Why Emerald Fennel’s “Wuthering Heights” Erases the Importance of Emily Bronte’s Book.
Do you enjoy passionate, dark, and unconventional tales of forbidden love? Depictions of obsessive and possessive romantic connection, driven on by cycles of violence that result from injustice? Emily Brontë’s one and only novel Wuthering Heights explores these ideas and Emerald Fennel’s recent film adaptation of the novel does nothing of the sort. This film erases the already strong standing message of Brontë’s book. This story isn’t supposed to be one of love, it’s about violence. How violence moves in circles and how colonization makes a monster out of both the colonized and the colonizer.
I want to start off by highlighting how love is portrayed in the novel. First, Nelly is the one who recounts the events that took place at Wuthering Heights. She was once a maid that took care of Cathy. Heathcliff and Cathy meet at the age of six, when her father, Mr. Earnshaw, returns from Liverpool, a major port for slave ships at this time. Instead of bringing Cathy and her brother Hindley a souvenir from his travels, he brings home a child. A child he named Heathcliff.
Heathcliff is described as having dark skin and being of South Asian or African descent. Because of his features he is regarded as uncivilized and “other.” Heathcliff is treated horribly by his “brother” Hindley, who is sent off to college by Mr. Earnshaw because of his behavior. However, when Mr. Earnshaw tragically passes, Hindley returns with a wife to take over the estate of Wuthering Heights. With Hindley’s new rule to power, he makes Heathcliff a slave. Cathy on the other hand is obsessed with Heathcliff. She dares not to leave Helathcliff’s side while also not being afraid to get the both of them into trouble.
One day, Cathy and Heathcliff spy on an estate just four miles from Wuthering Heights, called Thrushcross Grange. The Linton family owns the estate and one of their dogs attacks Cathy. The Linton’s decide to take her in so they can aid her wound and make sure it does not get infected. After five weeks at Thrushcross Grange, becoming well acquainted with the Linton children, Isabllea and Edgar, Cathy returns to Wuthering Heights a different person. She has learned manners and has taken an astute liking to Edgar, a man described as blonde with blue eyes. However, Catherine’s love for Heathcliff still burns unhealthy bright. She obsesses over him, and refers to him as her soulmate as she states “I am Healthcliff.” However, she ultimately chooses Edgar. A man who symbolizes the status quo.
Cathy goes against what she truly desires, and this decision is not only to show her want to be of a better social status while leaving Heathcliff behind, it’s commentary on the status quo of the British Empire, how whiteness is what should be desired and strived for. After marrying Edgar, Heathcliff disappears for three years and when he comes back, he is well refined and rich. This isn’t just to get Cathy back, it is the beginning of his pathway of revenge against anyone who treated him poorly in his adolescence.
After finding Cathy still married to Edgar, Heathcliff begins to take a liking towards Edgar’s sister; Isabella Linton. She is a bright and hopeful woman, who was able to break race barriers Cathy wasn’t able to break herself. He elopes with her out of jealous rage for Cathy and Isabella endures horrific abuse. She’s tormented, abused, and sexually assaulted. As a result she escapes from Wuthering Heights to London, an incredibly unlikely thing to happen in the Victorian era. Healthcliff abuses Isabllea because of his desire for revenge.
Cathy and Heatcliff’s relationship is chaotic and possessive. Cathy eventually is due to give birth to a child but she experiences complications that soon lead to her death. After Cathy’s death and the birth of her daughter, also named Catherine, Heathcliff becomes more enraged. Isabllea has a son named Linton, and Hindley has a son named Hareton before passing away. Heathcliff takes on ownership of Wuthering Heights and goes on to torture the next generation of childern produced by the people who hurt him as well as the person who he hurt. The book ends with the death of Healthcliff, starved and exhausted, obsessed with reuniting with Cathy’s ghost. The love between Heathcliff and Cathy is obsessive, possessive, chaotic and driven by selfish desires on both parties. This book isn’t a love story, it’s a cautionary tale about what love can do.
The love between Jacob Eldordi’s Heathcliff and Margon Robbie’s Cathy is equal to a star-crossed tragedy. Not only does the movie portray love like an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, it also portrays it as somewhat healthy. It’s portrayed as something the audience would want to be a part of, and that rings false for the entire message of Brontë’s writing. Not only that, but Shazad Latif, a South Asian actor plays Edgar. I feel that this choice also does more harm than good. It makes the stereotype evident that men of color are not desirable.
