For the Girls: Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights

Written by Anja

Rome’s Cinema Intrastevere, like much of the rest of the city, is a portal into the past. The neighborhood surrounding it, with its shadowy corners, ivy-covered facades, lively chatter, the yellow lamplight reflecting off the dark cobblestones, is beloved by tourists and locals alike, and for good reason—if you squint in the right way, it seems to have not changed all that much in the past century. The cinema itself incorporates marble columns and herringbone-laid floors into its structure. Pushing aside a heavy curtain, the sala is cozy and hushed with rows of red velvet seats. It truly feels like a step out of the 21st century.

Perhaps this context is what made Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” so jarring. For all its corsets and ruffles and leeches, it’s a film firmly placed in the 2020s. Not so much in its set and costume choices (although the rhinestones and red latex ballgown were admirable commitments), but in its cowardice. 

Although its creators and marketing team have tried their damnedest to sell the film as provocative and shocking, a sort of “not your great-great-grandmother’s Wuthering Heights,” the reality was quite a letdown. There’s the opening scene, which depicts a hanged man with an erection, an old nun making eyes at the body, and a young Cathy and Nelly inexplicably cheering for joy while the extras in vaguely medieval garb start going at it in the town square. (This movie is about SEX! Got it?!) Apart from that, a couple of implied pet-play scenarios and a quite… normal sex montage, there is nothing here worth gawking at. Except, perhaps, everything else. 

Despite these brief shock-value moments, I found this film very sanitized. Some of that may have to do with the (atrocious) casting choices—somehow I didn’t find Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi believable as 19-year-old inhabitants of a rural town in 1770s Yorkshire—but it has more to do with the flattening of an incredibly complex plot and nuanced characters into a sexy, easily digestible Gogurt of a movie. The absolute refusal (or inability) to deal with the themes of the novel in any capacity felt boring and lazy, and more than a bit spineless. 

Before I go any further, let me make a couple of things clear. I am not against sex in film. I think sex is an important part of the human experience and it can push a narrative forward if done in the right way. I don’t have an issue with the presence of sex in this film. 

If you liked the movie, I’m happy for you. If you had to read the book in high school and hated it, that is okay. I’m not here to tell anyone what to like. I don’t believe that every film has to make a dense commentary on the human condition. I also don’t believe that adaptations have to be meticulous in their historical accuracy. I love adaptations that do new and interesting takes on beloved stories! Put Cathy in costume jewelry and Romeo in a Hawaiian shirt! Have Charli XCX do the soundtrack (which was fantastic, by the way)! 

However, in order to make an adaptation that subverts, that makes a commentary, that says something of value, you must have an understanding of the source material. Producer Margot Robbie had not read the book before reading the script. Casting director Kharmel Cochrane, when asked about concerns over whitewashing, said there was no “need to be accurate. It’s just a book”. When a creative team treats its source material with this kind of flippancy, it doesn’t bode well. 

But most of all, it’s their choice of Emily Brontë’s novel as source material that worries me. The fact that this story—a story about race, class, and gender, about the cycles of trauma and abuse, published by a female author under a male pseudonym in a time when women were thought incapable of serious writing—has been adapted in this way, in this political climate, is a concerning reflection of our current state, and the path we may be following. 

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We might first look at Heathcliff’s introduction into the household. He’s introduced to a precocious and impeccably clean Cathy, whose father tells her that Heathcliff shall be her “pet”. She readily agrees, and we see her trying to teach Heathcliff to read and stomping about in frustration. Later, Cathy and Heathcliff are late to Mr. Earnshaw’s birthday dinner. Heathcliff takes the blame despite Cathy’s protests, and Mr. Earnshaw beats him cruelly.

As teenagers/adults, we don’t see that much of Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship. Some shots of him laboring covered in dirt while she walks by shyly in her starch-white dresses. Perhaps the most definitive moment of these characters and their dynamic is when, walking back home, Heathcliff easily swoops Cathy up and places her on a tree branch. She shrieks for him to come back and help her down, protesting that she can’t possibly jump down in her skirts. The camera pulls back, and her feet are maybe a meter off the ground. 

This firmly establishes a traditional gender dynamic between the two. Gone is that girl who was “half-savage and hardy, and free”, who makes a promise with Heathcliff to “grow up rude as savages”, who slaps and bites and runs endlessly on the moors. In this self-insert fanfiction rewrite, women have to want to be Cathy, so Cathy must be easy to swallow, must be beautiful and passive, and desired, and not weird or crazy, or do anything especially wrong, and must be effectively spiritually neutralized. Women, as Cathy, must desire Heathcliff, so he must be stronger than her, and patiently endure her milquetoast sassiness and pranks, and be tall and handsome, and not do anything particularly wrong except love her too much. 

Fennell’s Heathcliff echoes the oft-expressed desire, championed in tradwife and choice-feminist circles, for a man that will “let me submit”, will “let me be in my feminine”. This is a man who knows what’s best for me. A man that shelters me from sex that isn’t with him. A man who will chase me while I protest (just a little). A man who will use one hand to lift my dainty frame by the corset strings. A man who shelters me from the realities of the world. A man that embraces me, and in doing so, covers my eyes and mouth. 

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In what is, in my opinion, the best analysis of Brontë’s novel, Andrea Dworkin points out: 

“Isabella, his wife, stands in for the bad reader— a brilliant, ironic political point in itself. The bad reader is the sentimental reader of romance novels when life, love, and art demand a confrontation with the politics of power. The bad reader romanticizes the sadist and reads the rapist, the abuser, the violent man, as a romantic hero: tortured himself, despite proof that he is the torturer.” 

