• Emily Bronte ̈

    I was sitting at my desk, hunched over a book in the dim candlelight, a look of utter disgust across my features. At last, I thought, I’m at the last page…

    Reading the last paragraph in the book made my heart feel free and light, as if a large burden had been cast off. Finally, I had finished reading the worst four books in the history of literature, and my brain survived. Reading them was painful, but I was proud to have accomplished the feat.

    I sat up straight and immediately pulled out my quill and ink. Something, anything, had to be done about this travesty. Crossing out words, paragraphs… pages… chapters… I attempted to edit the books to a point where they were at least pieces that one could stand. Two tedious hours later, I snapped my quill in frustration and threw the book across the attic.
    All of the pages were crossed out. There was no possible way that even Jane Austen herself could fix the work into something remotely pleasing. No, not without a complete rewrite… a complete recreation of the nonexistent plot would be the only thing to save the dignity of whatever terrible creature had taken it upon them self to compose this… this… embarrassment.

    Could there not be a world in which books were all filled with real relationships, real love, real action, rather than empty infatuation and lust of two mindless beings? Not to mention that the authoress had absolutely no knowledge of my book, which she seemed to refer to at a disturbing frequency.

    Under normal circumstances, I would be quite flattered to see another so enraptured with the tale I created about Heathcliff and Catherine, but it is so very obvious that this “Stephenie Meyer” woman has not even cracked open the binding! Her quoting my novel, yes, MY NOVEL, to go along with her absent plot is absolutely insulting. Making parallels and the like, strongly implying that her sappy heroine is a counterpart to Catherine! The implications that Heathcliff is one in the same with her hero, and Edgar as the competition! I have never been so offended in my entire life.

    By making these failure parallels to my creations, she is therefore making the indirect claim that the relationship triangle in her tale is much like the one in Wuthering Heights. Exactly what similarities are there? Perhaps I am blind to them, but it would appear that the only thing my romantic conflict has with her (nonexistent) lusty anxiety is that they both have two members of the male population infatuated with the same woman. Exactly how does this one common base make her relationships counterpart mine?

    Heathcliff and Catherine loved each other as mere children, then growing over many years to the undying realization that their love for each other was so strong, it made them nothing less than unified hearts and souls. Catherine died over her love for Heathcliff, and he went mad over his love for her! This is tragic romance, real love, and something that is actually worth tears.

    It is all very separate from Stephenie Meyer’s saga, however. Bella declares her undying devotion to a vampire after just meeting him two weeks previously. Am I really the only one to see how ridiculously nonsensical this “love” is? Perhaps one would be reminded of the tale about Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet, where they declared their love and union within a mere forty-eight hours. The difference is that the lovely play written by Shakespeare is one ending in tragedy and regret, showing the dangers of lustful impulse and its contrast to true love. Bella and Edward, however, have none of that in their relationship. They live happily ever after with a physics-defying demon spawn child… who then captures the heart of Jacob Black, the so-called “Edgar parallel.”

    I do believe that I may never eat again, for fear of regurgitating whatever I happen to consume. Please write me when the date of Literature’s funeral is announced, as I would like to pay my respects to the mangled corpse.