To be fair to Emerald Fennell, adaptations of Wuthering Heights have always been controversial, and the first person to sell out Emily Brontë was her sister Charlotte in 1850. In the edition of that year, already PR-ing the family as more genteel and literary than it was, Charlotte watered down Joseph’s Yorkshire dialect to make the book more accessible to “Southerners”, while humblebragging the novel’s romantic wildness in the preface:
“Wuthering Heights must appear a rude and strange production [to] strangers who knew nothing of the author […] The wild moors of the north of England can for them have no interest: the language, the manners, the very dwellings and household customs of the scattered inhabitants of those districts must be to such readers in a great measure unintelligible, and – where intelligible – repulsive. Men and women who, perhaps, naturally very calm, and with feelings moderate in degree, and little marked in kind, have been trained from their cradle to observe the utmost evenness of manner and guardedness of language, will hardly know what to make of the rough, strong utterance, the harshly manifested passions, the unbridled aversions, and headlong partialities of unlettered moorland hinds and rugged moorland squires, who have grown up untaught and unchecked […]”
With her characteristic marketing nous, Charlotte was giving a reverse-exotic spin to criticisms made by reviewers on the book’s publication. Several honed in on the Earnshaws’ baseness and savagery, in terms reminiscent of those used in contemporary accounts of urban slums. Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper decried it for its “details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance”, which “disgusted, almost sickened” the reader. Another reviewer from the Examiner labelled it “wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable; and the people who make up the drama, which is tragic enough in its consequences, are savages ruder than those who lived before the days of Homer”. Emily Brontë kept cuttings of five reviews in her writing desk, which were found after her death. Each review, in some form or another, gestures towards the schisms of cultural capital at play in the novel, contrasting the “gentle” occupants of Thrushcross Grange against the “rude” inhabitants of Wuthering Heights – an assessment veined through with class politics. She was writing about race and class, and she knew it.
The political conflict between Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights is best seen as one between the yeoman class and the gentry, but throughout the book, boundaries that should contain working-class characters are also strained and subverted. Heathcliff disrupts conventions of economic inheritance and land ownership. Nelly Dean, the working-class narrator played by Hong Chau in the Fennell film, is a servant brought up with Catherine and Hindley, later acquiring an education of sorts in the Linton library. Joseph (Ewan Mitchell), the roughly puritanical farm servant, advises Mr Earnshaw on care and discipline for the children, and becomes a bitter, hypocritical guardian of the house. All three move above their stations and find themselves in unstable positions. The critic T K Meier points out that Heathcliff, the boy “taken nameless from a Liverpool slum”, transforms into “a gentleman’s son [who] in his new situation […] is at first rejected by family and servants alike, but achieves in time a violent communion with Cathy and a quieter toleration from Nelly Dean, two members of the household themselves undergoing a reduction from their former positions – Cathy from her rightful one of daughter and later sister of the squire, and Nelly from her unnatural former status of having been reared as a member of the family by Earnshaw” 1.
Meier points to the novel’s “profound genealogical decay” as a symbol of the “apparent disintegration of the class system; the five children of the second generation have dwindled to two in the third, despite four marriages prior to the union of Catherine and Hareton”. The principles of Christian morality, Meier notes, gradually disappear: “The local church closes its doors, the local lawyer becomes corrupt, and Joseph postulates a kind of theology of damnation as irrelevant as it is heretical; this, amid the general background of characters who are either weak, ignorant, foolish, or malevolent, heralds a culture in ruin”.
Heathcliff may himself be Earnshaw’s illegitimate son, as gestured towards by Mr Earnshaw’s unsatisfactory explanation for how he came upon Heathcliff as a foundling in Liverpool. Even before Heathcliff has so much as said a word within the narrative, this interpretation positions him as a threat to the “propriety” of the Earnshaw family, estate and wider class system. Conveniently, Heathcliff is younger than Hindley, somewhat mitigating the threat to primogeniture; however, he later interferes with another family’s inheritance pathway when he convinces the lawyer Mr Green to forge Edgar Linton’s will, enabling Heathcliff to take ownership of Thrushcross Grange. (During the Brontës’ time, inheritance was a hot-button topic; there was no standard legal process to bequeath possessions until the 1837 Wills Act.) It is worth remembering that Wuthering Heights may be set in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but Emily Brontë began work on it in 1845. That was only three years after the Chartists raised the “Leviathan petition” of three million signatures, and violent conflicts broke out between workers and employers in industrial towns, one of which was Haworth. It is fair to say that little sense of this has crept into the new film version of the story.
