this is not an essay about Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights"

why are women being told not to think?

The cover image for this piece is Cloud Inversion in the Hope Valley from Surprise View by Yorkshire landscape photographer Dave Parry and you can buy prints of it here.

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Something shifted a few weeks ago, and I went from despising all the teaser content from the new Wuthering Heights movie to being really quite convinced that I was going to like it. I like high camp. I like drama. The visuals looked compelling and interesting. I am totally up for adaptations that partially disregard their source material to achieve a different meaning; nothing is beyond revisiting. I am a Kubrick fan and he’s the ultimate source-material disrespecter. And yet I still felt kind of annoyed by the whole thing. I tried not caring but it wasn’t possible; having written a novel heavily indebted to Jane Eyre, and growing up just an hour away from where the Brontës grew up, I have strong feelings about these women, their books, and this land: I have written about the latter here.

I didn’t expect to come out of the movie genuinely livid. And yet. It is a bad movie, of course; less a film and more a music video stretched out to 136 minutes. For all I enjoyed seeing the Yorkshire Moors and the mad sets, it's difficult not to come out of it feeling kind of insulted, as if everyone involved with it thinks you specifically are a dunce. The issues are both macro and micro. Elordi can't do the accent (how hard is it to understand that we say tek and mek instead of take and make?). Margot Robbie is fifteen years too old to be playing Catherine Earnshaw. Martin Clunes and Hong Chai are doing heavy lifting in poorly written roles. All complexity is stripped from the characters. For some reason they have made Haworth look like Mordor. Tonally it is completely erratic. The lampshading of the fact that life at the Linton household is a doll’s house existence only serves to emphasise how that also applies to the film: these characters are empty dolls, moved around as a game. Mainstream cinema is currently replete with the worst kind of habits; this is the third major release in just over a month to have a main character poignantly explaining the plot of another ‘doomed love’ story to another character (Hamnet and The History of Sound both had Orpheus and Eurydice (recited by the same actor!!) and this has Isabella referencing Romeo and Juliet). The fact that scripts are starting to rely on this sort of abject signposting says a lot about Hollywood and none of it is good.

They mention Romeo and Juliet, of course, to ram home the point that Fennell has sort of cast these characters as Romeo and Juliet in Yorkshire; star-crossed lovers doomed not by their own behaviour or structural influences but through a simple misunderstanding (or, as we shall discuss later, the actions of staff). We get it. But why? Why adapt one story to turn it into another completely different story, of which many (better) versions already exist? Why is the resounding question you're left with after seeing this movie. Why am I supposed to give a fuck what an agonisingly posh woman from London thought Wuthering Heights was about when she was a teenager? Why you would remove one of the central characters altogether, Hindley, which completely changes the foundations of the relationship of the protagonists? Why replace timeless tortured longing and internal conflicts with things that might have shocked thirty years ago but now feel overdone to the point of being completely trite, when you can’t even commit to that enough to show us a naked body? Surely no one in the year 2026 thinks putting BDSM-lite on screen is shocking, given that capitalist society has absorbed it seamlessly into its usual modes (want sexual perversion? Fine, as long as you pay for it!). From the very first scene anything sexual is played as a juvenile joke (which results in tittering from the audience), so asking us to be actually turned on by it later just doesn’t work. But this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of directorial decisions that seem to have no congruity beyond wanting to alter the source material beyond recognition, to make what one prominent critic has called a ‘smooth-brained Wuthering Heights’ as a compliment.

