[COLUMN] In Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights", Heathcliff is a Monster Born of Repressed Feminine Desire | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, particularly discussing deviations from the source material. If you’re looking for a quick review, the film is fine. It is a little languid and over-extended. While its indulgence is the point of the exercise, it feels a little too indulgent. However, it has big ideas and takes some big, thoughtful swings that - like the best adaptations of the book - are engaged with the work as more than just a Wikipedia article. It’s also visually stunning. Not the worst film at the cinema now, but not the best either.

There is a famous passage in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which plays in some variation across most of the adaptations. Catherine Earnshaw (Margot Robbie) has just received and accepted a proposal of marriage from the family’s neighbor, Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif). However, Catherine is distraught, as she confesses her love for Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) to Nelly Dean (Hong Chau). “I am Heathcliff!” Catherine declares. “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”

It is one of the most famous declarations in western literature. Like Wuthering Heights itself, the scene can be interpreted in any number of ways. Most often, it is reduced to something as simple as “probably the most iconic declaration of love in literature”, as if it belongs on a Hallmark Greeting Card. It has also been read in the context of incestuous framing of the central love affair, the implication buried quite close to the surface of the novel at Catherine and Heathcliff are siblings.

In her adaptation of Brontë’s classic, writer and director Emerald Fennell hits on a somewhat novel interpretation of that classic speech. If Catherine is Heathcliff, “Wuthering Heights” seems to suggest, then surely the inverse is also true. By the transitive property, Heathcliff must also be Catherine. As much as “Wuthering Heights” is framed as an epic romance, releasing on Valentine’s Day, it is also a gothic horror. Its version of Heathcliff is framed as a creature of the monstrous feminine id.

One of the more tiresome aspects of the inevitable discourse cycle over Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” has been the emergence of book purists complaining about the liberties that Fennell has taken in translating the source material to screen, which are no greater or lesser than those taken by William Wyler in 1939 or Andrea Arnold in 2011. Fans were seemingly shocked to discover that Fennell was making the same choices that almost every other adaptation had made.

There is a sense in which this is perhaps the “comic-book-movie-fication” of cinema discourse, the emergence of a class of commentary that prioritizes “comics accurate” above adaptation as an artform unto itself. In such a framing, fidelity becomes the only metric of an adaptation’s value, and it is often measured by those who have either never directly engaged with the source material or have little interest in broader context, whether previous adaptations or this specific version’s authorship.

Like every previous adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Fennell’s film is an extremely loose take on the novel. This is no surprise. Anybody who has actually read Brontë’s novel will appreciate the structural challenges that it poses to any faithful or rigorous adaptation, from the framing devices within framing devices to the complete turnover of the cast to the frankly obscene levels of abuse and violence that would alienate an audience on screen.

The truth is that, in the great tradition of gothic literature, Brontë’s novel is decidedly ambiguous and open to interpretation. For example, the ongoing discourse over Heathcliff’s ethnicity tends to require selective reading of the book. It is entirely valid to argue that Heathcliff is a person of color, but it is also entirely valid to read his otherness as symbolic. It is valid to take Catherine’s father (Martin Clunes) at his word that Heathcliff is a random urchin he found in Liverpool, but it is also valid to question the tale of a businessman arriving home with a child of “unknown” parentage.

Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, there is a sense Wuthering Heights appeals to filmmakers because it is fundamentally unadaptable, so the only option is for writers and directors to put their own spin on the material. The object that lives in the popular memory is not the novel itself. Like the monster in Frankenstein, these stories take on lives of their own. That is a good thing. Every generation gets their own Frankenstein or Wuthering Heights. A filmmaker is obligated to have “a take.”

Fennell borrows from the template that William Wyler applied to his classic 1939 take, focusing on the first half of the novel. As the quotation marks around the title imply, her “Wuthering Heights” is in conversation with various takes on the source material over the past near-century. It is not just in conversation with Wuthering Heights, but in conversation with the conversation around Wuthering Heights, to the point that Heathcliff’s departure from the moors is shot to evoke the other big historical epic of 1939, Gone with the Wind.

As much as “Wuthering Heights” might deviate from the specifics of the text, it is quite evident that Fennell has thought a lot about the novel. For example, the sequence introducing Edgar and his ward Issabella (Ingrid Oliver) finds Ingrid monologuing about her theory that that nurse is the real villain of Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, a nod to the fringe academic reading of Wuthering Heights that suggests Nelly was the true villain of the novel, hiding in plain sight, an idea Fennell plays with.

