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Episode 124 -- Wuthering Heights (Patreon)

Published:
2026-03-03 04:03:44
Imported:
2026-09

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Content

Last week, Adrian and Moira went to the movies and watched director Emerald Fennell's version of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (trailer here). In this episode they explore the gender politics of the novel, of this adaptation and what it says about the fate of romance fiction in the 2020s.

Here are some of the texts we refer to in the discussion or used in preparing for it:

Elizabeth Hardwick, "Working Girls: The Brontës"

Georges Bataille, "Literature and Evil"

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, "The Madwoman in the Attic"

Comments

Nina V~

OOOH, about to listen, and i just want to say THANK YOU for giving me something fun to listen to while i lose my mind studying chemical kinetics 💜 ㅠ_ㅠ

Nina V~

i will also say that after what she does in "saltburn," cutting out the necrophilia in this story feels ESPECIALLY weird i will be missing this one, though. i was infuriated by the end of "promising young woman," and "saltburn" just left me cold. i've been joking that the only positive thing i can say abt this adaptation is that charli xcx got a paycheck

Haunter

this is all the analysis i wanted after watching fennell's adaptation but wasn't smart enough to articulate, thank u guys /so/ much

James Hultgren

My central complain with Fennell is that she understands the first part of metaphor (analogy), but then fails to do anything with it: the visuals are so rich, though, that you spend the first 40 minutes trying to just keep up before you realise there’s no point, cause nothing has but the most mundane and superficial meaning. So many of the shots have this beautiful mis en scene but then the camera has to move because *it’s a motion picture* and you wonder why anything is positioned where it is. One thing I really felt about Margot Robbie’s performance is that it felt like every scene her character was rebooted, which I think comports with the unreliable perspectives, but it isn’t present in any other area of the movie, so it just comes across as though Margot made a tonne of really strong, misguided choices and Fennell wasn’t confident enough to reign her back in. I also feel like a lot of the choices to reframe Heathcliff’s violence (to Isabelle, most acutely, but to a great extent, everyone!) is simply because Fennell didn’t want to threaten his romantic appeal. The costumes are the perfect summation of what’s wrong: ahistorical fabrics and silhouettes, not to say something, or challenge any preconceptions, but just because it looked cool. I love superficiality but it’s sold under the pretence of high art… only to be shown as fundamentally skin deep! Hong Chau and Charli XCX were great and the only thing I enjoyed… apart from the corset lift.

James Hultgren

Also the FAKEST DONG ON THE HANGED MAN just burn it down

Cheyenne Montgomery

Thank you! Not an English major and I never read the book, but now I REALLY want to. Then I want to see the adaptation with Sinead O’Connor

Nina

What really bothers me about when people cast Heathcliff as a white guy is that this seems to be done IN ORDER to portray him as more attractive and less abusive. I actually think that is very racist because it's like they could just cast a hot non white guy, I'm not against romantizing fucked up things I think that could work with the original novel, but doing so while making Heathcliff white just seems racist

Charley

As an English person (though not a northerner), I appreciated Moira’s solid Yorkshire pronunciation of “wuthering” 😉 Totally agree that the Cathy-Heathcliff thing is consistently mis-adapted as a romance (or even a conventionally sexual relationship). It’s obsessive, yes, it’s quasi-incestuous, but it’s almost beyond the physical - sort of animist, embodied in the cruel harshness of the landscape & elements. Terry Eagleton did an interesting Marxist critique of WH back in the day, where he highlighted the class & social order aspects of the book. Cathy’s decision to prioritise middle-class comfort over her “true nature” is her fatal flaw, which leads to her early death and gives Heathcliff a sort of plot excuse for going full violent revenger. One thing I’d note about Haworth - it is set in a bleak environment but the moors are not as remote as they first appear. That part of Yorkshire is a strange mix of moorland and industrial city landscape. (The industrial northern cities of Bradford and Halifax were nearby, complete with Blake’s “dark satanic mills”). You can see some of this beautifully in the film God’s Own Country with a few panoramic shots of wild moorland and industrial city in the distance.