Rather than turning the story towards a different message, Fennell’s choices here seem intended to remove any meaning whatsoever. Characters from the book are removed, amalgamated, made the complete opposite. Earnshaw, the Wuthering Heights patriarch, brings Heathcliff home not as an act of (real or posturing) charity but out of bullishness. Isabella is not an abused wife (and possibly sister) but a willing submissive, a plot strand which is handled as unconvincingly as it is in Babygirl, with a cowardly girl-boss angle to placate the audience at which this film is aimed. Heathcliff and Cathy are no longer complex, culpable, fallible people; they are empty-headed figures with the simplest of intentions and reactions, which has the bizarre effect of making these enduring characters of literature less edgy, less interesting and less controversially attractive. Heathcliff is not brutal or terrifying, despite the characters telling us so repeatedly. He never actually degrades anyone or behaves abominably; he even asks for consent to use Isabella to revenge himself against Catherine, which it turns out she is into. The worst thing he does is violent dirty talk in one of his consensual trysts with Cathy. Because he is so denuded as a character, the taboo of Cathy’s desire for him is totally de-fanged. He is not a man who abuses and perhaps rapes the innocent Isabella, having murdered her dog as a ‘gift’ on their wedding day; instead he is a bitchy consensual Dom with a wandering accent. Catherine is not a genuinely torn girl who understands the workings of the world and is still corrupted by them; she is innately mean and stupid, obsessed not with a monster but with a sort of sad goth ruffian. I can’t say I haven’t found myself in the same position, of course, but also—who cares? In desperately trying to make all of this relatable she has made it really, really dull.

I want to say that it looks great, in a maximalist way. One thing you can say is that the set design and costuming are at least interesting, and VistaVision captures the whole thing beautifully; you will never find me slagging off a director for committing to film in a world of digital. But actually, the costuming and the sets end up looking cheap and childish, and all the brooding shots of the moors are to no end. The film is intentionally and so unforgivably brainless. Everything that is a suggestion of anything deeper or darker in this story is erased, to be replaced by a nothingness; any social criticism is clipped away. It is all vibes, no substance. It’s the cinematic equivalent of one of those over-decorated cakes on Instagram that looks delicious until you realise it’s 90% American buttercream.

But there is more than that, and here we come to what made me so angry: the issue is not that Fennell has made a film that diverges from the book. It is that she has removed context that is so present in the book (Hindley, Heathcliff’s relationship with Earnshaw, etc) which scaffolds a critical analysis of class. She makes Catherine Earnshaw, and Mr Earnshaw, borderline aristocratic, in breeding and accent if not in material wealth, presumably so that Catherine can act as a self-insert for Fennell. And yet everything that follows from this is bad. Catherine is not corrupted by the influence of money, she is corrupted by poverty; someone temporarily removed from her rightful position amongst the elite. She is awful from the get-go, truly one of the most hateable child characters ever committed to film, and when she is amongst the rich, she is bettered, not just positionally but morally. When they’re young she immediately claims Heathcliff as her ‘pet’, and treats him petulantly and cruelly throughout her adulthood as well, which might work better if Catherine was convincingly eighteen, but she isn’t; at one point I realised you could describe this film as world’s most annoying middle-aged woman discovers kink. But actually it’s worse: Catherine is not a character seduced by the upper classes, she is coded as upper-class from the beginning, and has to marry Linton because of failing family fortunes, making that choice beyond criticism. She is irritating and spoiled, yet Heathcliff is in love with her, despite the fact that she treats him atrociously from the moment they meet. It is Nelly (not a servant in this version but a companion) who contrives a situation where Heathcliff might hear Cathy disparage him, and, later, it is Nelly who ignores Catherine’s reporting of a miscarriage and so brings about her death from septicaemia. So what does this mean? Emerald Fennell has taken this book and made a film which, if it can be said to be about anything, is about how the highborn should treat the poor like shit because they will love them anyway, and constantly sacrifice themselves for their betters, which is good and correct. It is about how the non-affluent classes are jealous and devious, inherently wired to manipulate and attack the elite, to bring down the innocent, well-meaning upper classes—which, I’m reliably informed, is also the overall message of Saltburn as well. As Marx said in The German Ideology, ‘The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force’. Here is a film that purports to be a brainless romance but, if you squint for a second, is actually a seductive treatise to argue for the class system as it operates in our filthy, unequal society. It is not a perverse system that keeps people poor; it is that if you end up poor it is your own fault (Earnshaw), and that the poor are innately deviant (the entire crowd laughing at the hanged man’s erection then fucking each other in base revelry), and that if you spend too much time with them, they will destroy you, and make you dirty, and doomed.

