5 days ago
Wuthering Heights is mad enough without adding bondage
FR Leavis will be turning in his grave. Reports from a test screening of Emerald Fennell's new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights suggest that the Saltburn director has moved rather a long way away from Emily Brontë's 1847 novel.
In Dallas, Texas, the World of Reel website reported on a decidedly un-Victorian approach to the source material. The film apparently opens with a public hanging, and the condemned man ejaculating mid-execution. A nun then does something unmentionable to his corpse.
There are, according to the website, several more masturbation scenes, some none-too-subtle visual metaphors (egg yolks running through fingers, dough being vigorously pummelled) and even a spot of BDSM as a woman is strapped into a horse's reins. Whether this is Catherine Earnshaw, the story's free-spirited heroine, or perhaps the luckless, charming Isabella Linton is unknown.
Admittedly, it has been a long time since I read Wuthering Heights (I studied it for A-level in the early 1990s and have never gone back), but I do not remember anything to set my teenage heart racing. Fennell is known as a provocateur – Saltburn became notorious for one absolutely revolting scene involving Barry Keoghan and a bathtub – but she does not need to enhance her version of Brontë's novel with anything that is likely to get the purists hot under the collar. For Wuthering Heights is quite strange enough – in fact, I think it is one of the weirdest novels I have ever read.
Certainly a lot of this is to do with the atmosphere. The Yorkshire Moors, which Brontë knew very well, is described as an untameable, unlovely place with no beginning and no end. It makes it seem as if the characters exist in some sort of deathloop – each generation burdened by the sins of the one before them.
They also act strangely, often irrationally, or outside moral convention, perhaps because their lives are so isolated and they don't really know how to behave. This is seen most explicitly in the case of Heathcliff (whose ethnicity has been questioned by academics for decades). As wild and austere as the countryside he stalks, Heathcliff hangs Isabella's little dog, Fanny – an act which is a precursor to how abusive he will be to the wife to whom he bears no affection. He also digs up the grave of his true love, Catherine, in what seems like the ultimate act of obsession.
Wuthering Heights feels so downright odd because it is unlike anything else from the times. While other novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens and – to a degree – her sisters Anne and Charlotte were attempting to critique the social mores of the time, Brontë's inspiration wandered back to the Gothic imagination of the 18th century, to novelists such as Ann Radcliffe and Horace Walpole, who are little read now, and whose fevered prose displays an unhealthy obsession with the macabre and the mentally warped.
It is also easy to believe that Emily Brontë was not really of this world, holed up in the parsonage on the edge of consumption-riddled Haworth, with too many books and too vivid an imagination. There is a train of thought that she was a high Tory, intolerant of the industrial unrest of the earlier part of the 19th century, but I can't see anything to support that view, other than the fact that the Brontës were essentially charitably minded Conservatives.
I don't want to be one of those purists who condemns Fennell for trying to be different. Obsessively faithful adaptations of famous literary works are all well and good (think of John Mortimer's 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited), but radical hot takes (such as Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon) can bring a fresh understanding of the novel and even win the source material new fans.
And in any case, I don't believe there is a truly impressive adaptation of Wuthering Heights. The 1939 version with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon has a certain sombreness which is appealing, but it is too truncated and Alfred Newman's score makes me want to rip my ears off. Andrea Arnold's naturalistic 2011 film (the last big cinematic adaptation) has its fans, although that does not include Arnold herself, who has expressly stated that she was unhappy with the result.
The purists who may baulk at the prospect of an Emerald Fennell smutfest will also complain that most versions gut the second half of the novel, when Cathy and Linton (the children of Catherine and Heathcliff respectively) fall in love. Yet only the biggest completist would surely argue that adapting the whole of Wuthering Heights is a good idea. Its narrative structure is as mad as everything else about the book, and there is a large and unwieldy dramatis personae that would surely send even Andrew Davies to the depths of despair.
Famously, Wuthering Heights inspired Kate Bush's biggest hit (which expertly captured the novel's madness). And I sometimes wonder whether those fangirls who head to the moors are as much in love with that song as with Brontë's work. Or maybe they are simply in love with the cult that has grown up around her.
But we must realise that Brontë is ultimately unknowable, and so any attempt to give her a biography becomes a projection of what we want her to be. Similarly any adaptation of Wuthering Heights will end up being rooted in the director's vision because the book is so unknowable, too. It's just a shame that in Fennell's case, that vision appears to be an unnecessary pornification. What is it with nuns, anyway?