MWD

Rude. I was trying to drink coffee while listening to the first few minutes. I was cracking up. Goo.

Kim

For some reason when Adrian said, they cast Ray Fiennes, my brain immediately filled in Ray Liotta, and I thought man that’s some bold casting. And I would so watch that version. 🤣

OuijaFBabysMama

Screaming! Moira Wuthering Heights is a book I reread constantly through my teens and return to often. I am so enjoying this conversation

OuijaFBabysMama

Adrian I love you too I just have never felt so seen by a public intellectual as when hearing Moira cooking🤯❤️‍🔥😍🥰✨✊✊✊✊✊

Moira Donegan

It’s such a good read! Run, don’t walk.

kathleen

The episode and the lively comments are the class discussion of my liberal arts college dreams, truly. I'm enjoying them so much. Because once a social science major always a social science major, I want to know about context (in the book I guess). What is with the secondary characters that create the conditions in this book generally? A father who favors his less than white foster waif, but dies without empowering him with independence so the son of the house in his envy can victimize this kid. A family that approves a marriage with a terrible person from a fucked up family (for the noble connection?). Yikes. Cathy and Heathcliff are forces of nature but the society around them gives them somewhere to exert that force and Society sure does fail itself. Romance novels can have a critical view of social folly. But at least the protagonists get over their own shit in order to find a way to navigate the barriers as a team. Not so with those who wuther on the heights! Anyway, thanks for this! It's so fun!

kathleen

OK on a purely distracting note... just looked up Timothy Dalton in his WuthHeigh and he sure can smolder. (He gives imo the BEST contribution to the obsolete art of the commentary track on the DVD issue of Hot Fuzz.)

Murphy

Me Out loud: "Wow!" in response to Moira's dog juxtaposition observation. I think I don't wanna see it.

Moira Donegan

It’s fun and stupid! But yeah that did piss me off. 🙃

Marlontini

Great episode! I read the book recently and have been so annoyed by Emerald Fennell's whole existence. (Not that adaptations have to be "faithful," but they should be able to make a decent argument for themselves.) A QUESTION: around 12 minutes in, Moira talks about Charlotte's 1850 intro to the novel and cites Charlotte as writing that Heathcliff is a kind of self-portrait of Emily. That really piqued my curiosity so I went and read Charlotte's 1850 "biographical notice," as reprinted in my own (grandmother's) 1950 edition. There's no such explicit comparison between Emily and Heathcliff. I'm not asking to be an annoying corrector of errors, I'm just very curious about this. Moira - did I read the wrong "note," do you know if there are multiple versions of it, or was this a misconstrual or exaggeration? THANK YOU if you take the time to read and respond to my query. I absolutely adore your work and think we all need more Moira's in the world.

Marlontini

Also, a funny PS: My grandmother made one sole annotation in this book. On the title page, directly under the title, she wrote in her perfect script: "A rotten book." She's dead so I can't ask whether she hated the book or was just describing its characters and contents... either way it's very funny to me.

Pascale Andor

Shazad Latif would’ve made a perfect Heathcliff and Alison Oliver would’ve made a more convincing Catherine. I’m sorry, but Margot Robbie doesn’t look like she died at 18-19.

Emily Furlich

Did anybody here see Bad Cinderella on Broadway? Fennell wrote the book and it was fascinating in that it might have passed for progressive if it opened here ten years earlier. The difference in gender politics between the UK vs the US may be part of why it flopped so hard here in comparison.

Sophie Helen

The whip marks are unfortunately a common trope in the "dark romance" genre, which abounds with tortured (white) male romantic leads who bear permanent physical markings of the (often clownish) abuse *they* have suffered at the hands of the patriarchy, which authors tend to use as a short cut to relay that the mmc can understand the trauma of the fmc on some deep level and serve as a righteous protector, which is lazy in general and dubious particularly for the character of Heathcliff...

kathleen

Ooh good choices!

