Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is a Foggy Fantasy, and Nothing More

By Sabrina Stevenson

Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is, unfortunately, everything I thought it would be. (And yes, the quotation marks around the title are a non-negotiable addition made by Fennell, who claimed in an interview with Fandango it is not possible to adapt ‘a book as dense and complicated as Wuthering Heights,’ so is instead making a ‘version of it.’) This quote alone confirmed my skeptical assumptions of the film based on the teaser back in September, where I could scarcely believe my eyes as one of my favourite novels was reduced to flashy imagery of piercing egg yolks and a sweaty Elordi. Having watched the entire film now, I can honestly say that it provides no more emotional depth or intrigue than the dialogue-devoid teaser, and is a shallow excuse for even a ‘version’ of the novel.

Margot Robbie’s Catherine is an uncomfortable watch and has an arresting similarity to Peter Pan, in that it’s hard to believe that her moments of ‘sexual awakening’ are born out of anything but immaturity, and a naivete not befitting of a woman who looks far beyond the age of spinsterhood in the period. Robbie’s attempts to bridge this age gap felt like watching her mock a spoiled child throwing a tantrum–a presentation complicated by Catherine’s upper-middle class background. Further, her jaded devolvement into a tyrannical ‘Queen of Hearts’ in the film appears fated from the beginning, rather than a dangerous taste of the corruption of the upper classes she was so seduced by as a child. In the novel, she marries Edgar based on a calculated desire to become ‘the greatest woman in the neighbourhood.’ It is thus hard to imagine that she would greet him on their wedding night in something as cheap or careless looking as the fruit basket dressings we’re supposed to call a nightgown in this film.

Source: British Vogue

Fennell’s exchange for the complex qualities of her characters with lavish aesthetic is unfortunately a recurring pattern. Fennell leans on the colour red to darken each ‘intense’ moment and give it stakes, because frankly without it, the stakes are about as high as the ads which played before the film. Each bigger and redder gown Robbie wears shouts “Lust! Passion! Sin!” at the audience with a failed understanding of the very un-aesthetic classism, racism, and cycles of abuse which this passion responds to, and makes the pair’s relationship in the Bronte novel so gripping. Instead, we are left with Catherine, a literal walking red flag, and a 10-minute-long sexcapade traversing the English moors. This is surely the same thing, right?

Source: British Vogue

Heathcliff’s character is next on the chopping block after the total axing of Hindley, Catherine’s demented brother and Heathcliff’s relentless tormentor during childhood. Hindley deliberately cast Heathcliff out because of the colour of his skin and nature of his birth, calling him a ‘gipsy’ and ‘beggarly interloper.’ Yet these racist connotations are lost on the white Elordi, and so too is the futile nature of his efforts to truly rise the ranks and assimilate into high society. 

Moreover, Fennel transfers Hindley’s abuse to the hands of Mr. Earnshaw, who acted as father to both Catherine and Heathcliff. This choice suggests that the pair experience the same violence and abuse and can thus escape it in the same way. This is profoundly untrue, as the novel makes clear that Catherine and Heathcliff’s difference in treatment from their peers determine the bulk of their character arcs–Catherine gets a way out by marrying her upper-class peer Edgar Linton, and Heathcliff is left with the grief of abandonment from his only male peer. All tension and movement in Heathcliff’s story is therefore gone in Emerald’s adaptation, as Mr. Earnshaw will die before Heathcliff has any chance to unleash the full extent of his rage against rejection as he does to Hindley in the novel.

The film’s failure to flesh out any of Heathcliff’s inner desires also makes his abandonment of Catherine at Wuthering Heights fall flat. No longer a flee built on an idolization of Catherine’s new life of luxury, but merely an act of lover’s spite spurred by the same kind of miscommunication and rich-man-poor-man trope you might expect of the telenovela program your mother is watching in the living room. In fact, it was hard to believe I wasn’t watching one as Elordi’s rugged wig flapped in the wind while he made his sunset equestrian escape in the hopes of earning his lover’s affection.

Source: KUTV

His return to Wuthering Heights is similarly distracting. Ah yes, our new favourite hero Heathcliff come to save Catherine from her poor decisions, definitely not an ‘unacclaimed creature’ so hellbent on the destruction of his abusers that he uses his newfound financial fortune to turn into a monster himself. Fennell has confused his ‘wolfish’ behaviour with sad puppy eyes, which greet Catherine in a Matthew-Macfadyen-as-Mr-Darcy-esque reunion on the moors. I’m sorry, but running my brother to a drunken death in order to take revenge on him and inherit his home, driving my childhood friends to ruin, and continuing the cycle of abuse onto my own children are much more incriminating offences than Mr. Darcy’s crimes of calling my family poor and being socially awkward. Mr Darcy is full of remorse, while Heathcliff is aggressively allergic to it, and attempting to classify them as similarly swoon worthy heartthrobs is a disgrace to both Austen and Bronte. 

X: Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff            Collider: Matthew Macfadyen as Mr. Darcy

This is not even to mention the complete butchering of Isabella Linton’s character, as she is now a submissive plaything who engages with what we are intended to view as annoying obsessions with girlish things like dollhouses and tea-parties. While Isabella certainly comes from a place of naive privilege, she is also defiant and stubborn, and flees from Heathcliff to protect herself and her child after realizing his true, violent nature. Fennell of course addresses none of this, and instead only addresses Heathcliff’s oppression and abuse toward her (seen when he kills her dog in the novel!) by chaining Isabella with a dog-collar as she crawls on all fours in a strange sex act with him. Again, Fennell’s attempt to bring out what she calls the ‘primal, sexual’ nature of the story to the BBC, is at the cost of another female character’s nuanced development and achieves the entirely opposite goal of female emancipation.

Source: Time Magazine

Having said this, there are many who will rebuttal with the point, ‘just enjoy the vibes!’ The actors themselves seem to feed into this rhetoric, as interviews with Margot Robbie feel eerily similar to those of Blake Lively’s during the It Ends With Us press tour, in which she marketed the film about domestic violence against women as something to unite your female friend group and ‘wear your florals!’ to. The Valentines Day release of “Wuthering Heights,” which is often a day of female togetherness, certainly drives a similar point home. 

Why is it that the making of a love story is only possible by reducing the female psyche to something that is concerned with ‘vibes’ only? Is it truly our fate as women to only find togetherness from a shared attraction over a male actor, and not in the wielding of power against tyrannical forces? It is Bronte’s invitation to question how you respond to power structures which makes the novel so timeless, and favouring the dull, cookie-cutter romance formula over this will certainly have Fennell’s version collecting dust for centuries to come.