{"id":307340,"date":"2026-03-03T07:10:00","date_gmt":"2026-03-03T12:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=307340"},"modified":"2026-03-02T18:30:47","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T23:30:47","slug":"wuthering-heights-was-never-a-love-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/wuthering-heights-was-never-a-love-story\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cWuthering Heights\u201d Was Never a Love Story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cThis is a strange book,\u201d begins a January 8, 1848 review of Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s Wuthering Heights<\/a><\/em>. \u201cIt is not without evidences of considerable power: but, as a whole, it is wild, confused, disjointed, and improbable . . . \u201d Another review, published a week later, drew similar conclusions: \u201cWuthering Heights <\/em>is a strange sort of book\u2014baffling all regular criticism; yet, it is impossible to begin and not finish it . . . we must leave it to our readers to decide what sort of book it is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That may be the million-dollar question. What sort of a book is Wuthering Heights<\/em>? Like many, I first came across the novel in my teens; unlike many, I couldn\u2019t get through it. If I was too impatient to make sense of Joseph\u2019s Yorkshire accent, I was also too unformed as a reader to probe the work\u2019s complex narrative structure. I was fourteen and had no inkling of puppy love, much less passion. And because I didn\u2019t know passion, I couldn\u2019t understand Heathcliff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A friend once described me as a late bloomer\u2019s late bloomer. In that long period of my life, spanning a little over three decades, in which I had never been in a relationship, I lived mostly in my own head. Fantasy seemed, at times, preferable to reality, not because I ever believed that what I imagined was real, but because, in being able to control every element of every story down to the most minute detail, I could play God. My mind\u2019s eye gave birth to multiple new selves, all beautiful, rich, coveted, and bearing not the slightest resemblance to reality. That a fantasy frequently ended in tragedy (my make-believe death, usually from tuberculosis or being fatally shot by an arrow) rendered it no less delicious, for the following evening I would resurrect myself and a new story with a new lover would commence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Perhaps this is why watching Emerald Fennell\u2019s adaptation of Wuthering Heights <\/em>felt so familiar. The landscape that Catherine and Heathcliff run through as children is a landscape that possesses an uncanny resemblance to the fantastical panoramas of my own lonely adolescence. And because fantasy owes very little, if anything, to history, this is a world governed solely by whim and the law of individual desire. Dresses can be anachronistic so long as they are beautiful. Feasts are laid out less for human consumption than for the delight of the eye. Few would be able to guess that Thrushcross Grange, which resembles in its exterior an iced sugar cookie, should contain a labyrinth of rooms with no unifying style beyond the ostentatious spectacle of wealth. There is a room for ribbons that is turned, for Mrs. Catherine Linton\u2019s pleasure, into a room for the display of opulent gowns. Most memorably, there is a room the color and texture of flesh that lends new meaning to what it is to inhabit one\u2019s own skin.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because fantasy owes very little, if anything, to history, this is a world governed solely by whim and the law of individual desire.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

As several reviews have pointed out, Fennell\u2019s adaptation of Bront\u00eb\u2019s magnum opus significantly departs from its source material; to document these disparities when the differences are both numerous and flagrant seems a meaningless exercise. What\u2019s more, I don\u2019t see much wrong with the degree of departure, whether minimal or extreme. There are no set rules for how to treat the source material, and different mediums require different modes of expression. Suzy Davies, the movie\u2019s production designer, puts it well: \u201cThis film was never about documenting the 1800s in a literal or academic way. Instead, it was about capturing the essence of a teenage fever dream\u2014the sensation of first encountering the book.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t help but feel disappointed both at critics who have extolled Fennell\u2019s \u201cWuthering Heights<\/em>\u201d and those who have panned it. Reviews have run the gamut, from \u201csexy, dramatic, melodramatic, occasionally comic and often swoonily romantic\u201d to simply \u201ca dud.\u201d Much of the problem seems to stem from the preconception that Bront\u00eb\u2019s novel is a love story. In all the times I have failed or succeeded in reading the book, I have never been fully convinced that Wuthering Heights <\/em>is a romance, or more accurately, that its most foundational element is the love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. We tend to look for what we want to see on the page, not what is actually there. In reading Wuthering Heights<\/em>, it\u2019s easy to discern how a combination of atmosphere and titillating storytelling can render the mind susceptible to extracting specific moments and specific lines at the expense of others. Who, after all, can finish Bront\u00eb\u2019s work without remembering Catherine\u2019s cry, \u201cI am <\/em>Heathcliff!