Film adaptations of classic literature tend to draw attention when they are released. In the case of Emerald Fennell’s version of “Wuthering Heights” many feathers have been ruffled. But why?
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 under her male pseudonym Ellis Bell. Brontë and her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, were all eventually published writers, but Emily would not see much fame for her work in her lifetime.
Wuthering Heights is a complicated novel chock full of characters to keep track of as they weave in and out of each other’s stories. It tells the strange tale of Cathy and Heathcliff, star-crossed lovers on the English moors who are separated by class and likely race as well. In fact, this is a point of contention for this year’s film version: the casting of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as the main characters raised a lot of eyebrows when announced. The issues taken with Robbie were related to maturity: Cathy is notably a young and naive woman, but Robbie is an adult woman and seems far too mature for the type of story demanded by Brontë’s source material. Elordi was the real question mark, though. An important aspect of Brontë’s novel is that Heathcliff is likely not white. He is of a much lower social class than Cathy, but many references are also made to his ethnicity, which the English around them do not know but make guesses towards. It is another separation between him and the other characters that helps spur many of his later decisions, but it is an aspect wholly removed from Fennell’s version. Adaptational changes are going to happen in the process of book-to-film, and expecting a perfect version of a story is unrealistic. However, changes such as this are not to help pacing or character or the visual language of a movie but are choices that fundamentally change the foundation of the story itself.
In terms of fundamental changes, Fennell also went out of her way to note that this is not an adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights Fennell has extensively explained (in a delightfully disastrous press run) that the quotation marks around the title are there to convey she is actually adapting Wuthering Heights as she read it when she was fourteen. She justifies her decision to take what is a rather searing indictment against upper-class English society and the strange, horrible things they were allowed to get away with doing to people and turn it into a heavily stylized bodice ripper in the same capitalistic glorifying vein as Saltburn, a previous film of Fennell’s.
This is not to say it is bad that the movie is erotic, but rather that it is a fundamental split from the novel. Fennell’s version includes far more sex than Brontë’s novel, and the source material does deal with female freedom and autonomy, with the questions of how much power women have in relationships in this time period. There was ample opportunity to marry these two ideas in her version, but Fennell seemed disinterested in doing so. Cathy and Heathcliff were reduced from interesting, complicated, flawed characters who trekked strange and dark paths, to a pair of attractive, pop-culturally relevant, sexy dolls for Fennell to mash together. Of course, film criticism is a subjective art, but if there is any advice to be had for those who wish to adapt a beloved novel into a film it is that perhaps the novel should matter to the film to some degree; if the names Cathy and Heathcliff, or any other character or the famous setting, can be changed and nothing about your adaptation subsequently changes too, maybe you have not adapted the novel but a strange fantasy version.
Though it seems we find ourselves back at the start. Fennell did warn everyone that she would be adapting the version she had created in her mind, rather than whatever Brontë initially wrote. It begs the question that if someone, who has already gained a loyal audience, as well as financial and critical appreciation, was so desperate to make a specific story and was willing to bend one of the most studied novels in the Western literary canon to her will to do so, then why not simply create an original story?