It is one thing to take a beloved, multilayered book and make a movie that sets it in a new direction. It is quite another to make an adaptation that seems determined to reverse the meaning of the entire story. This film takes a thoughtful, political, radical work of art by a woman and makes it shallow and individualist, with a message that seems to justify the obscene system we live in. It is an encouragement to self obsession and thin thinking. When Allison Willmore praises Fennell for ‘throw[ing] off the burden of trying to say something significant’, she really does seem to suggest that women are exhausted by trying to be intelligent agents in the world. What a burden, to be a thinking person! So difficult for my tiny little brain! And worse: if you dare to criticise these films, you are called a misogynist, as if it is inherently a female concern to make shallow films for a shallow audience. Accept this slop, otherwise you hate women. I will not have it. We are living through a time of extreme resource extraction, extreme wealth consolidation, extreme inequality; it feels not just oblivious but actively malign for the people—yes, in this case a woman—at the most privileged end of society to strip all the critique away from inherently socially-critical work, and spend $40 million marketing the new version as something radical precisely because of its brainlessness. It is becoming harder not to believe that the hollowing out of female political or indeed feminist work is a deliberate capitalist psy-op to further disenfranchise women. They pump stupid work out for us so we become stupid, and they tell us that it’s hard to have a mind, so we really should be allowed to give it up. Don't think, they say, when you could just sit on your phone sharing blank, pseudo-sexualised movie memes, repeating vibes, yearning, obsessed over and over again until you've achieved non-medical self-lobotomy. This is what is being marketed to women. We deserve so much more than this.

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Actually, no. Emerald Fennell's “Wuthering Heights”, is, perhaps, exactly what we deserve. An all-vibes, no-substance culture gets precisely that. Nothing has to follow through on the promises it makes because no one thinks deeply enough to notice. No need to actually be transgressive as long as there are enough transgressive-looking two second clips for social media. We all took the bait, me included. We all suckle at the teat of this idiocy.

The good thing to come out of this adaptation and its notoriety is, of course, that everyone is re-reading the novel. Both the actual work and the conversation around it have been more (sociologically) interesting than all the film chatter. What’s surprised me in the book-revival discourse is the obsession around getting definitive answers to two things: whether or not Heathcliff was a person of colour, and whether or not the book is a ‘love story’. I think the former question is partially due to us imposing a modern (US-centric) understanding of race and class on the past; we tend to see these things less as shifting social concepts that are highly context-dependent and more as immovable parts of our identity, which is why, for instance, people are so confident in calling multi-millionaires ‘working class’, centring their background rather than their current material circumstances, and why we find it so difficult to understand that people considered POC in some (white-majority) countries might be considered ‘white’ in others, and vice versa. The insistence on Heathcliff as having one certain racial identity is, I think, born of an inability to engage with how the concept of ‘whiteness’ has changed over the last few hundred years, and how literature from that period might be playing with this complexity (and the paranoia it engendered). On the question of whether or not this is a ‘love story’, I suspect this is mostly a misunderstanding of the gothic as a subcategory of Romanticism (a particular literary genre that does not equate to ‘love story’), as well as an inability to imagine novels as multifaceted, thanks to a culture that increasingly reduces literature to single, simple marketing terms and their most social-media-friendly tropes.

The overall issue, though, seems to be a refusal of this book’s ambiguity, which really is a refusal of what the gothic genre is: that is, ambiguous. You are not meant to know the provenance of Heathcliff, because you are not meant to know where you, the reader, or the characters in the book should place him on a class basis, relative to other characters and the social norms of the time. The fact that he is from the streets of Liverpool—at the time a thriving hub for the slave trade, but also a place full of Irish immigrants—is enough for the characters to fear that he has some mixed heritage, and it is that fear that comes across in their descriptions of him, which make reference to multiple distinct racial groups (truly a grab-bag of Orientalism, though, tellingly, the narrative voice never describes Heathcliff in these terms). His arrival amongst the Earnshaws also occurs in the midst of the enclosures, during which there was a new establishment of class centred around who owned land and who had a right to be there, imposed through extreme violence and maintained through both physical boundaries (which did not previously exist) and an aggressive othering; it is not an accident that Heathcliff is referred to as both ‘gypsy’ and ‘lascar’, terms not referring to distinct ethnic communities but to groups defined by crossing borders. His actual racial heritage is much less important than the fact that he is audaciously transgressing these new boundaries, and cannot be subdued by the violence with which these borders are usually policed.