Before “Wuthering Heights” was released, there was a popular internet theory that the film would be revealed to be a young girl’s fan fiction imagining of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or even a fantasy that was being played out with dolls. While Fennell avoids the obvious literalism of positioning such a revelation as a big twist, her “Wuthering Heights” is ultimately both of those things textually and subtextually.

Fennell has been quite open that she is making the version of Wuthering Heights that she imagined as a teenager. In the movie’s closing moments, the film flashes back to young Catherine (Charlotte Mellington) studying Heathcliff’s (Owen Cooper’s) scars. It is possible to read this as just a contrast between how the two characters started and where they ended up, but it also suggests the possibility that the entire movie has been the fantasy of young Catherine, a hormonal teenager.

The dolls are also a recurring motif. When Catherine marries Edgar, Isabella gifts her a doll made with her own hair. The doll goes into Isabella's beautiful detailed dollhouse, a perfect replica of the fantastical set on which they find themselves. Inside the doll house, the dolls stand outside a smaller dollhouse, contemplating two smaller dolls. One can only imagine that there is another dollhouse within that. And so on. And so on. Ad infinitum. It is dollhouses, all the way down.

One of the more interesting aspects of “Wuthering Heights” is the extent to which Fennell foregrounds Catherine. Discussions of Wuthering Heights tend to fixate on Heathcliff, to the point that there is a long history of academic writing calling out the marginalization of Catherine within the critical canon. Heathcliff is allowed to be complex and multifaceted, while Catherine is often simplified in adaptations, reduced to a beautiful and tragic innocent, pure and pursued.

Recent adaptations have taken steps to address this. Andrea Arnold’s take makes it clear Catherine (Kaya Scodelario) is just as much a monster as Heathcliff (James Howson). Fennell pushes the idea further. Fennell’s take on Heathcliff is decidedly and aggressively shallow. Heathcliff has no real power or agency within the narrative, no inner life. Instead, if anything, he exists as an expression of Catherine’s inner life. Heathcliff is presented as Catherine’s unleashed id, a monster of her making.

From the opening moments of “Wuthering Heights”, death and sex are inexorably linked – the Freudian concepts of “eros and thanatos.” Over the production logos, the audience hears the sound of wood creaking and labored breathing. It sounds like sex. The reveal is that it is, in fact, a hanging. The hanged – and perhaps hung – man does not have his neck snapped at the gallows. Instead, as he asphyxiates, his erection becomes visible. As he dies, his ejaculation stains his trousers.

Young Catherine watches this morbid scene from the crowd, with no way of establishing context for what she has seen. The only adult present, a nun (Vicki Pepperdine), shushes the children into silence. There will be no discussion or unpacking of that formative image. Later, Catherine asks Nelly to explain what sent the man to the gallows, and Nelly obliges with an impromptu puppet show – involving a male and a female doll. Sex, violence and death all intertwine.

There is an inherent perversity here, but it is a perversity woven into the fabric of Wuthering Heights. The book is often identified as “the greatest love story of all time” in polls of readers, which can seem insane to anybody who has parsed the abuse and violence of Brontë’s tale. Fennell’s film is playing with that tension, with the poster tagline promising audiences “the greatest love story.” That is not a title that Fennell has bestowed unilaterally upon the work, it is part of the work’s legacy.

“Wuthering Heights” is full of overtly feminine imagery. There are lots of archways and gateways and openings that don’t seem to lead anywhere. The moors are populated by crevices and valleys. Red and white are frequently contrasted. Broken eggs, cream buns with cherry nipples, supple bread dough. This feminine iconography is often contrasted with eerie deathly imagery: collapsed stone cottages, jutting rocks, grey mists, black stone. It is a curious and contradictory collection of ideas.

The women of “Wuthering Heights” are sexually repressed. Catherine, played by a 35-year-old Margot Robbie, is described by her father as “a spinster.” She is sexually inexperienced, shocked at catching a glimpse of some consensual kink play between the servant Joseph (Ewan Mitchell) and the maid Zillah (Amy Morgan), including whips and bridles. When she escapes to the moors to masturbate, it is heavily implied that this may be the first time that she has done so. That’s thirty years of pent up sexual frustration.