*
Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights has attracted much criticism for its casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and for its restyling of the work as a Fifty Shades of Brontë bodice-ripper. Fennell has said, by way of an apology for the film’s inaccuracies, that the film is her own half-remembered, half-imagined version of the story, which is why its correct title uses quotation marks, “Wuthering Heights”, not Wuthering Heights. This is the kind of thing artists do when they have been heavily praised and spent rather too long at work, but Heathcliff and Cathy do seem to bring out the self-indulgence and experiment in film and TV creatives.
Wuthering Heights was first adapted for screen in 1920 as a silent film of the same name, directed by A V Bramble, which has not survived. Laurence Olivier starred in the famous 1939 film adaptation, made during the Hollywood wartime gothic boom, a film in which Heathcliff is at least referred to as “gipsy”, as he is in the novel. In 1992, Peter Kosminsky directed a remake of Wuthering Heights (“the biggest mistake of my life”) that featured Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche as both the older Cathy and her daughter Catherine. The 2009 ITV drama serialised the novel for TV, starring Tom Hardy as Heathcliff opposite his now wife, Charlotte Riley. Other TV adaptations include the BBC’s 1953 version, cinematically groundbreaking for its use of new camera technology, and its 2002 Sparkhouse, in which Heathcliff was played by a woman, Sarah Smart. The 2011 BBC TV series, however, is the only adaptation that has cast a Black actor in the role of Heathcliff: James Howson. In the overwhelming majority of these adaptations, Heathcliff is played by white actors from wealthy backgrounds.
It may be useful to briefly recap why this is racist. Emily Brontë variously describes Heathcliff as a “gipsy brat” and “blackguard”, although it has been argued that these terms were used as metaphors and cultural shorthand for class differences – “blackguard”, for example, was an umbrella term for a man of bad character during the 19th century. Other references to Heathcliff’s appearance, however, are explicit, not least the specific description of him as “dark-skinned”.
We know from the juvenilia of Glass Town, Angria and Gondal that Emily was exposed, through publications such as Blackwood’s, to the machinations of empire and its racial atrocities (although these would have been framed through the language of the imperial project, by turns dehumanising or patronising, depending on the nature of the publication). Liverpool, from where Heathcliff is adopted by Mr Earnshaw, was also a major port for the transatlantic slave trade during Wuthering Heights’s historical period in the late 18th century, and lies only 68 miles from Haworth. The novel’s context that Heathcliff was allegedly “kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England” is often used to reinforce the notion that Heathcliff was a disenfranchised Black person of African origin, as is the fact that he is bestowed only a single name, in keeping with enslavement practices of the time. Such evidence is overwhelming.
The novel has been adapted to a bewildering variety of forms across a global spread of countries, from the 2013 Fifty Shades of Grey-style retelling by I J Miller (which credits Brontë prominently as a co-author on its front cover) to not one but two telenovelas in Mexico in 1964 and 1979 2. Given this tradition of interpretation and adaptation, one might argue that criticism of, say, casting a white Australian actor as Heathcliff, or yassifying the curmudgeonly servant Joseph, is inappropriate. However, at a time of considerable sensitivity around cultural appropriation, Fennell’s version does look conspicuously rootless and touched with a distinct kind of globalised glamour. This is, after all, a novel whose author was consciously writing about distinct geography and social, political and class context with great attention to detail.
Irene Wiltshire points to Emily’s use of dialect, for example, as an important indicator of class within the novel. Characters’ idiosyncratic “ways of speaking” correlate to “their station in life and […] their aspirations” 3. For example, Emily
“has Lockwood comment on Mrs Dean’s refinement of manners: ‘Excepting a few provincialisms of slight consequence, you have no marks of the manners that I am habituated to consider as peculiar to your class’ […] Mrs Dean’s reply is that she has undergone strict discipline and taken advantage of the library at the Grange where, by that time, she had resided for 18 years. Thus her speech reflects the influence exerted on her early life by the Earnshaw family and, crucially, her own book-learning at the Grange.”
