I’m reading Wuthering Heights in hopes the Secret Goth Cabal will let me keep my Goth Card and I have to say, this book would make a lot more sense if people didn’t all have the same or similar names.
@KimberlyHirsh I am also currently reading Wuthering Heights and they are all such terrible horny people
@KimberlyHirsh “if people didn’t all have the same or similar names” — should be a general rule for authors. In the book I’m reading right now there’s a Dylan and a Ryan…
@Miraz In Wuthering Heights, there are two Catherines, a Heathcliff, a Hindley, and a Hareton. There are 5 people with the last name Linton including, at different times, both Catherines, and 5 or 6 people with the last name Earnshaw, also including at different times both Catherines.
@KimberlyHirsh I’m pretty sure it’s on purpose, to emphasize the generational cycles of abuse and trauma
Granted, it does get a tad confusing :/
@wisewillow.bsky.social I’m sure it is. I just wish there were more clarity about which person anyone is talking about in any particular instance.
@wisewillow.bsky.social No because even when Cathy I is dead people are talking about when she was alive. The whole thing turns my brain to mush. Super compelling, but makes me mush.
@KimberlyHirsh @Miraz Small town / rural living! Interrelated people cycle through the same limited set of names. In my area, you tell people apart by their country nicknames, because it is only polite to name the younger generations after the older ones; but I dunno, distinguishing people by nicknames like “Tink” and “Tootie” and “Dumpsey” might detract from the Gothic atmosphere 😹
@Miraz if one of the Catherines was known as “Tootie” and the other as “Cookie” this would all be solved.
@annahavron Oh, no. I disagree — those names are spelled the same and (nearly) rhyme. I’d need Tootie and Biscuit. 🤣
@Miraz Excellent point! I guess since they’re Brits someone could be called “Biscuit”… if it was a “Biscuit” in the U.S. South it wouldn’t be the same as a “Cookie” but there has got to be a “Biscuit” around somewhere… now I keep thinking of country nicknames… Peanut, Stumpy, Tank, Dawg, Turtle, Mudcat, Scooter, Little Bob, Cricket… of course Sissy and Bubba…
@annahavron Thanks for that link. I’d looked up country nicknames but didn’t get far. Names are so interesting.
@Miraz I think the hard part about them, for some of the people I know, is that sometimes they can be embarrassing; but the rule is (as far as I can determine it), that someone else gives it to you, people usually get them when they are very young, and they are often ironic (e.g. calling a big kid “Tiny”). Oh, and you have them for life, and beyond. They appear in obituaries and sometimes even on tombstones.
@KimberlyHirsh For books like that I literally have to write my own name list/cheat sheet in order to make it through.😂
@KimberlyHirsh It’s the opposite of the problem I have reading War and Peace, where everybody is referred to by three different forms of their names that would be obvious to a Russian but took me a good 300 pages to sort out. Turns out there were not nearly as many characters as I thought.
@annahavron I was thinking of old German Pennsylvania and a town where (I recall reading) there was a Sheep Joe and a Wet Joe. The reasons being lost to whatever that sort of knowledge is lost to.
@dwalbert Same with Anna Karenina and Russian novels in general. I write down little charts on file cards and use them as bookmarks. Some characters have nicknames on top of their several formal names.
Re Wuthering Heights, I felt as if the repeating names were important, emphasizing the hellish, constricting loop of the story.
@dwalbert 😹 👀 I thank God I’m Not From Around Here and therefore never got saddled with a country nickname, though I do always enjoy meeting some huge grizzled guy and finding out that everyone calls him ‘Peanut.’
@dwalbert Wuthering Heights manages to somehow give everyone the same names while also giving everyone 2 or 3 different names (e.g. Hareton is Mr. Earnshaw but at one point Hindley is Mr. Earnshaw and before that, Hindley’s dad is Mr. Earnshaw). For the first 20% I couldn’t even tell how many people there were.
@JohnBrady That’s the point where reading has to move to a different chair, by the table where I keep a pencil and some post-it flags. I did eventually settle into W&P—very much worth the effort. (WH less so. As a psychological exploration of the effects of abuse it’s interesting, especially for that time, but I could not wait for the daggum thing to be over.) The bigger challenge was the untranslated French, the presence of which tells the reader much about the characters and their interactions, but which I can only sometimes sorta read.
@KimberlyHirsh The other thing I wonder about—almost completely unrelated—is what the contemporary reaction to WH really was, behind all the moralizing. Did women read it with a false cover, like they did 50 Shades of Gray 160 years later? (Not literally, as there weren’t dust jackets—but.) So of course I typed some version of my question into The Machine and found this, from which I learned that “The author of Wuthering Heights has evidently eaten toasted cheese.”
@dwalbert Some good stuff there. I liked DG Rossetti’s “The action is laid in Hell, – only it seems places and people have English names there.” I’ll add a quote I saved from a review of the (apparently awful) new movie: “When I finished reading it for the first time as a teenager, I remember shoving my copy under my bed instead of returning it to my bookshelf; the unsettled feeling that I had read something fundamentally obscene lingered in my bones for days.”