Narratively speaking, he is a blank slate onto which other characters project their own societal anxieties and bigotries. To be clear, I don’t think it is wrong to choose to interpret Heathcliff as POC (and so casting a POC actor as this character totally makes sense, though so does casting a white actor); what would have been interesting in a contemporary adaptation, and would have made reference to the slippery nature of whiteness, would have been to have a white actor that is still racialised constantly by the other white characters. But I think it is probably idiotic to expect this of an Emerald Fennell film, especially one that is largely marketing itself on the ‘unhinged romance’ angle.

I think it is wrong to ignore the book’s deliberate ambiguity to state definitely what this character is meant to be, because he is not meant to be readable by this metric. Similarly: you are not supposed to definitively know whether Heathcliff is actually Earnshaw’s illegitimate son, or indeed whether Linton, a blonde-haired, ‘pale, delicate, effeminate boy’ is really Heathcliff’s child or a result of incest between his mother Isabella and her brother Edgar, or whether Cathy’s ghost is really knocking at Lockwood’s window, or whether Heathcliff kills himself or is ‘killed’ by Cathy’s ghost at the end. You are meant to sit with these questions and, in sitting with them, consider what they force us to ask about the world as we know it. The gothic genre is all about refusing easy classification, about unreliable narrators and different perspectives, and about the line between the supernatural and the psychological. It is a genre that forces you to question, not a genre that gives simple answers.

But more than anything, the insistence on getting answers to these two questions points, I think, to a decline in critical thinking, specifically around literature. It seems to be a double-headed problem: we can’t read someone else’s thesis and compare it to source material to make up our own minds, so we read somewhere that Heathcliff is definitely a POC, and we don’t subject it to further scrutiny against what’s actually in the book, what we know about the concept of whiteness as a social construct and the historial period in which the book is set (though many commentators are even getting that wrong, certain it's a book about the Victorians, in fact, set in the Georgian era). We demand to know whether a novel sits in one category or another because we no longer know how to understand books without being given a framework of tropes or being blankly told what they’re about in advance—even when the books in question are generally considered foundational texts of a specific genre—so we engage in pointless debate about whether or not they are definitely supposed to mean one thing or another, whether they fit neatly into one classification. Intentional literary ambiguity, rather than being seen as something that is deployed by authors so that the reader may have to ask themselves questions, or to make space for a multiplicity of meanings to be taken from the text, are seen as a failure to provide the clarity we now demand. How can I position myself in relation to this book if the book won’t tell me what it is? For this I do blame, in part, social media-focused marketing, which so often sells books based on tropes alone that now books are being written to specifically be marketed in this way, and readers as a result are losing the ability to comprehend work outside of this. Over-simplification is a snake that eat its own tail.

landscape by Dave Parry. Prints available here.

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For what it’s worth: I think Wuthering Heights can mean a lot of different things. To me, it is inextricably a book about how class anxieties will destroy your ability to be happy and to truly love. It is about how the racist British class system acts like a virus. It is a book about who has power over whom, how such power is taken, and what the desperation to be ‘above’ someone else does to you, both socially and individually. The very first line is about the narrator’s class position in relation to Heathcliff: ‘I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.’ Is Heathcliff the sole neighbour he will be ‘troubled’ by because he truly is the only person there, or because he is the only person around who is in a more powerful position than Lockwood, a wealthy southerner? The book’s ambiguity is immediate, but clearly it is of prime importance that we understand, in this first line, that Heathcliff now holds power, over both this stranger and those around him, as we will soon learn the travails he has been through to gain and then lose it, and what it took from him to get it back.