Stephanie Corbitt

Once again yall have perfectly encapsulated all of the issues I have with this movie! I haven’t seen it yet, but Moira I find it interesting that you didn’t buy Jacob Elordi as threatening or abusive because he gives that 1000% in Euphoria! His performance in that show was the one thing that made me think he could be good as Heathcliff (whiteness aside), so that’s disappointing Fennell couldn’t even capture that aspect 🥴

Pascale Andor

They’re playing the Lintons. It’s just that when the casting dropped, I was like “they would’ve been perfect as Cathy and Heathcliff”.

Melinda Hileman

The best adaptation I have seen is Wuthering Heights (1988), a Japanese film that addresses both generations and the general fuck-ed-up-ness of the source material. Set in medieval Japan on the side of a dormant volcanic mountain. It is hard to find for rent or purchase, but is freely available here: https://archive.org/details/wuthering-heights-yoshishige-yoshida

Melinda Hileman

As far as I can tell, Fennell's version is basically a sexy fanfic. In interviews she's talked about how intense and sexy she found this book when she read it at age 14... so she's done a high-budget, somewhat artistic porn parody, to be really reductive for the sake of brevity. And so ok, whatever, go have your sexy fanfic, I don't have much of a problem with that on its face. It means that the film is at the intellectual level of a horny 14 year old, however...

Sarah Sullivan

I had the same reaction! how does the interpretation of power in the masculine body differ by cohort? 👀

Susan Olson

It's been really interesting seeing the The Discourse on this movie and the book in turn lately, and your take on both was unsurprisingly really fascinating (Betwixt the Sheets did a great Brontë episode recently too, if anyone's curious). Your perspectives were helpful for me as someone who read this book as a part of my Victorian lit class at 18 in my very first semester of college, loathed every single character in it, and consequently had no fond or protective feelings about it. Also, as quite a literal thinker myself, I remember being shocked (SHOCKED) when my professor brought up the possibility that Heathcliff was in fact Mr. Earnshaw's illegitimate son, which is why he and Cathy's relationship was so seemingly cursed. That *never* would have occurred to me on my own, which is why I was a chemistry rather than literature major 😂 Nonetheless, you've given me a lot of food for thought around the impact of framing story choices in particular ❤️

Moira Donegan

Oh my god thank you for sharing! I’ve wanted to see this one forever.

Moira Donegan

I thought they both did a great job!

Brandi Pursley

Moira is fucking cooking in the last 10 minutes of this episode 🔥

Devin Rooney

The end of the episode Lewis/Dworkin comment made me wonder if you all might consider doing a full-on Dworkin episode that teases out the Right's misappropriation of her anti-porn politics and share your perspectives on her work more broadly

café latte supernova

Moira Jacob Elordi is 6’5” and like 200 pounds of muscle and white boy rage, he is very believable as the perpetrator of violence! For example, his Euphoria character is very physical and scary. Maybe he’s not presented as such in the film, but his physical vessel is sufficiently potentially imposing. Great ep otherwise tho, I just had to laugh at that part when she said this dude wasn’t threatening. Maybe I’m just stuck on his Euphoria role, but I’d hate to be alone with that man.

Laura Cullen

One of my most enduring memories is from my first day of freshman English (in my "early college" program) when our assignment was to write about our favorite and least favorite novels. As I was writing about my "least favorite," the instructor walked by and chirped, "I love Wuthering Heights" or maybe that it was HER favorite. Despite the mortification, I did fine on the assignment and in the class and even changed my major to English a few years later (for reasons completely unrelated to Wuthering Heights). I've reread it at least twice since then and still haven't come around. About halfway through the episode, I was almost convinced I might be able to appreciate something that I'd missed before, but now I think I'm just going to stick with Team Austen and leave the Brontës well enough alone.

