But Was I Wuthered?
- robyncoombes
- Mar 3
- 8 min read
Updated: Mar 5
“The literature on Wuthering Heights is abundant and its incoherence striking. Even more than some other great works of literature this novel seems to have an inexhaustible power to call forth commentary and more commentary” wrote J. Hillis Miller in 1980, but his words could just as easily apply to Emerald Fennell’s contentiously quotation-ed “Wuthering Heights” in 2026 (91). According to Miller’s own controversial take, Wuthering Heights defers meaning indefinitely: “however far inside the reader gets, he finds not presences but only more enigmatic signs, enticing promises of a revelation which never occurs” (86). Miller however comes to one conclusion; that part of the success of the novel, and its endless reincarnations, is due to this very suspension of definitive significance.
Enter Emerald Fennell then with her decidedly non-definitive interpretation: an adaptation of her memory of reading the novel for the first time as a fourteen-year-old. Now you can say many things about this film, and many have demonstrated that inexhaustible commentary upon commentary, but you can't say that's not a creative (or daring) approach.
I went on quite the journey with this film long before I’d seen it. From the first announcement to its divisive casting, to those initial costumes and early test screenings, I experienced the full gamut of mild interest, confusion, complete perplexity, and consternation. And then the press tour which brought genuine excitement, and stunned my algorithm with Margot Robbie’s sequence of sartorial spectacles. The Schiaparelli? Speechless.
Distracted by this method dressing (Robbie’s looks, see below, alluded to costumes in the film), many seemed to be taken in by the film’s insistent marketing, while failing to take that method approach as a clue. What some took to be ‘affair-baiting’ was surely just another meta tactic of playing up the obsessive nature of their characters to press? Some had theories this was all a ploy to distract us still further from the film’s growing unease around the casting of modern-faced Robbie as Cathy and genuine alarm at a Jacob Elordi-Heathcliff. Whatever the strategy, it appeared to have worked. The film recouped its $80 million budget within its opening weekend, even if that controversy lingered.
As another literary critic states, “the reception of the novel has been split between Brontë scholars who read Heathcliff’s darkness metaphorically as a sign of his later moral depravity and postcolonial readings, which see him as racially mixed, possibly Black, of Afro-Caribbean origins, or as Irish. Throughout the novel, racialized meanings are entangled with gender and class dynamics, and Cathy, despite sharing a passionate love and ‘half-savage’ nature with Heathcliff, cannot marry him due to his perception as dependent and inferior – economically, as well as, by implication, racially” (Hoydis 117-118). Described on numerous occasions as a ‘gypsy’, and even as a ‘Lascar’ - meaning a sailor from India or south-east Asia - one of Heathcliff’s least contested traits is his racial ambiguity. All we know of him is that he was found in Liverpool, a known slave port at the time of Brontë's writing in 1847. Yet given the general consensus on his non-whiteness, only the 2011 film by Andrea Arnold cast a black actor. By reverting to Hollywood form and casting a white man, Fennell undoubtedly flattens his character, thereby removing the central aspect of his othering to make way for a simple romance.
I reread Wuthering Heights in anticipation of this iteration (you really don’t need to, but one major upside is that the book has drawn many new readers) and was struck by how unromantic, subversive, violent, and viscerally gothic it is. I was also shocked by how much I remembered, having read it as a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old (and not having a great recall for anything I read these days). I put this down to that visceral effect of Brontë's writing and imagination, which I do think Fennell comes (sometimes) close to touching with some striking visuals and Charlie XCX’s score, even if a lot of the film’s ‘visceral’ becomes viscous (many many egg yolks, things in aspic, snail mucus, oily dough - you get the gist).
Here is where those quotation marks do the heavy lifting. Some have argued that air quotes are not a get-out-of-jail-free card, that by aligning yourself with such a renowned IP you should be held to the quality of said IP, but Fennell’s defence is similar to Miller’s assertion that the novel is unknowable. It would be arrogant not to use scare quotes, Fennell has said, moreover, that one could adapt a new version of Wuthering Heights every year (there have been over 35, so plenty to choose from). Speaking to Fandango she added “you can't adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book. I can't say I'm making Wuthering Heights. It's not possible. What I can say is I'm making a version of it. There's a version that I remembered reading that isn't quite real. And there's a version where I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is 'Wuthering Heights', and it isn't."
And boy did stuff happen that never happened. Fennell essentially takes a sledgehammer to the book; doing away with Hindley, removing the second half (as most adaptations do), and introducing plot points that show just how fevered her fourteen-year-old imagination was. And I didn’t hate it. Now admittedly I’m not a book purist, but the thing about adaptations is that, crucially, you have to adapt. Was I annoyed that the film fell short of the subversion of the book? Not really no; I'm not a subversive gal. Many have angrily argued that an "adaptation" is all well and good, but you have to at least get to the heart of the book, to translate the kernel of what it’s all about.
Over to you Miller: “Wuthering Heights lacks an adequate explanatory principle. In this lies its power to produce inexhaustible repetitions of ever-hopeful, ever-unsuccessful attempts to account for it” (92). Perhaps Fennel took this sentiment as the ultimate permission to unleash her artistic license: “The secret truth about Wuthering Heights, rather, is that there is no secret truth. No hidden ordering principle stands at the head of the chain or at the back of the back which will account for everything … Any formulation of such a principle … is visibly reductive” ( Miller 92).
