I read Wuthering Heights for the first time as a senior in high school. Of course I had seen that iconic quote, “Whatever his soul is made of, his and mine are the same,” and I was so excited to read a gothic romance. That is not what I got, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Despite what the tag line for Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of the film might suggest, Wuthering Heights is not the greatest love story of all time. Heathcliff and Catherine don’t even kiss in the book y’all. The book is about obsession and revenge. It tackles topics like domestic abuse, trauma, and the Victorian class system. Ultimately, this adaptation of the novel sensationalizes abuse and is sending the message to its target audience of young women that “it’s okay if you’re being mistreated as long as the guy looks like Jacob Elordi.”
The biggest issue with this adaptation (and to be totally fair, many others as well), is that Jacob Elordi’s character, Heathcliff, is described as a person of color in the novel. There is no arguing that. Emily Brontë literally writes that he has dark skin. His status as an orphaned person of color is what ultimately leads to his abuse by the Earnshaw’s, the family of Margot Robbie’s character which ultimately leads to his own manipulative, abusive plot to get revenge on the Earnshaw’s and their entire extended family.
Later in the book, Heathcliff disappears and returns years later having accumulated wealth. Heathcliff uses his new economic power to enact his revenge because of how he was treated by them in his youth. Fennell says that she wanted to focus on the sado-masochistic elements of the novel, but these elements literally would not exist if Heathcliff wasn’t a poor man of color. The movie attempts to get away with this by focusing on the fact that Elordi’s Heathcliff was a poor, abandoned boy who wouldn’t have been able to be with Catherine because of their class disparity. This erasure from Heathcliff’s story makes it so everything he did was in the name of love, and it is quite obvious that Fennell wants her audience to think that love as a motive is inherently hot. But is it really love, or is it an obsessive need for control?
Not only does this film adaptation completely disregard racial elements of the novel, but it treats abuse as something necessary for plot development. In the novel, Heathcliff’s wife, Isabella, writes letters to Catherine and her maid Nelly saying that Heathcliff is incredibly abusive and that she fears for her life. However, in the movie Heathcliff does not actually abuse Isabella, but rather forces her to write letters claiming she is being abused in an attempt to get the attention of Catherine. In the film, Nelly comes to visit Isabella to try and ensure her safety, but her and Heathcliff have devised a plan to try and show Nelly that she’s actually really into the way she’s being treated. All Fennell succeeded in with this plot line is sensationalizing abuse, making it hot to be treated this way because Elordi sure is easy on the eyes.
I will say the film has some redeeming qualities. Fennell sure does know how to make a pretty movie. The direction, set design, and cinematography were all outstanding. Also, Charlie xcx’s companion album is fantastic. However, none of this excuses the blatant racism and misogyny the film was built on.
I will also applaud Fennell for including quotation marks around the title because this certainly is an adaptation of Wuthering Heights. It is definitely the version of the story that lives in her head, rather than the one Emily Brontë wrote in 1847.
But what do I know? As the casting director for the film said in response to the criticism of Elordi’s casting there’s “no need to be accurate” because “it’s just a book.”