OuijaFBabysMama

I also never saw Euphoria and the first thing I said to my bff when I left is how that guy wasn’t big enough and she balked about his height and I am like I didnt say too short I said not “big” enough. It’s not the capability of violence merely but the constant threat of violence simply by your smallness and inherent vulnerability on a like planetary scale

OuijaFBabysMama

Like it should look like beauty and the beast full beast

Amanda

Yessss. How the audience may perceive the death of the dog vs eroticized rape…🤯

Jenny

Highly recommend reading the book - it's a rich text ripe for analysis, and a good (wild, not necessarily feel-good) time!

Brandi Pursley

It’s so accurate though. For some reason, I saw My Friend Dahmer in the theater, and everyone was so tense when he was contemplating killing a dog. There was a collective sigh of relief when he let it go. Meanwhile he’s murdering queer boys…

Jenny

It's Ralph Fiennes! Damn the Brits and their spelling/pronunciation. 🥲

OuijaFBabysMama

I also think there is something to be said about the idea that the best film adaptation of wuthering heights is robert pattinson and willem defoe’s lighthouse movie that made me want to die in the theatre

Moira Donegan

In fairness I have never seen Euphoria!

Johnny

a small detail abt the book that i think is interesting! when cathy is ushered into polite society while staying at the lintons’, she’s expressly made female in that process. it’s specifically hindley’s wife (a person who lives at wuthering heights due to her gendered position as wife, as opposed to cathy’s non-gendered presence as biological child) who undertakes this, and she uses specifically “fine clothes and flattery”. when cathy comes home, hindley greets her with, “‘why, cathy, you are quite a beauty! i should scarcely have known you: you look like a lady now.’” there’s more (this is all chapter 7) but i won’t go into it and bore everyone to death. i don’t have any sweeping theses here, but in combination with, for example, the incredible “i AM heathcliff” bit, and the gendered forms of physical violence that cathy and heathcliff engage in, the question of gender seems really significant. i’d love to hear other thoughts abt this specific use of upper class FEMININITY as the first big wedge between the cathy-heathcliff unity!

Anne

I could have listened to you talk about this easily for another couple of hours. I do take exception to Adrian’s comments about the second half of the book though! I don’t think it’s eventless at all. There’s young Cathy discovering Wuthering Heights (breaking Nelly Dean’s heart in the process, who was so intent on protecting her from the drama), falling in love with her ailing cousin, just to realize he’s being manipulated by Heathcliff, and then, being kidnapped and forced into mariage. One thing that came to mind the last time I read the book is how it could be read through the lens of the various ways in which adults fail children. For instance, I feel like I rarely hear about the treatment of Heathcliff Linton, who was tormented by his father and -at the very least- neglected to death . I’m not an expert on the matter, but the Brontës seem to have had a rather miserable childhood, with a zealot father (see Joseph torturing the kids with his Bible studies). Also, in the end, the character of whom it’s been said most explicitly that she was raised by a loving father (Cathy Jr) fixes the whole plot, ostensibly ending the cycle of abuse.

Karen Cox

I read this book three times in high school. I am going to have read it again now after 5 decades of feminism ànd see how my reaction changes.

Karen Cox

I would sell a kidney for that episode.

Alan Elrod

Really loved this one. I have to admit that I did not enjoy this book in high school, but looking back, I think it’s becuase I was not primed to take it in as a story about horrible people and abusive behavior. Instead, it was presented as a kind of bleak romance. I manly recall loathing everyone in it. This conversation was just really enlightening and delightful. Fennell seems to be on an odd trajectory from making a film about avenging rape to making a film that asks us to enjoy the dismemberment of a household to making a film that whitewashes and glams up the sexual violence of its source material.

Lizbeth

Yes! They mentioned they were coming to a close and I was a bit disappointed they hadn’t strongly critiqued in a nutshell how the misogyny, abuse of women and depravity had been scrubbed and then BAM!

