Lennie and Gram cut up Wuthering Heights in a scene where shared anger over Bailey’s absence becomes a way back to one another. Lennie’s marked, weathered copy of the novel becomes the target of their grief and frustration; as they tear through its pages together, the act ends not in estrangement but in laughter, an embrace, and a tentative sense of forgiveness.

Causes and Background

The scene follows Gram’s furious rejection of the idea that Bailey is simply carried in the hearts of those who loved her. Gram wants Bailey present in ordinary life: in the kitchen with her and Lennie, at the river with Toby and their baby, and onstage as Juliet or Lady Macbeth. The imagined futures make the loss concrete, while Gram’s anger insists that remembrance cannot substitute for Bailey’s physical presence.

Wuthering Heights lies nearby, its story of wasted lives and love drawing Lennie’s attention. The copy bears the marks of years of reading and living: underlining and annotations, creases, soil, river water, beach sand, and sweat. Lennie offers Gram the book and the garden shears, urging her to cut it apart. Unlike earlier that morning, Lennie feels no fear as she takes up the shears.

What Happens

Lennie begins cutting through the pages, treating the book’s doomed love and tragedy as something she can attack. Her anger reaches beyond the novel: in her thoughts, she turns against Joe Fontaine’s jealousy, anger, judgment, and inability to forgive, then against her own duplicity, confusion, hurt, poor judgment, and seemingly endless grief. She connects these wounds to what is keeping her and Joe from sharing their love while they still can.

Gram first watches wide-eyed, then smiles faintly and asks for a turn. She begins tentatively but soon joins Lennie in hacking through handfuls of pages. Words scatter around them like confetti. The destruction becomes mutual rather than solitary: Gram does not merely witness Lennie’s outburst but takes part in it, and they end the cutting out of breath, laughing and giddy.

Consequences and Aftermath

Their shared laughter gives way to renewed affection. Lennie jokes that she must be related to Gram; Gram pulls her onto her lap as if she were five and tells her she has missed her. Lennie thinks she is forgiven. Gram also apologizes for shouting, and Lennie hugs her back before offering to make tea.

The scene does not resolve the family’s bereavement or Lennie’s pain over Joe. Instead, it marks a change in the relationship between Lennie and Gram: anger and grief, which had left them feeling distant, become something they can face together. Cutting up the novel is at once an attack on its tragic love story and a physical expression of Lennie’s wish to clear the way for the love she and Joe might still share.