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This all boils down to a certain amount of delusion around love: its addictive nature, its inextinguishable flame. That is, the belief that love is not love if it isn\u2019t immortal, if it fails to live beyond the grave. Love is not love if one is not willing to kill for it, to give up one\u2019s life for it, to exercise violence and exact vengeance on its behalf and under its banner. Love is not love if you do not place someone\u2019s well-being totally above your own, if you do not sacrifice yourself to it, if formerly two separate selves do not merge wholly and completely into one. This thinking may be why we remember Wuthering Heights <\/em>more for Heathcliff\u2019s extreme\u2014and insane\u2014devotion to Catherine\u2019s memory than as a story about generational abuse, otherness, and redemption. It is also why, regrettably, we remember Wuthering Heights <\/em>less as an exemplar of vicarious, vivid, and vivacious storytelling than for the love story that was never really the crux of what is, from first page to last, a passion project: a passion not for romance but for, above all, the act of creativity and the pure, unadulterated joy of playing God in ink.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is how the novel has always struck me: as a gratuitous exercise in artistry and play, in the kind of explosive energy that will unfold on the page when, for better or worse, the imagination is loosed like a dog that has been liberated from its leash in a park. How else to explain the layers of narrative that remind me, at times, of a mille-feuille? Revisiting the work in my early thirties, I noticed as I didn\u2019t before the delightful recklessness, the heedlessness and risk-taking of Bront\u00eb\u2019s prose. I laughed at Lockwood\u2019s ineptitude and buffoonery, his pomposity, his romantic nature that allows him to be so easily beguiled by a pretty face and to fancy himself in love. In the first pages alone, a comic scene unfolds that sends the whole household into uproar. If there is passion, then it is passion made vivid to the point of fluorescence with melodrama.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wuthering Heights <\/em>is, in a nutshell, a noisy affair, raucous with Joseph\u2019s ear-splitting outbursts, with Nellie Dean\u2019s sanctimonious need to be right, with Linton Heathcliff\u2019s whining, with violence and kidnapping and elopement and death and ghosts. In its ingenuity, its surrender to the spirit of its diverse and strange cast of characters, Wuthering Heights<\/em> is more instinct than strategy, more id than superego, more the splatter of ink that leaks from a broken nib than a smooth and unbroken line. Thomas Wolfe is reputed to have said, \u201cWriting is easy. Just put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and start bleeding.\u201d I feel something different at work with Bront\u00eb. Even when I disliked the book, I always sensed how fun and, more vitally, how free it was. So often do we harp on the struggle of writing that we forget that pleasure can and frequently does accompany the uphill battle to put words on the page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fennell\u2019s film is a testament to the contagiousness of that energy and pleasure. For all its adult themes, it\u2019s a fantasy of the kind that precedes actual experience of the realities of the world; its stunning aesthetics betray, at its heart, a cluelessness. The hodgepodge of erotic imagery scattered throughout scenes recollects the giggles that would inevitably spread like wildfire in a classroom whenever someone happened to mention boobs or dared to say the word \u201cdick\u201d or \u201cfuck\u201d aloud. Tellingly, even symbolically, there is no nudity in Fennell\u2019s movie: no breasts or buttocks or penises. But there are plenty of pig\u2019s feet; there is the underside of a snail leaving a trail of slime across a glass pane. There\u2019s the slap of wet dough and the meticulously handcrafted book Isabella Linton presents Catherine, which highlights more than one erotic feature in its pages: a pop-up of a phallus-shaped mushroom, a flower that resembles vaginal lips. Sex is clean, and its participants are, most of the time, even formally dressed for the occasion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In one revealing scene, Catherine screams at her good-for-nothing father, as she stamps across the courtyard of Wuthering Heights, \u201cWe\u2019re all ill! We\u2019re all ill because of you!\u201d This line hits at what Fennell\u2019s \u201cWuthering Heights<\/em>\u201d is about. None of the characters know what they\u2019re doing or how to go about getting what they want. Everyone is suffering under some form of delusion. Except for, surprisingly, Zillah, who has left the service of Wuthering Heights, married, and become a mother of a little boy, no one really grows up or moves on. With guardians like Mr. Earnshaw and Edgar Linton, maybe they don\u2019t know how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So often do we harp on the struggle of writing that we forget that pleasure can and frequently does accompany the uphill battle to put words on the page.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