Desire becomes sublimated and buried. Heathcliff covers her eyes and mouth to protect her innocence at one point, such a formative moment that she recreates it with Edgar in their marital bed. Timid Isabella presents Catherine with a Christmas present of a pop-up book loaded with comically overt sexual imagery: a rose bud and pop-out gigantic mushroom. In Fennell’s telling, all of this repressed feminine desire has to manifest somewhere. It does in Heathcliff.

While Fennell reportedly cast Elordi after working with him Saltburn, it feels strangely appropriate that this is the actor’s first major role after his Oscar-nominated supporting turn in Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. Once again, he plays a gothic monster that serves as a manifestation of his creator’s id. In “Wuthering Heights”, it is Catherine – not her father – who bestows the urchin with the name of her dead brother. Bestowing a name gives one power. “I named him,” she protests. “He is mine.”

In “Wuthering Heights”, Heathcliff is a manifestation of all the parts of Catherine that she has buried. He is her “pet.” Heathcliff accepts the beatings from her father, to spare her. The lash marks on his back are juxtaposed with the laces of her smothering corset. At various points, Heathcliff threatens violence upon Catherine’s father and her husband, but cannot act without her consent and endorsement. He is in many ways a manifestation of her own anger directed at those men.  

In this way, Fennell repurposes Heathcliff as something that the character has become over the century or so since the novel’s publication. He is a figure of feminine fantasy. Another of Fennell’s bigger changes to the text is the reworking of the relationship between Heathcliff and Isabella. In the book, Heathcliff is horrifically abusive of Isabella. In Fennell’s recontextualizing of the work as a feminine fantasy, their dynamic becomes a more consensual submissive relationship with Isabella in control.

Sneaking into Isabella’s room, Heathcliff tells her how he does not and will not love her and will only use her to get back at Catherine, just as in their conversations in the book. However, this version of Heathcliff is all about affirmative consent. After every threat or promise, he whispers to the innocent young woman, “Do you want me to stop?” Even the framing of the question is playful, creating a fantasy for Isabella where no quite literally means yes. It’s a safe space for Isabella to play.

These are characters playing with dolls. The hanging sequence features puppets and jesters to work the crowd, to turn the morbid spectacle into fun narratives. It is implied that Isabella maintains the dollhouse to allow herself the fantasy of a life more exciting than her own. Even the dolls that Nelly uses to restage the hanging man’s crime serve as representative of something that she cannot explain with words in the context of the time. In this context, Heathcliff is perhaps a living doll.

Fennell is not just playing with Wuthering Heights. She is engaged with everything that has flowed from Wuthering Heights. This is an adaptation of Brontë’s novel in conversation with decades of “dark romances” that all feel like fantasies derived from Wuthering Heights, stories like Twilight, 50 Shades of Gray or even 365 Days, populated by discount versions of Heathcliff. These are the fantasies packaged and sold to women like Catherine, in their thirties and beyond.

It is important not to be dismissive of this. There is a long history of diminishing and belittling pop art aimed at women. Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” might be an exploration of women playing with the dolls that they loved as teenagers, but isn’t that just what most superhero movies are for boys? It would perhaps be hypocritical to critique the sublimated blurring of sexual and volent desire of bodice-ripping romances given the none-too-subtle subtext of so much superhero media.

In some ways, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” feels in tune with the mood of this particular moment, in particular the weird relationship that “Gen Z” seems to have towards sex, having less sex than older generations, being openly puritanical about the depiction of sex in media while also devouring shows like Heated Rivalry and Tell Me Lies. It is a paradox, a mess of contradictions, and these competing impulses seem to be playing through “Wuthering Heights.”

Fennell imagines a version of Heathcliff born of repressed feminine desire, dark-but-not-quite-dangerous, dominant-but-consent-forward, powerful-yet-impotent. Consciously or not, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” reflects a culture that has as strange – and perhaps unhealthy – a relationship to sex as Catherine Earnshaw does. It is no surprise Heathcliff returns to Catherine’s life once she becomes pregnant with Edgar’s child, conjured back into being.

It is fitting, then, that Fennell’s ultimate conclusion in “Wuthering Heights” is that this life Catherine has created within her ultimately kills her. The baby dies in Catherine’s womb, becoming sceptic. Nelly refuses to acknowledge this, and Catherine is eaten away from the inside. This thing that she has created – this life spawned from repression – consumes her. As she lies dead, Heathcliff cradles her body. He will be with her always, part of her forever. He was never anything more.