My Problem with Sexed Up Classics

I was recently taken to task by a commenter for being judgmental for replying that I didn’t want to read ‘yet another unoriginal retelling’ of a classic with the sex dumped in. This was in reference to recently produced and eroticised version of Wuthering Heights. This is the latest in a slew of sexed-up classics published in the last few years. There are a number of publishers releasing a whole raft of them.

The phenomenon of why books become classics and enter the canon in the first place is a very interesting one. I’m not going to address it here, because why certain texts become classics and who determines which texts deserve to be there is a cultural and social study in itself. This has been addressed by some of the most notable thinkers of the 20th Century.

Certainly, of more interest to me, because of my studies, is how eroticism has been written about through the ages. What choices and limitations authors practiced under in their times, and how they coped with those restrictions.

The particular book in question, in the comment, was Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights happens to be very dear to my heart for a number of reasons. To begin with, it has a strangely lopsided structure. It has two main characters, which was unusual for the time.  And it continues to be, in my estimation, one of the most deeply erotic works ever written.

It’s not an easy book for modern readers to read, because the way Brontë used language is simply very different to the way we use it today. Admittedly, it’s not as hard to read as Chaucer or Shakespeare, but language does change with time and the very subtle ways in which we imply, hint, infer things have shifted radically. In any given time period, writers leave a lot out of their work; they make assumptions about what might seem obvious to a reader in their time. That also changes with the years. People don’t speak to each other in the same way as they did in 1850. So in the 21st Century, we are reading Wuthering Heights through something of a spiderweb of lost cultural nuance. Nonetheless, I believe one of the reasons it stands up so well, over 150 years later, is because the society Brontë is describing, the landscape, the atmosphere and the characters were probably quite strange, even in her time. In a way, Wuthering Heights is and has always been a piece of speculative fiction. (It is worth taking a look at a summary of the critical response to the novel when it came out – many contemporary critics found the language difficult as well)

Heathcliff is a particularly modern character. In the mid-19th Century, people didn’t often spend a lot of time obsessing about their identities in the way we do today. Usually, the main reason to ponder identity in those days revolved around inheritance, rather than our modern need to interrogate our ‘truths’. Yet both Emily and Charlotte Brontë do so; Jane Eyre is also very much a novel of identity. I’ve often wondered at the tremendous, subverted erotic tension that must have existed in the Brontë household, because both these women wrote about erotic desire in its most tempestuous and destructive form.

I first read Wuthering Heights at fourteen. Even then, I was perfectly aware of the sexual tension that electrifies the novel. By the time I read it again, at university, at the age of 23, I was fully capable of ‘filling in the unwritten’ eroticism in the novel.

Look, I’m a writer of erotic fiction, and you’d think I would be a staunch proponent of making ‘the implicit’ explicit. I’m not. I am first a writer and I honour the fact that, within the constraints of her time, Emily Brontë wrote as erotic a novel as she could. She used atmosphere, metaphor, dialogue, conflict and horror to eloquently paint a picture of an erotic desire so strong it survived past death. The eroticism is there, everywhere, in the text if readers would get off their cerebral asses and actively read the text. Just like in 1847, this is a novel where you, as the reader, are expected to use your very active imagination to make the implicit explicit.

Sexing up the classics, and especially this classic is, I believe, bad for our brains. In its original form, Wuthering Heights begs the modern reader to play ‘what if’ with their imagination. Time and cultural change challenge us to fill in the gaps of what could not be made explicit at the time. It exercises our erotic imaginations in a way that an explicit fuck scene never can.

Looking into the semi-opaque world of classic texts, and actively reading the eroticism into them as we read, is good for us. It keeps our minds fertile and questing. Reproducing those stories and adding in ten explicit sex scenes robs us of the opportunity to use our imaginative powers.

But more than all of that… what is it about us that we cannot value new stories? Are there no new stories left to tell? I don’t believe that.

Yes, I am a very judgmental writer. I don’t hide it and I don’t deny it. I think, if you are a REAL erotic fiction writer, you will find new stories to tell, not rehash old ones.