The depiction of love I am most upset about is the one between Heathcliff and Isabella. In the movie she is used for shock value, she enjoys being degraded. In one scene she crawls to Heathcliff like a dog and when Nelly goes to check on her, she winks in an attempt to non-verbally communicate that she likes what Heathcliff is doing to her. This points the cannon in the completely opposite direction for the messaging of the story. It erases what the book has to say about slavery, systemic racism, colonialism, and love.
The film has been advertised as an “erotic” and “steamy” love story that ultimately concludes in a tragic yet romantic end to star crossed lovers. But the issue at hand is Emerald Fennel is not a real pervert. If she wanted to take this piece of gothic literature and make it more steamy and erotic, there is no problem with that. But Emerald Fennel doesn’t understand erotica, period. The name of the game is restraint, that’s what makes erotica so tantalizing. The most erotic scene that occurs in the film is heard off screen and doesn’t even include the two main characters. I understand having issues with the visual adaptation of the story, however the story is already written and it already has a message that just needs to be translated on screen. This movie is nothing what it says it is. It’s not really steamy, it’s not erotic and it’s not Wuthering Heights.
The two people who are most important as second leads in the story, Edgar and Nelly, are played by people of color. Hong Chau plays Nelly and Shazad Latif plays Edgar, both who are white in the book. We don’t root for either of these characters. From the beginning, Nelly bothers Cathy, she gives Heathcliff the wrong idea when she and Cathy privately talk about her marriage to Edgar, she ultimately ignores Cathy when she says that her baby has died inside her womb and she is to blame when Cathy dies of sepsis. Edgar too is only a wealthy man who gets in the way of Jacob Elordi and Margo Robbie’s love. We aren’t supposed to feel bad for him, as for he is not as deep as Heathcliff, he is not as charming and he certainly isn’t Cathy’s soulmate. He is supposed to be viewed as the man who took Cathy away from Heathcliff. And instead of this plot point making sense, because in the book a brown man can’t marry a white woman of high social standing, it only seems to tell the audience that these two people of color are obstacles to a white love story. It removes all of the important statements made and reduces this incredibly complex novel into two white people having sex with each other and being victimized by people of color.
A brown man should have played Heathcliff; this drives the main points home of critique of systemic oppression and cycles of violence. Jacob Elordi could have played Edgar, this would have made the decision between heathcliff and edgar much more difficult because the audience would love Heathcliff’s beauty and character although he is regarded as “other” but the audience (not me personally but I’m guessing a lot of you) would find Edgar handsome and the idea of his wealth thrilling. This decision would have realistically put the audience in Cathy’s shoes.
The depiction of Isabella should have been true to the book to show just how horrible cycles of violence can be and how multi-dimensional Heathcliff is. Nelly shouldn’t be the reason Cathy dies, this does nothing for the plot except pin the audience against a woman of color. Nelly is an observer and I think the plot would have been just fine if kept that way.
In my humble opinion, I felt as though this movie had so much potential as a concept. It could have had the sex that sells and the message that an audience needs in our present time. Restraint should be shown through the desire of Heathcliff and Cathy, making every touch or interaction that much more palpable. I don’t think this means taking out sex or any sort of erotica entirely, it just means to make the stakes higher.
You can take gothic literature that makes a strong statement on power dynamics, social injustice and still make the main love story more erotic than it was in the book; this can heighten emotion in both directions. But what Emerald Fennel’s adaptation of the story does is ultimately erasure. The main take away from this movie should be how frightening and intense love can be, and how that symbolizes how violent colonization can be. This depiction was cowardly in its messaging and made a mockery out of one of the only books during the Victorian era to outright critique colonialism and slavery. You can tell when a director really resonates with the novel they depicted on screen. With Emerald Fennel’s adaptation, I felt nothing of the sort.
Media:
- Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush https://open.spotify.com/track/2VyjK8wf0S6J8FgAgoqOkw
- Trees and Flowers by Strawberry Switchblade https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7HtKLlBSBxeut0S9UqPdeW