You come into a movie based on Wuthering Heights with certain expectations.
Emerald Fennell has been clear that she considers her “Wuthering Heights” — pointed quote marks and all — to be a fantasia, not a straight adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. “It could only ever be an attempt to take a tiny piece of the book and make sense of it,” she said in a recent interview. Still, as a matter of basic fact, Wuthering Heights is a story of passionate, obsessive love between two monstrous sadists, and Fennell’s version of the story is so very showy about how sexy and dark it plans to be. So you would think that the tiny piece of the story she’s trying to make sense of would be the part about the sexy sociopaths in love.
Fennell’s film opens with the sounds of a body writhing in what the audience at first believes to be sex, but soon learns are actually death throes. Its ostentatiously perverse production design is filled with rooms wallpapered with flesh-colored leather, complete with veins and moles; long, lingering closeups of moist slug trails; characters outfitted in full red latex skirts or transparent cellophane drapery. It is a film that palpably wants to be thought of as kinky — a storytelling mode that should mesh nicely with Brontë’s bleak, merciless world.
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Brontë punishes her readers for even liking her characters. Its most charismatic and compelling characters, the doomed lovers Heathcliff and Catherine, are also two of its greatest monsters. Feral and violent, Brontë’s Heathcliff and Catherine ruin lives and inflict wanton amounts of pain for the sheer sport of it all, but they also love each other overwhelmingly, ferociously, enough to tear down the world all around each other. Reading about them, it’s both difficult to wish them well and impossible not to feel that they really should be together. That contradiction is what creates the tension that powers the reader through this brutal, bleak book, with all its misery and squalor.
Yet puzzlingly, Fennell chooses to delete this source of tension from her version of the story. Her Catherine and Heathcliff are beautiful blameless horndogs, to the point that they resemble the lovely personality-free characters in Nicholas Sparks films, beset by tragedies for which they hold absolutely no responsibility. Fennell neuters her monsters, and that is the one fault from which Wuthering Heights can never recover.
The perverse power of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
Heathcliff and Catherine do not begin their lives as villains. In Brontë’s novel, they are first neglected children. Catherine is the spoiled daughter of a wealthy, isolated family on the English moors, and Heathcliff is the racially ambiguous foundling her father brings home from a visit to the city. At first, the pair live as brother and sister; they are educated together and, after their lessons, run across the moors like animals, considering “the after punishment” to be “a mere thing to laugh at.” But after Catherine’s father dies and her brother Hindley takes over the house, he jealously demotes Heathcliff from fellow brother to servant, leaving him uneducated and impoverished.
Did Brontë have more stories to tell?
Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis at age 30, leaving behind only Wuthering Heights and her poetry. But scholars have long been haunted by the possibility that she might have been working on a second novel when she died. In a letter sent shortly before her death, Brontë’s publisher wrote that he “shall have great pleasure in making arrangements for your second novel,” and that Brontë is “quite right not to let it go before the world until well satisfied with it.” If Brontë was corresponding with her publisher about a second book, the thinking goes, she must have been well into it.
So what happened to this mysterious manuscript? No trace of the novel has ever been found. The persistent, never-confirmed rumor, however, is that Brontë’s sister Charlotte, of Jane Eyre fame, destroyed the manuscript to protect Emily’s reputation. Victorian readers were shocked enough by the bleakness of Wuthering Heights. Whatever was in the second book might have been even more brutal.
The tragedy of the novel all unspools from that first act of abuse. When Catherine comes of age as a member of genteel society, she decides that although she loves Heathcliff, she cannot marry him because he is socially below her. Instead she marries a rich but weak man who she can dominate and control. At the same time, she covers up her intense and passionate nature, ensuring her fits of rage only ever happen at strategically chosen moments.
Heathcliff, heartbroken, disappears for three years and then returns mysteriously rich, polished, and determined to exact his revenge. He drives Hindley into an alcoholic depression that eventually leads to his death, and then takes custody of Hindley’s house and child and sets about degrading each as vividly as possible. He marries Catherine’s sister-in-law and abuses both her and their child. A mere hundred pages into the novel, he has become so sadistic that he is strangling a puppy with a handkerchief.
Catherine, in her turn, is violent with her servants, her husband, and her sister-in-law whenever she feels she can get away with it. She eggs Heathcliff on, delighting in his rages. “He’s more myself than I am,” she says, meaning, among other things, that all the monstrous urges Catherine must hide and sublimate in herself, Heathcliff is free to enact. After Catherine dies, Heathcliff goes to great lengths to draw her daughter into his clutches, where he can rage at her.
By the time Catherine and Heathcliff are adults, they are so palpably awful that it is difficult to care for them at all. But Brontë dares you to keep reading, lavishing her most beautiful prose on these wretched, miserable people. “Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Catherine says of Heathcliff as she resolves not to marry him. “Be with me always — take any form — drive me mad!” cries out Heathcliff to Catherine’s ghost after she dies.