Lizbeth

Sanitising, misrepresenting and sexualising a book largely centred on female subjugation is gross though. It’s a shame for Brontë and all the people who haven’t read the book to be given this impression of it. And gonna be a big disappointment for those who do then read it!

Alex Strasheim

I'm not a scholar and I can't back this up with a proper argument, so this is probably kind of dumb. But when I revisited it as an older person, along with Jane Eyre, I really felt like this was where lots of stuff in Bleak House came from. I mean, there's the Pickwick Papers, which is one kind of book, which you can put into a box, and there's Bleak House, with the spontaneous combustion, the gut wrenching death of Jo. And in Bleak House, some parts of kind of normal, but some are a little weird, and kind of vivid without . And it really seemed clear to me that Dickens had lifted that part of it from the Brontes.

OuijaFBabysMama

So I had to rereread WH and am I trippin or are Lockwood’s scenes actually hillarious? Like his night at Wuthering Heights is a comedy a campy comedy of gothic like there is so much darkness but emily is also like the first whisp of camp wait what is the HiStOry oF CamP you guys

Sarah O'Mahoney

Another fabulous episode! Listened twice! Think I might have to give WH another read after many years

paul bowman

‘And she did that on purpose, because she knew that her viewers — she was more afraid of what it would evoke in her viewers if she said that he killed the dog than what it would evoke in her viewers if she eroticized rape.’ Boom. — Not that i was ever going to see this movie anyway, but this line. This is going to stick with me.

Moira Donegan

I don’t think the right *has* appropriated her work.

Moira Donegan

I’ve been meaning to for years! People say it’s incredible.

Devin Rooney

Maybe it's better phrased as made common cause with her on fighting porn by mostly feigning interest in the gendered violence while actually caring about porn through the lens of regressive religious impulses and propertarian conceptions of father-daughter, husband-wife relations

Devin Rooney

Or are you saying the argument that she aligned with the right was mostly overblown by her opponents in liberal feminist and radical feminist spaces and not a real thing

Molly

Slightly off topic but can you recommend any “friends of the pod” who discuss domestic violence and DARVO? Much of critical analysis pertaining to this subject comes through lens of sexual violence, but that’s not quite the same, is it? I identified strongly with “me too” movement both because I experienced workplace harassment and because I welcomed lifting the stigma about discussing it openly, but ultimately felt let down as DV wasn’t included in conversation. (Also please excuse typos/grammar—don’t know it’s my phone or app but can’t see what I’ve written other than this sentence!) I’d love to hear an intelligent conversation re DV and would appreciate recommendations.

Octopus

He’s also terrifying in his 1st role as a Netflix romance slop heartthrob where he slams his fist on a car and demands the main character to get in (the kissing booth)

Astraea

I know I am SUPER late to the party (I hate almost every character in this book so avoided the episode for a long time - should have trusted a Moira and Adrian, because it was great!). BUT. The whole conversation about whip scars made me think of exactly this, and I'm glad you brought it up. I'm sure the movie scars do directly evoke that artwork, but truly, the number of male leads in romance who have literal physical scars from their abusive fathers is very, very high. (Only slightly higher than the number of murdered mothers, if we're being honest.) I have not found this to be limited to dark romance. It's pretty common across period romance of any type, and on contemporary Harlequin romance. It is extremely common that the character development the male lead goes through (learning to trust, learning to love, learning to respond instead of react, etc) requires addressing and healing from childhood parental abuse. It IS extremely lazy and I've read so often I could write it in my sleep. But I do think it's interesting that it's a really consistent application of the trauma plot to men. In fact it's the only consistent trauma plot that men get in romance these days, as far as I can tell. (Sometimes PTSD from military service, but that's not usually a thing they have to overcome in order to fall in love, just a thing that exists.) Anyway, I just think it's very interesting. I'd love hear an episode on modern-day romance in general (esp. period romance), because I think there's a LOT there.