Over at Pop Culture Junkies, Alea notes that the very striking and signature “look” of the Twilight cover featuring a woman’s arms with apple being offered seems to have been borrowed. Note the similarity with the cover of a collection of C. S. Lewis essays called Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian:
Nota bene: I rush to add the “borrowing” has been done by HarperOne; Words to Live By was published in 2007 during the first waves of Twilight mania. There’s no way this wasn’t an intentional “hat tip,” to put the kindest spin on that. But this Twilight echoing in book covers has just begun!
Take a look at these articles on Great Books editions published with Twilight looks:
* Galley Cat: Look what Edward and Bella Hath Wrought
* The Awl: Olde Books Get Vampirey Makeover
* The Guardian: Vampire Endorsement Turns Bronte into Best Seller
I mean, take a look:
Frankly, I love it. If putting Bronte in a Twilight wrapper with the pitch “Edward and Bella’s Favorite Book” means 10,000 copies of Wuthering Heights are sold, my suggestion is to revamp all the classics with a vampire look.
Your thoughts? (H/T to RHT on the CSL link and to Matthew for the Wuthering Heights articles!)
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Well, as Garrison Kiellor once said, “put the hay down where the goats can get it.” I agree. Let the wrappers lure readers in to Dracula’s den.
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“Frankly, I love it. If putting Bronte in a Twilight wrapper with the pitch “Edward and Bella’s Favorite Book” means 10,000 copies of Wuthering Heights are sold, my suggestion is to revamp all the classics with a vampire look.”
ROTFL. That’s beautiful! Nice pun, too.
Of course this is sending Wuthering Heights to the top of the classics chart. I don’t think everyone will find it as romantic as Bella did–I’m not expecting to (I put it on the requests list for one of my book clubs, so we’ll read it within the next few months.) Reading the classics is a good thing, however, even when said classics are painful to get through. Although I still think Tess of the D’Urbervilles is an awful book.
The American cover for Wuthering Heights is particularly lovely. For whatever it’s worth, all these covers–starting with the Twilight ones–remind me of some of the imagery in the 2004 Phantom of the Opera movie. [Hmm. I bet Bella and Edward really appealed to all those girls who saw that movie and thought Christine should have stuck with the (Gerard Butler) Phantom.]
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I’m with you on Tess, LibraryLily, shudder!
I’m delighted to see the crossover effect, though I do sometimes wonder what the expectations are. Edward’s assessment of WH is a pretty accurate one, in many ways. Heathcliff and Cathy are awful people, not nearly as appealing as Edward and Bella themselves. But it does have great tingle factor. Who doesn’t love a good back-from-the-dead love story? I have gotten a few students started on WH because they loved Twilight, but I’ve had much more success with Jane Eyre (which I like much better,too). I’m looking forward to getting some serious Twilight mileage out of Midsummer Night’s Dream this year too. This is going to better than the interest I get from explaining all the naughty humor. -
going to BE better, of course, whoops.
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I should give Jane Eyre aother crack, I suppose. As one who prizes honesty, especially in relationships, I could never get over Devious Rochester conning Jane into a bigamist sham marriage. And then whining about his crazy wife. Maybe I’d read it differently now.
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I agree that if such covers drive people to literary classics then by all means, bring on the apple, flower, and chess piece be-decked covers.
Yet, as Jonathon Fiske, Janet Radway, and other theorists of mass culture remind us, just because someone buys a book does not mean they will read it. Or, in other words, bestSELLER does not mean most read…
I have a sneaking suspicion many will not be enraptured by WH — it is a much slower, complex text that is far more taxing on the reader. I agree with Elizabeth that Jane Eyre will likely be more appealing to many — we just need a cover depicting Bertha as a red-haired villain (ala Victoria) and Jane as a would be, apple holding Bella (whith a Rochester-Edward look alike thrown in for good measure)! -
I’m not exactly appalled–publishers are entitled to publish books with whatever covers they please. However, some of the articles make it clear that readers *not* already familiar with Bronte do not like the books. However, another stereotype about readers of *Twilight* is that they do not read or enjoy other books. That is also demonstrably not true, as your blog proves, John.
One of my beefs with Meyer is that she seems to pick some of the most shallow readings of the works she chooses to reference. *Romeo and Juliet* and *Wuthering Heights* are reduced to mere love stories with no other content. Where’s the family drama? The social or generational conflict? The class consciousness? I also am not crazy about the idea of *Jane Eyre*, or *Pride and Prejudice* being read as only, or primarily, love stories. Where’s Jane’s moral fiber? Her self-sufficiency? How can you skim right over a moment like the one in which, worried that if she does not agree to being Rochester’s mistress, he will destroy himself, and anyway, “who cares for you?” and her response “I care for myself,” adding that her ethical and religious commitments trump “love conquers all.”
Arabella Figg, I do hope you will give *Jane Eyre* another chance and try looking at it as about Jane’s personal and spiritual growth. She goes from a girl who says she would let someone break her arm if only they would love her, to a young woman who determines to be self-supporting, with strong moral values. She even is able to look back at some of the more miserable experiences of her life, such as the extreme deprivation at Lowood School, as something that has formed her character. It’s not really about Rochester, though Jean Rhys’ *The Wide Sargasso Sea* is an interesting counterpoint, written from the point of view of Bertha.
And as someone brought up in a largely Jewish town with a fairly high number of people who had lost family in the Holocaust, I was very surprised to see an old-fashioned reading of *Merchant of Venice* as being about “justice.” A shallow Venetians = good, Shylock = bad reading is really reactionary at this point, and, to me, very disturbing. Also, Christine should have stuck with the Phantom? Devil’s Island Erik? Shudder. They need to see the Lon Chaney Sr. version.
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