If Fennell\u2019s \u201cWuthering Heights<\/em>\u201d is meant, to quote Davies, to replicate \u201ca teenage fever dream,\u201d it also warns of the dangers of being caught in the stage of hormonally fueled fantasy for too long. There is a difference between the love we imagine and the love we practice, and \u201ccompromise,\u201d so integral to real life and to navigating any relationship, is not a word recognized in the world of this film. No one surrenders, except to their own fantasy of what and how things should be. Everyone clings. Edgar Linton deceives himself that his wife is perfect. Isabella allows herself to be treated, literally, like a dog. Nelly guards the only thing that gives meaning to her life: her proximity to those in power. And Catherine and Heathcliff abjectly fail to grow out of an adolescent hedonism; their creed remains, we can do anything we want, so long as we are the ones doing it. Appropriately, the film concludes with flashbacks to Catherine and Heathcliff\u2019s childhood. This move is sentimental, even predictable, a play for easy audience tears. But the bigger lesson may be that if one can\u2019t look forward, one runs the risk of living forever in an idealized past. And lest we forget, the film ends in tragedy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While watching Fennell\u2019s \u201cWuthering Heights<\/em>,\u201d I thought a lot about my debut novel<\/a>, a retelling of Jane Austen\u2019s Pride and Prejudice<\/a><\/em>. I wrote it a few years out of college, having just been fired from a dead-end job I despised. I was twenty-five and had never had either a boyfriend or sex. My parents were filing for bankruptcy, and I was about to lose my childhood home. Some, or possibly most, of that pent-up frustration came out in the span of three months in a first draft of a novel that I composed while sweating in an airless basement I would very soon never have the privilege of sitting or typing in again. All of my fears and wishes for the future somehow found their expression in that first book. I had no idea what I was doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The end result was a fantasy. My protagonist not only gets her happy ending but also has a lot of fine, robust sex in between. I wondered that I could write about positions, about the sensation of lying naked beside a lover, without having experienced any of what I described. My inspiration came from what I had consumed in books, movies, and porn, from my introversion and isolation, from the buzz of sexual frustration and my despair at repetitive encounters with unrequited love. By and large, critics were much kinder to my first novel than readers were. Many were furious, outraged to the point of being almost comic. What I\u2019d done to Austen was disgraceful, they declared; what right did I have to rewrite, to retell, to revise, to essentially destroy what had already attained the highest echelon of literary perfection. So, the litany of complaints went on and on\u2014and on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If I could, I\u2019d inform the Janeite mob at my door that my treatment of Mr. Darcy and Lizzy, of Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins, of, notably, Mary Bennet, had nothing to do with them. I did not think of them. I didn\u2019t want to think of them, not out of any disrespect, but because all that mattered as I was writing the novel was the absolute, all-consuming urgency I felt in transplanting my vision onto a preexisting world that had become so intimate to me that I had grown bold enough to wish to change the scenery and the weather, to shift the furniture and swap the curtains, and to rearrange characters as if they were my own playthings. You don\u2019t do that out of hatred or scorn. You do that only when a book becomes so alive that you cannot remember who you were before you read it, when your tongue takes on the rhythm of its language and lines, and when the impulse to rummage around inside of its world becomes all but irresistible. In short, it is out of adulation\u2014and out of love.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sense the same impulse in Fennell\u2019s adaptation. This is surely a personal vision, and because it is so personal, it will be, at times, moving, and, at times, ridiculous. The trailer for the film describes it as, \u201cInspired by the greatest love story of all time.\u201d I don\u2019t think, however, that this is accurate. Rather, I would say that Fennell\u2019s \u201cWuthering Heights<\/em>\u201d is inspired simply by her love for a truly great\u2014and truly strange\u2014novel, that the passion which drove her to undertake such an ambitious project is the same that compelled Bront\u00eb to write the book. It\u2019s a bold move, and it takes courage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a scene in the film where a shivering Catherine complains of the cold. Heathcliff offers to build a fire, but they cannot spare the firewood. After a brief exchange, Heathcliff stands up. He slams his chair against the floor, again, then again, until it breaks. With the remnants of the chair, he builds a fire; he will not see Catherine cold.<\/p>\n\n\n