The new film “Wuthering Heights” is many things: forbidden passion, spiky Gothic rocks, lashings of wind and rain, shiny frocks for Cathy to flounce about in, the agonies of a hanged man and a slaughtered pig, and an obsession with the colour red in decor, skirts, blood and a sunset for Heathcliff to gallop off into. But it is not the novel that Emily Bronte wrote.
Is it just me or is the home-made scrapbook that prim little Isabella shows to Cathy full of phallic and vaginal images? What are those naughty snails doing, and why is Cathy fascinated with kneading dough? Aha, sexual awakening. She has the hots for Heathcliff, but she must resist him because he is beneath her. Or on top of her, trying to stop her eavesdropping on two servants copulating.
Emily Bronte never went in for this sort of thing. You couldn’t get away with it in her day. But there’s passion aplenty in Wuthering Heights the novel. And much of it isn’t sexual or romantic. It’s passion for cruelty and revenge.
I feel for director Emerald Fennell. Adapting a sprawling 19th-century read to 21st-century sensibilities is no easy task. No wonder the credits say the film is only “based on” the novel. So Fennell has stuck to the central part of the novel, the ill-starred romance between Cathy and Heathcliff, which is what every filmgoer wants to see. But what about the rest of the story? (Spoiler alert: I discuss endings).
We lose the Bronte storytellers: Mr Lockwood, the new tenant at Thrushcross Grange, and Nelly Dean, the servant (Nelly is in the film, but not as a narrator). Instead of a gradual lead-in, we begin with a horror: a hanged man’s last moments, witnessed by a jeering crowd, with an enthusiastic young Cathy Earnshaw near the front row – so we know at once she’s a savage little moppet.
We also lose key characters such as Cathy’s brother Hindley, which changes the story in crucial ways. In the novel, Hindley is so nasty and jealous of his father’s adoption of Heathcliff that kindly Mr Earnshaw has to send his surly son off to college. After his father’s death, Hindley inherits Wuthering Heights and banishes daddy’s favourite to labour in the fields.
In the film, Mr Earnshaw takes Hindley’s place as the brutal authority figure and pathetic alcoholic who despises Heathcliff. Which doesn’t make much sense, as he adopted the boy in the first place.
Another change: the rich people at Thrushcross Grange are not a couple with two children, Edgar and Isabella. They are the adult Edgar and a much younger Isabella, his ward. In the book, the child Cathy has a very different experience with two boys, Edgar and Heathcliff, who become her competing love interests. In the film, she meets Edgar as a grown woman and her interest in him is purely for the life he can give her when they marry. The novel is more ambiguous: Cathy has feelings for Edgar, which increases the tension.
The biggest difference between book and film is that the novel takes us far beyond the Cathy-Heathcliff episode and sweeps us down the generations. In the novel, Cathy dies giving birth, but her daughter, also called Cathy, lives on. In the film, both Cathy and her child die, Heathcliff grieves, and that’s all folks.
Yet, the novel takes off at this point because Heathcliff, always a dark threatening presence, becomes totally fiendish. What drives him is partly his thwarted love for Cathy and his contempt for Edgar, but above all, it’s his hatred of Hindley and his limitless thirst for revenge.
He gets hold of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and tyrannises their innocent inhabitants. The only reason we care about him at all is his agony and heartbreak over his lost love, and his unhinged desire for her to haunt him forever.
The film’s Heathcliff isn’t a mad scheming monster; he’s watered-down. He begs Cathy to haunt him, but it’s just the grief talking, not the subsequent madness. He marries the besotted Isabella and is cruel to her, but this is just to get back at Cathy, and Isabella has a masochistic urge to play along.
If you want a flashy romance with all the stops out, go and see the film. Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi certainly make a sizzling pair. But if you want a darker, more complex story that echoes down the generations, read the book. And by the way, it has a happy ending.
Janesullivan.sullivan9@gmail.com
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Jane Sullivan is a books columnist and reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