Joseph’s dialect marks him out as belonging to the labouring class, which makes Charlotte’s imposed elocution all the more misleading. Wiltshire also remarks on the subtleties of class consciousness and upward social mobility in Heathcliff’s speech, which begins as “gibberish” but does not develop into the dialect of Joseph; rather, he takes on the speech of the Earnshaw family, thus “aligning himself with the yeoman class and not the serving class that others see as his rightful place”.
Of course, such nuances are omitted in the new version, class reduced to the old tropes of repression and bits of rough.
*
It is a stretch to call Wuthering Heights a working-class novel, although it is hardly a bourgeois work either. It is a book about messy, selfish, unregulated, vengeful people in inhospitable provincial places trying to climb out of the mud, sometimes literally. Whatever the characters are or are not, they are not beautiful, which is another problem with the Fennell version: casting Margot Robbie as Cathy is like making a cinematic version of Happy Valley with Julia Roberts as Catherine Cawood.
The truly repugnant factor, though, is not the presence of beautiful people playing ugly characters. To find the real reason this film makes some of us so depressed, you have to go back to Emerald Fennell’s quotation marks, and her plea that this is the Wuthering Heights in her own head. Another way of putting that is that she took someone else’s story and made her own version of it, so that its places and people look like she would like them to be. So far, so fanfic; fine. Lots of us re-imagine other people’s work. The difference is that Fennell can raise the funding to get her vision made into an international hit film. If you loved Emily Brontë’s version in the way many of us do love it, the experience is akin to seeing you and your friends’ favourite caff bought and turned into a caff-themed café by Benugo.
It comes down to money. Last year, Claire Malcolm reported for the Bee on the increasing tendency of film and TV financiers to seek out “beigevision” material: material with conventionally pretty visuals and global-middle-class-friendly plots, light on limiting features such as regional accents and working-class homes. The resulting beigevision films and TV series – all those young lawyers with marital problems, all those wealthy international travellers – are bad enough in themselves, but when they are made by filleting out the pretty bits from quality, meaningful-but-sometimes-difficult books, they are infuriating.
And that’s the real problem with Fennell’s Wuthering Heights. It feels like a story by and about people from below, and as such it has inspired devotion in millions of people around the world for 150 years. Fennell appears to have taken the sexy bits and made them into a film for people from above.
With thanks to Georgia Poplett.
1. T.K. Meier, ‘Wuthering Heights and Violation of Class’, Brontë Studies 38.4 (2013), p. 309.
2. The range is spectacular. To give a cursory overview: Wuthering Heights was also adapted into a 2011 graphic novel by John M Burns, and a self-described 2024 “modern gothic punk remix” novel, Catherine the Ghost, by Kathe Koja. More firmly within the remit of literary fiction are Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child, which he characterises as “an oblique, intricate re-writing” of Wuthering Heights (2015), and Windward Heights, a re-interpretation of Brontë’s classic by French-Caribbean author Maryse Condé in the vein of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. Bernard Herrmann adapted Wuthering Heights for opera between 1943 and 1951. Carlisle Floyd and Frédéric Chaslin also completed versions in 1958 and 2009 respectively. And of course there was Kate Bush’s international 1978 smash hit “Wuthering Heights”. Outside the Anglosphere, Wuthering Heights has been adapted for film as the Mexican Abismos de Pasión (Depths of Passion, 1954); the Hindi-language Arzoo (Desire, 1950) and Hulchul (Commotion, 1951); the Bollywood-produced Dil Diya Dard Liya (I Gave My Heart and Took Your Pain, 1966 – in which the transplanted Heathcliff character, Shankar, is literally thrown off a cliff); the French Hurlevent (Stormwind, 1985); the Japanese Arashi ga oka (Wuthering Heights, 1988 – also the name of a song by Japanese guitarist Hotei about the romanticism of war); and the Filipino Hihintayin Kita sa Langit (I Will Wait for You in Heaven, 1991). A telenovela, Cumbres Borrascosas (literally, Stormy Summits), was broadcast for Mexican TV in 1964, for Venezuelan TV in 1976, and again for Mexican TV in 1979. Finally, of course, there is Kate Bush’s 1978 global hit single, “Wuthering Heights”.
3. Irene Wiltshire, ‘Speech in Wuthering Heights: Joseph’s Dialect and Charlotte’s Emendations’, Brontë Studies 30 (2005)
All donations go towards supporting the Bee’s mission to nurture, publish promote and pay for the best new working-class writing.
Comments