Delving into your own ignorance sometimes has the secondary effect of revealing to you how incurious you've been over the years. Certainly I've heard the name Wuthering Heights for most of my life, and probably knew the story through a movie or television adaptation long before I read it, but it never occurred to me to wonder what "wuthering" meant. I assumed that it was just an atmospheric name given to a kind of gloomy place and if anyone had asked me, I would hazarded the guess that Bronte just invented it.
However, an early sentence in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas changed all that. In describing a very basic church, his narrator says "No organist played a Magnificat but the wind in the flue chimney, no choir sang a Nunc Dimittis but the wuthering gulls, yet I fancy the Creator was not displeazed."
Now leaving aside the fact that I have no idea what a Nunc Dimittis is, I was quite surprised to see that wuthering in there as an adjective for gulls. And it doesn't help me figure out the Wuthering Heights angle either. I suppose I always thought that "wuthering" in the book title meant something like "stormy" or "foreboding". But "wuthering gulls" doesn't seem that it could have this threatening aspect. It seems more like wandering or airborne or even cawing, and maybe in the context of the sentence, it would be more likely to have something to do with the sound they make. I am not going to get any further on this by deduction, so let's cut to the chase.
Okay. "Wuthering" comes from Northern English dialect, and is a version of the Scot "whither", to blow fiercely. It derives from the Old Norse word for "squall", which is hvitha. The sense in which Wuthering Heights and wuthering gulls come together is that both are buffeted by and at the mercy of strong winds. The Heights would simply be battered; the gulls, more mobile, wind-tossed.
Uttered on the shores of an island off the coast of New Zealand by a San Franciscan, this seems like an exceptionally long way for a word of local dialect to have traveled. Perhaps it was wuthered there.
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I'm not sure I had ever ventured a guess on this one. Of course, I haven't read Wuthering Heights.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
You know, I've always vaguely wondered about wuthering, but apparently never enough to actually look it up.
ReplyDeleteBut what a great word and etymology ... it's almost onomatopoeic!
Peter, Wuthering Heights is a great novel. And there's a wonderful essay in Madwoman in the Attic that illuminated it for me.
ReplyDeleteNate, I'm very much afraid that it's explained plainly in the book somewhere and I just don't remember. But in any case, both wuther and the Scottish whither are great words, aren't they? And of course I now wonder whether the more familiar whither, as in where, is connected, but thought I'd leave that for another time. If ever.
Whew--that's a lot of wh- words and now I've added one more.
Whilom. That's another.
ReplyDeleteNunc is a part of one of my favorite words in any language: quidnunc, from the Latin quid nunc?, what now? It means "busybody, someone always pestering one with questions, seeking gossip and so on.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
And you could probably call someone a quidnunc these days without even risking offending them.
ReplyDeleteWhilom, though, I don't know. I don't believe I've ever heard it used in a sentence.
I know I've heard whilom, but I have read it. I am a whilom student, you know.
ReplyDeleteWait, I take that back. I'm still a student.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Got it. Handy little word I think--wonder why it fell into disuse.
ReplyDeleteOops. I meant that I haven't heard whilom, though I have read it.
ReplyDeleteFigured it out.
ReplyDeleteWhen reading the book, it never once crossed my mind to look up wuthering in the dictionary, even though I had no idea what it meant.
ReplyDeleteThat probably says a lot about me.
One of my college professors once described the Bronte sisters (Charlotte and Emily) in terms of the Beatles. Some people are John fans and some people are Paul fans, i.e. some people like Charlotte and some like Emily.
Don't know how accurate that is, but I love Jane Eyre and could take or leave Wuthering Heights.
I think most people just are content to think of Wuthering Heights as a place name and leave it at that. It's a perfect sounding sort of name. And wuthering is not a word you're going to hear too often apart from that. But if you do come across it elsewhere, you think, What? That's a real word? And that's very fun.
ReplyDeleteI love the Brontes. When I was a kid, my father brought home a biography of the family from the library for me to read--I think I remember this because he didn't often select reading for me. So the family captured my imagination before I ever read the books.