Of course, through Fennell’s lens, we become Isabella once again. This Heathcliff is likeable, and simple, and totally centered around Cathy. He isn’t an outsider. He’s whipped, not by Hindley for being a racial Other (and their father’s favorite), but to save Cathy from her father’s anger. He doesn’t come back for slow, sadistic revenge on Hindley and Edgar and their respective lineages, he comes back because he wants Cathy. Instead of hanging Isabella’s dog, he has her wear a collar and bark (with carefully established verbal consent for the viewers, don’t worry, he’s a good guy!). He didn’t really do anything wrong except have sex with a married woman. But I suppose Jacob Elordi lynching a Pomeranian wouldn’t rake in the big bucks.

Most importantly, this Heathcliff is raised as a servant or a “pet” rather than a brother. This conveniently removes any icky incest associations, but it also neatly puts Cathy and Heathcliff in two distinct social classes from the very beginning. They never get a chance to be equals, two halves of one soul. Dworkin writes, of the novel: 

“Together, they are human, a human whole, the self twice over; apart, each is insanely, horribly alone, a self disfigured from separation, mutilated. They are wild together, roaming the moors as children outside the bounds of polite society, vagabonds, lawless. They sleep as children in the same cradled bed. The social distinctions between them mean nothing to them, because to each other they are the world. […] This is a love based on sameness, not difference. It is a love outside the conventions or convictions of gender altogether. […] This, says Bronte, is passionate love, real love, unalterable love—not the socialized conflicts and antagonisms of opposites but the deep sameness of two roaming, wild, restless souls; society conspires to destroy the sameness. In destroying the sameness, society destroys the two people.”

Here, from the start, Cathy is the rich helpless maiden and Heathcliff the rugged farmhand. The boundaries of class and gender never tear them apart, because they were always there. Casting Heathcliff as a white man, the boundaries of race conveniently don’t affect them either. (It’s not his low social status as a racial/ethnic outsider that disincentivizes Cathy from marrying him, but his low social status as a servant.) They have no deep or meaningful relationship that makes the later events of the story so tragic. They are, at best, coworkers with banter, and if I wanted to see that, I would watch The Office and be more invested. 

Why should I care whether Cathy and Heathcliff have sex? Why should I care about whether they try to be together, and whether they succeed? 

– – – –

Cathy and Heathcliff aren’t the only characters made uncomplicated in service of an easier narrative, and it’s worth noting that there’s a vein of anti-intellectualism running through this version. We see this most clearly in the introduction to the Lintons. Isabella is smart and quirky and annoying (read: she talks about a book she likes and wears glasses which are inexplicably never seen again). They might as well have put a big sign on her that says I’M WEIRD AND A NERD, YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO LIKE ME! Cut to Edgar looking vaguely befuddled and bored. Until of course he discovers Cathy, lying prone and passive and beautiful, saying nothing. He’s overwhelmed, seduced! And relieved to not have to listen to Isabella anymore! Cue laughter. 

When we’re so clearly meant to empathize with Cathy over Isabella, what does this magnified juxtaposition between the two of them imply about our society’s idea of an attractive and desirable woman? About women who read and express their opinions? About which women should be loved and which women should be degraded? 

– – – –

Ultimately, Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” plays it safe. It cringes away from anything genuine in fear it might be ugly. By some sexy sleight-of-hand in hopes of diverting the viewer’s attention, neatly dodging around anything difficult, it takes the teeth out of a wolf of a story. And the characters—likeable, easy, and impotent—fall flat. Their motivations don’t ring true.

Cathy is presented as feeble, a victim of circumstance rather than a person who made bad decisions and has to reckon with the consequences. Heathcliff is a faithful protector rather than a vengeful victim-turned-abuser. Isabella at least has hobbies, but is made a more “deserving” target of cruelty and humiliation. Edgar is mostly absent because otherwise we’d have to think about him as a real person, and that would make things tricky, wouldn’t it? 

In this flattening, they do to Emily Brontë exactly what the male-dominated literary world has done to her for nearly 200 years. They continue to deny her storytelling the respect it deserves. This isn’t about the sex or the soundtrack or the set design, it’s the dumbing-down of a complicated story into something simple and easy. “For the girls.” “Come undone with your Galentines”, their website reads. On the official social media page: “Choose a man that protects you. A man that lifts you up. Choose a forbidden love.” For the jealousy trope lovers. Romanticizing. Girls be like. The feminine urge. Isabella crawling is #sorelatable. 

Emerald Fennell and the team behind “Wuthering Heights” knows their audience. They know booktok, and LLM-generated “dark romance”, and the social media algorithms that push endless lamentations of feminism, “blue job/pink job”, “divine feminine”, “girl math”, and always, always, the slogan of our generation, “it’s not that deep”.

The film and its marketing are an accurate reflection of a general public that doesn’t want to think. An audience that wants the easy answers. Black and white, man and woman, rich and poor, beautiful and ugly, right and wrong. An audience that can’t handle nuance, and doesn’t care much for people who read and think about things. It reflects a substantial portion of women who don’t really want the responsibility of making decisions and dealing with the consequences, and think they’d be happier living in Emily Brontë’s world. This is a public vulnerable to feminist regression. This is a public susceptible to fascism. It’s an unsettling reflection.

You may read all of this and think that I shouldn’t take this film so seriously, that I should just enjoy it for what it is, that it’s not that deep. Maybe so, but my answer remains: If it’s not that deep, I’m not that interested. 

“Don’t you see that face?’ she enquired, gazing earnestly at the mirror. And say what I could, I was incapable of making her comprehend it to be her own;” – Wuthering Heights, chapter XII