So much of the discussion around Wuthering Heights centres on Heathcliff’s brutality later in the book, but few people seem to mention that he is a essentially good child (as much as can be said in a book full of complex characters), made bad by his treatment at the hands of the Earnshaw children and what he learns from this. But he is not self-sacrificing; he is stoic. According to Nelly he is a ‘sullen, patient child’ who will ‘stand Hindley’s blows without winking’, and take Nelly’s own pinches ‘as if he had hurt himself by accident and nobody was to blame.’ He becomes Earnshaw’s favourite, as he is less mean than Hindley and less wayward than Catherine; even Nelly comes to love him for his undemanding and uncomplaining nature. But he is also not grateful, in the way that it would be expected of him, and he is not cowed by Hindley; when treated poorly by him he will simply report it to Earnshaw, knowing he has full rights within Earnshaw’s protection, because he has accepted him as his own family. He is a non-vindictive child, turned into a vengeful adult by his treatment at the hands of his peers, and by what this teaches him about how you thrive within this system.

Whether or not Heathcliff is intended to be Earnshaw’s illegitimate son is sort of besides the point, for me at least; 19th century readers, I believe, would have assumed that was the case, heightening the tension of their relationship for the audience (Romantic era authors loved to write about incest—see Matthew Lewis’s still shocking The Monk). But the very act of Earnshaw bringing Heathcliff into their home, regardless of the child’s provenance, smashes the comfortable class assumptions that the isolated Earnshaw family enjoy. While smuggling the child home under his coat, Earnshaw smashes a fiddle, bought for Hindley, and loses a whip, bought for Cathy; poignant symbols of the class position (that of ‘high’ culture and power) that the children are about to lose. Polite society will look down on the family for treating this vagrant child like their own. But more importantly, by bringing the child to Wuthering Heights Mr Earnshaw introduces the question, to Hindley, of where the family sits in the world, and how they relate to other people outside of the home. With this scruffy incomer, who Earnshaw insists will be raised with his own children (and who is named after a son that died in infancy), what had seemed the ‘natural’ order of the house to the youngsters—that is, with Nelly and Joseph at the bottom, and the Earnshaws at the top—is immediately called into question, and therefore problematised. Children do not consider such things—hence Heathcliff and Cathy’s easy relationship—but Hindley, fourteen years old, is on the cusp of his transition into adulthood, and is led to ask: if this street child can be brought in and settled amongst us, is this all so natural after all? Hindley becomes terrified that, in fact, on the grand scheme of things, in the world outside the family home, they are the same as Heathcliff. On recognising that his position at the top of even his own household is, in fact, contingent on a great many things, and that this does not translate to the same position in the wider world, Hindley clings to his upper hand by casting Heathcliff downwards, assuming the cruel and brutal nature of the very class system he is suddenly aware of. Even Nelly, the servant, finds on his arrival that she hates this child, because he is closer to her in terms of class, and yet is elevated immediately above her.

Cathy, six or seven years old, is too young to really notice the change. But she is twelve when she and Heathcliff go to Thrushcross Grange for the first time, and this is her initiation into the question of class. Here is a manor steeped in ‘high’ culture and high society, dripping in comfort, in stark contrast to the isolated, battered farmhouse she has come from. Rather than being terrified about the loss of her position, like Hindley, she is seduced by the possibility of betterment. The life inside the Grange is one that she immediately wants, both for the social elevation and its material improvement on her life inside cold, uncomfortable Wuthering Heights. She and Heathcliff watch this world from the outside initially, but she believes that both of them will be allowed to enter. She is very quickly disabused of this notion when Heathcliff is sent back to their home while she remains at Thrushcross Grange to recover from her injury; she understands, even in this moment, that a healthy young woman is seen as valuable for reasons that a healthy young man cannot be.

