This post, authored byGuy de la Bédoyère, is republished with permission fromThe Daily Sceptic
The other day I wrote a piece about theNHS and cousin marriagefor this site. It included a quote fromWuthering Heights, so my attention was drawn to a piece in theTelegraphby Liam Kelly about Gen Z beingtoo dumb to readWuthering Heights. Apparently, the appearance of the latest movie adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 classic, which originally appeared 10 years into the reign of Victoria (1837-1901), has led to a boom in sales:
The hotly anticipated film adaptation ofWuthering Heights, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has led to a surge in sales of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. Bookshops shifted more than five times as many copies last month (10,670) as in January last year (1,875), according to publisher Penguin.
Many of the books have been bought by young people eager to understand the story of Cathy and Heathcliff before Emerald Fennell’s big-screen version hits cinemas on Friday. But if stories circulating online are to be believed, many of these newly bought novels are being left largely unread.
Social media sites, including TikTok, are starting to feature guides to the novel, but:
These struggles are not confined to social media. A colleague reports that at a press screening for the film earlier this week, two women discussed their thoughts on the book. One, who was reading it for the first time, said her “brain rot” – a Gen Z term for chronic short attention span – had left her unable to grasp much of the plot or language.
Gone are the days when literature students could move from discussingPride and Prejudiceone week toCrime and Punishmentthe next. A viral piece in American online magazine theAtlanticin October 2024 featured professors who said students were struggling to read full novels or even poetry. One reported that only extracts from Homer’sOdysseyare now set, supplemented with “music, articles andTed Talks”, because even elite students are unable to grasp the full text or its themes.
Now, this started me thinking about whether we really are staring at an existential crisis. I was a history teacher for nine years. Some of my students studiedWuthering Heightsfor their A-level English Literature. Since I took an interest in their other subjects because I enjoyed encouraging them to see links across the curriculum, I decided it was about time I readWuthering Heights. So, I did. Or at least I tried to.
And no, I didn’t finish it, though God knows I tried. Hard going barely describes the experience of reading it, which was like trying to crawl up a cliff with lead weights attached to my ankles while my eyelids metamorphosed into concrete shutters. It reminded me of Samuel Johnson’s comment about the novelist Samuel Richardson (ClarissaandPamela), “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself.”
I should perhaps add at this point that I have written over 30 books (admittedly all non-fiction), so I could hardly be accused of being a brain-dead zombie. I might point out that I can claim legitimately to be an expert in aspects of 17th-century English too, so it’s not as if archaisms are beyond me. I also have some ability in Latin and Greek which means the etymology of many more complex terms is not impenetrable to me either.
Source: modernity