Visibly reductive is a criticism many have thrown at the film’s compression of character, ‘smooth-brain’ storytelling (basically undemanding content engineered for frazzled consumers at the end of a busy day), and sets that look like 1950s soundstages. Jacqueline Durran’s costumes too have come in for their fair share of critique. Intentionally ahistorical, Durran combines modern (highly flammable) fabrics with Victorian-esque silhouettes, using a reduced palette that favours fatal red, pristine white, and oppressive black. But there is a pearlescent wedding-night dress that looks to be made of cellophane, a shinier-than-patent black evening gown, and pink sunglasses that wouldn’t look amiss in Barbie’s dream house. The set of Thrushcross Grange doesn’t look unlike that plastic idyll; our first look is a long distance shot of a fantastical mansion improbably placed at the bottom of a valley in the moors. Subsequent scenes bring us ever closer - a pale blue exterior that really does read like Fennell’s teenage reverie, introduced in an Alice in Wonderland-inspired transition as Cathy literally stumbles from the earthy reality of the moors into this trippy dreamscape. As we get inside the house, the set design assumes prominence. Not only does the dining room possess a dollhouse replication of Thrushcross Grange to perfect scale, but inside is - you guessed it - another Thrushcross Grange.
I can’t help thinking of Brontë’s story-within-a-story here. It reminds me of Emily Rena-Dozier’s assertion that “the claustrophobic accretions of frames … have created in the critical discourse surrounding Wuthering Heights a gothic mirror of the narrative situation of the novel itself” (758). Not only does this play out in the current discourse around the film – a never-ending conflict of opinions that reflects the seemingly endless meanings and framings within the novel – but it suggests something of Fennell’s postmodern take on that embedded narrative structure. Sure you could argue that Fennell takes the place of Lockwood as narrator, but Nelly Dean is relegated to a non-narrating sort-of-villain; instead of literally translating the framing device, the dollhouse visually and efficiently implies that claustrophobia and infinite deferment of meaning through multiple structures of enclosed consequence. We might think we’ve figured Wuthering Heights out, but inside that perfect closure lies another seemingly believable explanation. As Rena-Dozier continues, “the gothic is marked by a proliferation of narrative frames and voices, and represents the forces of violence, wildness and savagery, as opposed to the domestic, which is marked by an assumption of omniscient, totalizing narratorial awareness and associated with civilization, cultivation, and the feminine” (758). The gothic presence of Wuthering Heights is almost cartoonishly opposed to the civilised, feminised Thrushcross Grange, with the liminal moors somewhere in between yet nowhere in particular.
Perhaps Fennell’s film, as glossy and surface level as a very long music video (which it felt to many, including me) has a tad more depth than those one- and two-star reviewers have given it credit. Does it at least try to approach “the "penetralium" of [Emily’s] strange vision of life” (Miller 86) by not reflecting but refracting the novel’s embedded structure? We are presented after all not with a classic framed narrative, but more interestingly, a visual retelling through the hazy prism of memory, that transposes Brontë's classic to the surreal and heightened world of a teenage girl’s fantasy. If it were called anything else, I’m not convinced it would even remind me of the novel, so why am I defending it? Maybe it's that my expectations going in were on the floor. Having consumed those stingy-starred reviews and numerous podcast analyses that thoroughly spoiled each frame of this movie, I still got some enjoyment from it, even if I anticipated beat for beat what was to come. I think the secret is to leave any memory of the book you read at the door and expect nothing but spectacle. What we get is a somewhat effective three-star film that reads like a sequence of vignettes - Cathy being hefted up by her corset laces; a very catchy pop soundtrack; a topless Elordi forking straw that for some reason looks like the cover of a 1980s romance novel; two standout comedic performances from Alison Oliver and Martin Clunes (watch it for these two alone); that kid from Adolescence (also good); a weirdly compelling jellied fish; an incongruous dirndl; a disturbing ‘skin room’; that whole thing with Isabella; and mist being a paid background actor.
The main criticism I have is that ending that left me emotionally vacant. Did I believe in their undying love? Not really. And that really is a problem if you strip Wuthering Heights down to its non-kernel of romantic untruth. By simplifying the source material past the point of recognition, "Wuthering Heights" has sacrificed substance for style, and emotional resonance makes up a large part of that loss. Because these characters appear like cardboard cutouts of Brontë’s creations (Fennell has said she sees Cathy as Scarlett O'Hara - let's not delve too deeply into that), they lack the necessary depth to move the audience (read: me). What should be the film's most impactful scene left me therefore empty. That much-needed tension that at least gives a semblance of chemistry to the Cathy and Heathcliff of the film's first half, fizzles and dies as soon as Fennell deviates from fantasy to fulfilment. But look, I'll be watching it again.
Works Cited
Hoydis, Julia. “Breaking the Cycle of Heathcliff: Precarious Subjects from Emily Brontë to Caryl Phillips.” Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World, edited by
Barbara Schmidt-Haberkamp et al., Brill, 2022, pp. 116–34. JSTOR,
Miller, J. Hillis. “‘Wuthering Heights’ and the Ellipses of Interpretation.” Notre Dame
English Journal, vol. 12, no. 2, 1980, pp. 85–100. JSTOR,
Rena-Dozier, Emily. “Gothic Criticisms: ‘Wuthering Heights’ and Nineteenth-Century
Literary History.” ELH, vol. 77, no. 3, 2010, pp. 757–75. JSTOR,
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