There is such vitality to their characters that the story goes flat on the page whenever they are not there, terrorizing everyone around them. They are the reason the world of Wuthering Heights is so awful and oppressive, and the contradiction between their passion and their cruelty is what makes the book dynamic and unforgettable. Without that tension, it would never have remained beloved or relevant for long as it has.
In Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” the great monster is not Heathcliff or Catherine, or even Catherine’s brother Hindley. (Fennell chooses to combine Hindley with Catherine’s father in a perfectly reasonable consolidation of characters.) It’s Catherine’s maid, Nelly.
In Brontë’s novel, Nelly Dean is one of the central narrators. She grows up with Catherine and Heathcliff and works as a maid in Catherine’s house after her marriage, with a close view of all the horrors that are enacted there. We learn Catherine and Heathcliff’s tale because Nelly is recounting it to Heathcliff’s new tenant, so that the whole novel becomes one story nested inside another, in a sort of matryoshka doll of trauma.
Nelly, tartly sensible and with little tolerance for her employers’ dramatics, is ostensibly one of the few sympathetic characters in a novel containing precious few of them — Charlotte Brontë described her as “a specimen of true benevolence and homely fidelity.” But there’s an ambiguity to her storytelling that has led some readers to consider her an unreliable narrator, and perhaps ultimately the villain of the whole piece. She keeps silent when she learns that Heathcliff has disastrously misheard Catherine, with the eventual consequence that he runs away, and she refuses to take Catherine’s final illness seriously until it is too late for her to be saved. Would things have gotten so bad, some readers demand, if it weren’t for Nelly?
Fennell signals early on that she will be following this reading. She inserts a new scene in which Catherine’s eventual husband, Edgar Linton, listens to Isabella Linton (in Brontë’s story, Linton’s sister; in Fennell’s, his ward) explain the plot of Romeo and Juliet. “I don’t really like the nurse,” Isabella declares, before going on to argue that all the needless death and bloodshed of Romeo and Juliet could have been avoided if only Juliet’s nurse had been more responsible.
Drawing parallels between Juliet’s nurse and Catherine’s maid, Fennell comes down hard on Nelly over the course of her film. Any mistake Nelly makes is recast as a mean-spirited and deliberate act of vengeance on people who are hotter and more interesting than she is. They are also, in Fennell’s version of the story, whiter than Nelly — Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity is erased while Nelly becomes a woman of color, in a strangely nasty bit of not-quite-color-blind casting. At the end of the film, Edgar Linton declares the maid a “torturer” and condemns her for the rage hiding within her.
The whole thing is oddly reminiscent of Fennell’s vapid Saltburn, in which the rich and beautiful are revealed at the end to be virtuous and correct, while the poor are scheming social climbers. Fennell has a fondness for subversion, but somehow she seems to always end up subverting her way to the most conservative position possible.
It’s absolutely possible to come to the conclusion that Nelly is unreliable or even villainous within a good faith reading of Brontë’s novel. One potential consequence of such a reading that is congruent with the emotional tone of the novel might be to remove the comfort of a fully likable character from this harsh, bleak landscape, and to allow ourselves to experience the horror of a world in which everyone is ruthless and wicked out for themselves. Fennell, instead, uses it as an excuse to reveal that Catherine and Heathcliff bear no fault at all for what befalls them, and that all of the tragedy was a result of Nelly’s meddling — a sort of Joker apologia for them, if it were already Batman canon that the Joker was pretty sexy and glamorous and had a tragic backstory.
Watching Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” there is no point at which you are asked to sit with the discomfort of finding a monster more interesting and lively than their prey. At no point are you asked to look at someone doing something terrible, and remember that they used to be a child who was treated badly.
Brontë’s Cathy beats her servants, her horses, her husband. She flies into uncontrollable rages and plots to destroy her enemies. Fennell’s Cathy offers the occasional mean girl putdown, swiftly belied by her beautiful tear-swollen eyes, which reveal her true purity of heart. She is not so much passionate and angry as she is pragmatic and a little bit petty.
Brontë’s Heathcliff slowly and systematically bankrupts his abuser and then ruins the man’s son. Fennell’s Heathcliff kindly cares for his adopted father in his broken old age. Brontë’s Heathcliff tortures the feckless Isabella’s puppy, then seduces her and abuses her and their child. Fennell’s Heathcliff mostly stares in confusion as Isabella writhes in pleasure on the end of a dog’s leash, having not only enthusiastically consented to the treatment, but in fact instigated it. When onscreen Catherine tells Isabella that Heathcliff will eat her alive, the moment feels absurd: The audience knows by this point that Isabella is an oversexed weirdo who will do whatever she wants with reserved, pliant Heathcliff. (In fact, she does.)
No adaptation must be absolutely faithful to its source text in order to be good, but it has to do something. It has to have an energy, a source of tension, a reason to exist. But having excised the tension of Brontë’s novel from her film, Fennell replaces it with absolutely nothing. Instead, you are asked only to watch beautiful people engage in mild BDSM play upon the beautiful moors, and then die through no fault of their own.
All that gleefully perverse production design made promises, and she follows through on absolutely none of them. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” reaches no heights at all.
