Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (quotation marks included in original title) has been the topic of much controversy this week, as filmgoers and Victorian literature enthusiasts alike are up in arms about the quality of this adaptation of Emily Brontë’s beloved novel.
Before delving into the narrative asynchronies of the film and its source text, I would like to draw attention to some elements of this film which worked very well. I thought the performances given by the majority of the cast, particularly the children, Nelly, Mr. Earnshaw/Hindley and Heathcliff were skilful and did great work with the script they were given. The cinematography and score were superb, with the latter being produced by pop icon Charli XCX – whose suitability for such a project as this is debatable – but nevertheless produced a fun and energetically tongue-in-cheek soundtrack album in her own right. For more on this, you can read Music Editor Maya Dallal’s review of the album in the music section of Exeposé this week.
However, as observed by the public long before the film’s release, the problems with the film begin with the casting. Although Heathcliff’s specific race is never explicitly confirmed in Brontë’s novel, he is frequently described as a “dark-skinned gipsy” and a “Lascar”, a term used for Indian and Southeast Asian sailors – and sometimes their children – employed or trafficked by the East India Company. Much of Heathcliff’s complexity in the novel is flattened by Fennell’s casting of Jacob Elordi in this role, in what is unfortunately only one instance of the problematic moulding of racial dynamics to fit what Fennell describes as her 14-year-old self’s perception of the novel.
Perplexingly, both Nelly and Edgar are recast as POC, a choice with arguably racist undertones when considering that these are the only two characters that threaten the now-whitewashed relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff. The complex class dynamics of the novel are similarly treated with all the myopia of a 14-year-old white girl born in Chelsea to a wealthy family of jewellers and novelists. Nelly’s justified class resentment is passingly depicted, but her and so many other nuanced characters such as Joseph, Zillah, Isabella and the entire younger generation are steamrolled for the purpose of foregrounding an idealised and romanticised image of Catherine and Heathcliff’s ‘love’ story.
The gender dynamics are another example of a theme which is levelled to the ground. Isabella, who is a strong independent female character in the book, is reduced to an off-putting and strange child, which seemingly leads her to complete submission to Heathcliff later in the film – in an upsettingly sexualised retelling of her experience as an abuse victim. Her eventual escape and independent life as a single mother are cut completely. Margot Robbie as Catherine plays a doting and infatuated young girl, rather than the scruffy and wild child of the book, taking away any meaning from the famous line, “whatever our souls are made of [Heathcliff’s] and mine are the same”. In the film, she centres her life around marrying Edgar from the outset, feigning an injury to be taken in by him at Thrushcross Grange. Yet, the entire point of Catherine’s character is that she does not want to centre her life around this marriage but is forced to by societal pressures.
So many other nuanced characters […] are steamrolled for the purpose of foregrounding an idealised and romanticised image of Catherine and Heathcliff’s ‘love’ story.
My main issue with the film is that truncating the story in the way it does undermines everything the book is attempting to say, and even independent of the source material, leaves the film’s narrative to fall flat on its face in every regard. Neither Cathy or Heathcliff are good people, and that’s okay – Wuthering Heights is about the messy flows of love and pain, trauma and violence, all set amid a tempestuous storm of class, race, religion, and gender dynamics. In many ways, the story is not about Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship, but the fallout that follows it and the subsequent healing of generational cycles of violence as represented by young Cathy and Hareton. The credits rolling after Catherine’s death becomes a laughable moment in this light, as the attempt to turn this into a simple tragic romance ignores so much integral information not only to the wider cast of characters, but to Catherine and Heathcliff themselves.
Many great adaptations in the past have re-moulded their source text and been historically inaccurate. For example any of Kurosawa’s Shakespeare adaptations, and I am all for an unfaithful adaptation when it reflects a core feeling of the text or builds on it in a fresh way. Unfortunately though, Emerald Fennell does none of these things. She simply cuts away the supporting foundations of the novel, leaving only the parts which are agreeable to a white upper-class romantic perspective, leaving the film to collapse in on itself completely. The resulting rubble is a hollowed out, one-note husk of what was once a wonderfully sharp and complex piece of art.
