotions calmly, these two volumes are heated. Wuthering Heights and Frankenstein fit the description I wrote down in a college notebook decades ago: “Gothic novels explore paranormal and existential themes amid eerie backgrounds.”
Both books have been written about, or at least referenced, by writers I deeply admire, including French philosopher Georges Bataille and English author Jeanette Winterson.
Bataille examines Wuthering Heights (along with Sade and Kafka) in his excellent 1957 collection of essays, Literature and Evil, contending, “Emily Brontë fathomed the very depths of evil.” He links “the fundamental theme of Wuthering Heights to childhood”—when the love between the main characters Catherine and Heathcliff originated. “But society contrasts the free play of innocence with reason, reason based on the calculations of interest. Society is governed by its will to survive. It could not survive if these childish instincts, which bound the children in were allowed to triumph”1
Jeanette Winterson’s beautiful and powerful 2019 novel, Frankissstein: A Love Story, riffs on Frankenstein’s contemporary relevance, pointing to our impulsivity and impatience as a global society for anything that requires nurturing or deep consideration. Winterson writes: “Humans will be like decayed gentry. We’ll have the glorious mansion called the past that is falling into disrepair. We’ll have a piece of land that we didn’t look after very well called the planet. And we’ll have some nice clothes and a lot of stories.”
What follows here is a “conversation” between Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights. I have intertwined text from the original novels, alternating sentences, in order, from the first pages in each book. There is a detectably strong energy, tenor, and rhythm in this union.
“You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.”
–Frankenstein
“I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.”
–Wuthering Heights
“I arrived here yesterday, and my first task is to assure my dear sister of my welfare and increasing confidence in the success of my undertaking.”
–Frankenstein
“This is certainly a beautiful country.”
–Wuthering Heights
“I am already far north of London, and as I walk in the streets of Petersburg, feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight.”
–Frankenstein
“In all England, I do not believe I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society.”
–Wuthering Heights
“Do you understand this feeling?”
–Frankenstein
“A perfect misanthrope’s heaven—and Mr. Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us.”
–Wuthering Heights
“This breeze, which has traveled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes.”
–Frankenstein
“A capital fellow!”
–Wuthering Heights
“Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid.”
–Frankenstein
“He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further on his waistcoat, as I announced my name.”
–Wuthering Heights
“I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.
–Frankenstein
“Mr. Heathcliff?” I said.
–Wuthering Heights
Image: Pierre Antoine Augustin Vafflard, Young Holding his Dead Daughter in his Arms, 1804, oil on canvas, 94 x 76 inches, Musée Municipal, Angoulême
End Notes
1. Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, translated by Alastair Hamilton (London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 2001), 18
Imaginary Dinner Party is a literary series by Lynn Crawford that explores “what happens when books join forces.” Read the archive:
Part One, Under Stories (spring 2021)
Part Two, Heal the People (summer 2021)
Part Three, Think Like a Detective (fall 2021)
Part Four, Possession (winter 2022)
Part Five, Forms of Engagement (spring 2022)
Part Six, Conversations (summer 2022)
Part Seven (fall 2022)
Part Eight (winter 2023)
Part Nine (spring 2023)
Part Ten (summer 2023)
Part Eleven (fall 2023)
Part Twelve (winter 2024) Part Thirteen (spring 2024)
Part Fourteen (summer 2024)
Lynn Crawford’s books include Simply Separate People (2002), Fortification Resort (2005), Shankus & Kitto: A Saga (2016), and Paula Regossy (2020). She is currently working on her next novel, Closely Touched Things. An excerpt from that book, Take Away From the Total, was published in issue no. one of Three Fold.