After ending her extramarital affair with Heathcliff, Catherine Linton wastes away in a bizarre room designed to look and feel like the skin on her body. Gone are her blood-red gowns, her ribboned hairstyles, her face gems and flashy jewels; she spends her last days in a white nightdress, looking forlornly out the window as her complexion and the room designed to mirror it grow ashy and pale. In parallel scenes, Heathcliff keeps his wife Isabella chained up (willingly) and demands she write letters to Cathy on his behalf.
Welcome to controversial director Emerald Fennell’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Though these scenes are the story’s culminating moments, the entire film is characterized by a sensual surrealism that transforms the haunting classic into a romantic fever dream. Nobody, least of all Fennell, ever claimed it would be a faithful adaptation of the classic novel. But is it a good one?
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was first released in 1847. Since then, the book’s exploration of love, obsession, jealousy and revenge through the tale of Cathy and Heathcliff have gripped (and disturbed) generations of readers.
In a 1916 reflection on the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf discussed what makes Emily’s only novel so compelling. Wuthering Heights was not merely about “the love of men and women,” Woolf claimed. It transcended that. With Wuthering Heights, Emily “looked out upon a world cleft into gigantic disorder and felt within her the power to unite it in a book.”
Disorder. Transcendence. That which scares us and excites us. Cathy and Heathcliff seem so “impossible,” as Woolf says. So wicked, so wretched. And yet there is something in them that we recognize as extraordinarily real. Their choices are not merely reflections of the power of physical attraction and romantic desire, but also of the most flawed and vulnerable depths of human nature. The brilliance of Wuthering Heights is that no character is only a victim or villain. It is all much more complicated than that.
Fennell’s adaptation, which stars Margot Robbie as Cathy and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff, does capture some of the original text’s haunting effect. There are breathtaking shots of the imposing cliffs of North and West Yorkshire, and striking scenes set at Thrushcross Grange, the Linton family’s extravagant estate, where vivid colors and bizarre decorations create a decadent fantasy land. And then there are the imposing silhouettes of the Wuthering Heights home itself, all dark wood and looming shadows.
The film has garnered criticism for being historically inaccurate since the first teasers were released, and it’s true that Emily Brontë could hardly have imagined Robbie’s red latex gown or the hyperpop musical collaboration between Charli XCX and John Cale that plays in one of the first few scenes of the film.
Yet these complaints hardly seem relevant. Fennell was, by her own explanation, much more interested in capturing the way the book made her feel when she first read it as a teenager than in trying to recreate the story as it would have looked or sounded when it was first released.
And these aesthetic choices are hardly the most significant departures from the source material. Fennell also eliminated a number of characters, including the book’s entire second generation. She also cut much of the more horrifying violence from the book, including a moment where Heathcliff hangs his new wife Isabella’s dog.
Fennell is right that most viewers probably don’t want to see that. I myself felt relief when it became clear that she had transformed the abusive relationship between Heathcliff and Isabella (whom in the book he marries and then mistreats solely to exact spiteful revenge on her brother, Cathy’s husband Edgar) into an explicitly consensual sadomasochistic partnership in which Isabella is deriving her own pleasure and satisfaction. After all, who wants to watch someone endure misery at the hands of someone who is also miserable?
But I am reluctant to endorse Fennell’s omissions, and my relief over Isabella’s treatment is a key reason why.
Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff is a harrowing character, both because of the violence he endures and the violence he inflicts on others. As a child, Heathcliff, who is described as having dark skin and dark hair, is subjected to belittlement from the Earnshaw family who take him in from the streets of Liverpool. (There have been diverse opinions about Heathcliff’s specific racial identity, though it seems clear that the character is singled out as a racial “other” throughout the novel.)
Though Cathy Earnshaw warms to Heathcliff, with the two becoming close companions, her brother Hindley is filled with contempt and cruelty that only worsens after his father dies. Heathcliff is reduced to servitude and endures physical abuse.
So when Cathy, who loves Heathcliff, nonetheless decides to marry the wealthy Edgar Linton, Heathcliff’s anger and resentment consumes him. His obsession is not, as Fennell’s adaptation suggests, his love for Cathy alone. It is also a hunger for revenge, a desire to make others suffer as he has, which leads him to act inhumanly to others in turn, including his wife, his son, and Cathy and Hindley’s children.
It is also notable that in Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” Heathcliff is played by Elordi, who is white and handsome. Though this version of the character is also treated as a servant, he and Cathy seem mostly kept apart by mistakes and misunderstandings. The majority of the harm they do is to themselves and to each other.
This version of Heathcliff may make the film a more pleasurable and accessible watch. But Wuthering Heights is not heralded as one of the greatest works of British literature because it was palatable or easy. The very opposite is true.
Emily Brontë tells a complex story about how alienation, discrimination and dehumanization damage us. Though Wuthering Heights is not a book with a clear or commanding moral imperative, the rippling effects of cruelty in the story demonstrate that humans are emotionally and spiritually shaped by how we are treated. The book forces us to grapple with the dark things that characters we might sympathize with become capable of when their spirits are broken. Brontë certainly offers her readers no relief.
Despite the viscerality and sensuality of the new “Wuthering Heights,” the film hovers, as Woolf put it, in the realm of the “love of men and women.” It does not succeed at, nor even really attempt, any reckoning with a “world cleft into gigantic disorder.”
Emerald Fennell’s project is beautiful, it’s evocative, it’s romantic. It may be a good Valentine’s Day watch. But it does not force us to face that which is most dangerous and frightening about being a person in relationship with other people, as we all are. It’s just another love story.
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