Every few years, Wuthering Heights is exhumed, dusted off and handed back to us as a love story. Not a brutal love story. Not a metaphysical fever dream disguised as rural melodrama. Just ...love. The kind that sells tickets, soundtracks and close-ups of beautiful people suffering beautifully. The latest cinematic resurrection promises passion and revenge, though one suspects the emphasis, once again, will fall on passion rendered in flattering light. Emily Brontë, who wrote a novel as jagged as the Yorkshire wind, must be wondering how her feral child keeps getting sent to finishing school.
The novel, published in 1847, has always resisted polite company. Its author, Emily Brontë, did not write a romance in the conventional sense; she wrote a psychological storm system. Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff are not star-crossed lovers in the perfumed tradition of tragic devotion. They are two halves of the same wound. Their attachment is less a courtship than a combustion. To reduce their bond to yearning glances and swelling violins is to mistake a lightning strike for candlelight.
Yet Hollywood, ever optimistic about the redemptive power of cheekbones, appears ready to try again. Casting Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi as Catherine and Heathcliff feels less like interpretation and more like translation into a language Brontë never spoke: the dialect of aspirational glamour. These are performers of undeniable magnetism, but magnetism is not menace. Catherine is not a fashion editorial in emotional distress; she is willful, cruel, ecstatic and self-destructive. Heathcliff is not merely brooding; he is elemental, closer to a force of nature than to a Byronic heartthrob. To make him sleek is to declaw him.
There is a curious cultural habit of sanding down the rough edges of classics until they fit contemporary appetites. In this case, the appetite is unmistakably shaped by the confectionary success of Bridgerton, a series that has perfected the art of packaging longing as luxury. But Wuthering Heights is not luxury. It is mud and rot and resentment fermenting over decades. It is about inheritance and social exclusion and the corrosive effects of humiliation. Heathcliff’s outsider status, racially ambiguous, economically dispossessed, perpetually reminded of his inferiority, is not a romantic inconvenience; it is the engine of his vengeance. Without that, he becomes merely misunderstood. And Heathcliff is not misunderstood. He is understood all too well by those he punishes.
Brontë’s novel is structurally audacious, layered with narrators who mediate, distort and sometimes trivialize the events they recount. Lockwood and Nelly Dean are not neutral guides; they are participants in the moral fog. The story we receive is already filtered, already compromised. That complexity matters. It forces the reader to question not only the characters but the act of storytelling itself. Film adaptations, by necessity, streamline. But when streamlining becomes simplification essential is lost, the sense that this tale is not a single thread of doomed love but a tapestry of obsession, cruelty, class anxiety and generational trauma.
Catherine Earnshaw is frequently mistaken for a romantic heroine when she is, in fact, a study in divided identity. “I am Heathcliff,” she declares, not as a swoon, but as a metaphysical claim. She recognizes in him a shared wildness that the genteel world of Thrushcross Grange cannot accommodate. Her decision to marry Edgar Linton is not merely a betrayal of love; it is a capitulation to social aspiration. She chooses comfort, status and the illusion of refinement over the savage equality she shares with Heathcliff. The tragedy is not that she cannot be with the man she loves; it is that she cannot reconcile the two selves she inhabits. Any adaptation that treats her as a victim of circumstance rather than as an architect of her own ruin does her a grave disservice.
And Heathcliff, poor, demonized Heathcliff, has suffered perhaps the most from romantic revisionism. He has been reimagined as a dark prince, a wounded antihero whose cruelty is but a mask for tenderness. But Brontë gives us little comfort here. Heathcliff is abused, yes, but he also becomes an abuser. He weaponizes marriage, inheritance law and emotional dependency with chilling precision. His revenge is not operatic; it is bureaucratic. He destroys lives through contracts and confinements as much as through rage. To frame him as merely lovesick is to excuse what the novel painstakingly exposes, the way suffering can metastasize into tyranny.
There is also the question of landscape, which in Brontë is not backdrop but bloodstream. The moors are not scenic; they are spiritual territory. They mirror the characters’ excesses, their refusal to be domesticated. The house itself, Wuthering Heights, is less a home than a pressure chamber. One wonders how this will survive the modern camera’s tendency to aestheticize everything it touches. The moors are not meant to be pretty. They are meant to be inhospitable.
Of course, adaptation is interpretation. No film owes us fidelity in the pedantic sense. But there is a difference between reimagining and rebranding. To tilt the story decisively toward “love,” as if that word alone could contain the novel’s ferocity, is to participate in a long-standing misunderstanding. Wuthering Heights is not about the triumph of passion; it is about the cost of it. It asks what happens when desire is unmoored from conscience, when pride curdles into revenge, when social hierarchies distort the most intimate bonds.
Emily Brontë did not write a love story designed to console. She wrote a novel that unsettles, even repels, before it seduces. To honour that is to resist the urge to prettify it. The moors, after all, were never meant to be comfortable.
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