I don't have a favorite, though I understand why people tend to fall into camps about them. I was influenced in my reading Wuthering Heights by an essay in Madwomen in the Attic about it's mythological and archetypal aims. Also, if memory serves, I was actually reading Wuthering Heights for the first time while on the moors and staying in a hostel at Haworth whre they lived. Which helps with the atmosphere.
The wind was definitely wuthering while we were there.
Seana,
ReplyDeleteProbably a dumb question, but have you read Wide Sargasso Sea? I don't remember too much about it, other than it being very concerned with the "mad woman in the attic."
That biography must have been very interesting. The extremely gifted sisters Bronte didn't enjoy the longest of lives, from what I recall.
It's not a dumb question, but yes I have read it, though like you it was so long ago now that I've forgotten a lot of the plot. I think it was Adrienne Rich, the poet, who also did a nice little feminist rereading of Jane Eyre, which addresses the question of Bertha too.
ReplyDeleteYes, the two oldest sisters died in childhood while away at rotten school, which I think plays some part in Jane's school story. But of all of them, it is Branwell, the lone brother who I feel most sorry for. He destroyed himself with drink and maybe other things. Possibly because everyone laid too many hopes on him and he couldn't live up to it. But I might have that part wrong.
It's a cautionary tale, anyway.
I so rarely know enough to actually be a stickler, but here's a rare opportunity.
ReplyDeleteDana Stevens has a review up on Slate called Wuthering Wolfman. Unless she is talking about Benicio del Toro being windblown, I don't think that's actually right!
Forgive the gloating, but there are going to be precious few opportunities to show off my expertise on "wuthering" and this is one of them.
Maybe the headline writer alluded to some plot similarity between The Wolfman and Wuthering Heights. (I worked on the features desk two days last week and wrote the headline to my paper's review of the movie. I wrote "`Wolfman' is a real dog." I should check to see if it got in the paper.)
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
I'm sure that is the intention but it is wrong, wrong, wrong!
ReplyDeleteWell, at least you and your paper's reviewer agree on the movie. I like your headline better.
Poor Benicio. He's such a good actor and he gets these terrible parts. I'm sure someone told him this was a prudent move like it was for Hugh Jackman and his taking on a more beastly character. I suppose he'll make some money though.
Yep, sometimes actors in major movies just have to sacrifice their art to make some money. It pains them grievously, I'm sure.
ReplyDelete==============
Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Well, I don't begrudge them it, really. But I like them to at least sometimes do what they are actually gifted at. Del Toro has at least done a few indie movies that he can be proud of.
ReplyDeleteThe Wuthering Wolfman review linked to an article in which Benicio Del Toro talks about The Wolfman.
ReplyDeleteNow, that gets on my nerves. Think pieces that are nothing but publicity, and the media's prostrate complicity in the publicity making.
I don't know if this is fitting, but my v-word is hyper.
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Detectives Beyond Borders
"Because Murder Is More Fun Away From Home"
http://www.detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/
Hmm, I didn't actually see that link. I'd be curious what if anything del Toro has to say. Isn't one of the current kings of horror, Guillermo del Toro his brother or something?
ReplyDeleteI didn't read the interview. He could have said something worthwhile. Take a million movie stars and interview them a million times to promote a million movies, and one might say something worthwhile. I don't know about Benicio del Toro's horrible brother.
ReplyDeleteI did find out that they are not related.
ReplyDeleteI also watched a little flashy no content clip about the movie that was mostly designed to show off some of the action clips, but I liked the part where Benicio said that he used to watch horror movies as a kid and just be horrified at the way the monsters were treated. Persecuted without evidence or a fair trial, he just thought it was so unfair.
Now that's my kind of actor.
He was wonderful in Things We Lost in the Fire, by the way, a movie that did not get anything like the kind of attention it should have.
A nice coincidence, then, that one gravitated to horror and other sympathized with monsters even thought they're not related.
ReplyDeleteAnother good v-word: tries