Even as she is seduced by the Linton family and their status, Cathy clings to a naive hope that she can use her advantage to bring Heathcliff up with her; one of the reasons she gives Nelly for wanting to marry Edgar Linton, is that she can use his money to improve Heathcliff’s position too. Nelly, being more cognisant of the contradictions of the class system, tells her this will never work; this certainty about the fate of Heathcliff terrifies Cathy, because she worries that it applies to her as well. When Cathy says the now infamous line ‘whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same’, I don’t think she is only talking romantically, but also of social rank: they are cut from the same cloth, no matter how much Hindley has tried to cast Heathcliff downwards to raise himself up. This paranoia remains throughout the rest of Cathy’s life. When Heathcliff returns from his absence, Cathy wants to welcome him as a guest in her new comfortable home, but Linton wants to set him up in the kitchen with the servants; Cathy says to Nelly:

“Set two tables here, Ellen; one for your master and Miss Isabella, being gentry; the other for Heathcliff and myself, being of the lower orders.”

Heathcliff, Cathy and Hindley all learn, from the introduction of Heathcliff into their home, that what you own, and how you can control others, is key to your position: if you wish to not be downtrodden and beaten, you must become the owner, the controller, whether that is through brutality or marriage. As the character most downtrodden, it is Heathcliff that is forced to put these lessons into practice to save himself. We never learn how he makes his money in America, but we know that he returns brutal and vengeful, determined to be the lord and master of everything at Wuthering Heights; I think it’s worth noting that America is also where, in the century after this book was published, racialised groups like Irish and Italian immigrants were integrated into ‘whiteness’, in the face of enormous discrimination, through collaborating with a violent racialised system (whilst simultaneously being victims of it), assuming power over another oppressed group, and adopting the most brutal techniques of policing, guarding and eventually owning property, becoming landlords themselves. They took on the violence extolled by the property-owning classes, which is exactly the process that Heathcliff goes through in his time away. In this way, Heathcliff also adopts and is begrudgingly accepted into ‘whiteness’; by understanding and deploying its most violent processes, with increasing and shocking cruelty. He understands that his relative acceptance into this new class stratum is completely contingent and always under attack, so where others can afford to relax into something kinder, he cannot. This need to always be barbaric destroys his soul, his relationships, his very humanity. He is, necessarily, damned by it.

But it is not just Heathcliff: all of them are trapped in this suffocating knowledge of the class system, all of them altered by it. Hindley, despite his hatred of Heathcliff, chooses to remains and die at Wuthering Heights even with his enemy, even in a submissive role, because he knows, now, that outside its walls he is less than nothing; at least inside his old home he is a fallen master. Heathcliff and Catherine eventually use the language of ‘winning’, owning and controlling each other precisely because of their class obsessions, and through the prism of desire this is turned into something much more sadomasochistic. You can’t understand their relationship without understanding how class plays into it, how, by adulthood, it has warped and poisoned something that started out pure (though not uncomplicated, given that they were if not genetic relatives then adoptive ones).

The need to be superior, to have another person below you, destroys all the characters in this book. Its refusal to clarify questions of heritage and provenance are key to its real meaning, and by imposing essentialism where there is none, you miss the point completely. You are being invited to question everything made ambiguous here, and in questioning, to think more critically, more deeply about how these things translate to you, now, and the system you inhabit: what is it that makes some people powerful, and other people powerless? And what does this system do to all of us? That is what makes the book timeless.

The third act, in which the children of the Hareton-Catherine generation put aside their class differences—indeed, that they are willing to sacrifice for one another to ensure that they are equals—is the redemption arc of Wuthering Heights. The fact that most film adaptations remove the last half of the book is, perhaps, why everyone thinks this is a story of doomed (and perhaps incestuous) romance rather than something more much radical, much more political. I don’t believe it is beyond us, as modern audiences, to understand that if Heathcliff and Cathy do ever reach a sort of peace together, it is one they find on the wild and unknowable moors, on which everyone is equally vulnerable, made equally submissive at the feet of nature herself.