A columnist from
The Telegraph claims that, 'A woke
Wuthering Heights reboot is another tedious attempt at provocation'. What do we know about this new
Wuthering Heights that makes it 'woke', though?
It is a truth – universally depressing – that directors who hate period novels always seem to end up adapting them.
In recent years we’ve had Steven Knight’s degradation of Dickens’s Great Expectations which saw Mrs Havisham recast as a prostitute-hiring smackhead; the injection of a wildly unnecessary handjob into Jane Austen’s unfinished Sanditon; and Netflix’s Persuasion which replaces meditations on “perpetual estrangement” with the line: “we’re worse than exes. We’re friends.”
But these adaptory travesties look set to soon be topped. Emerald Fennell’s new Wuthering Heights has been shown to its first test audience. Emily Brontë’s masterpiece has, according to attendees, been transformed into a shockingly depraved, sex-obsessed, masturbatory romp. [...]
The casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, has already made clear her total disdain for both the work and its author. At the Sands film festival she mused that there is no need to be accurate as it is “just a book.” Continuing, she admitted “there’s definitely going to be some English Lit fans that are not going to be happy,” especially with the “shocking” set design, which may or may not feature a dog collar in some new offshoot of performative depravity.
It’s hard not to imagine the production team salivating over this opportunity to send Brontë’s work up in flames. The decision to launch the film in theatres on Valentines Day – as though as though they are dealing with a love story – is an obvious sign that Fennell has grasped the wrong end of the stick. [...]
Maybe I shouldn’t care so much. But Wuthering Heights isn’t “just a book”, and it certainly didn’t need sexing up. It is an act of great hubris to think that you know better than Brontë. Believing you can improve her storytelling with a bit of masturbation and some equestrian themed BDSM is an act of supreme arrogance. No one forced Fennell to adapt it. If she wanted to make a kinky nineteenth-century bodice ripper that would have been fine. But why did she have to take a chainsaw to the English Canon in the process? (Lara Brown)
Don't they hear how over the top they sound? About a film they haven't even seen?
Behold:
In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity
(Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, 15 January 1848)
Or:
. . . when left altogether to his own imaginations, seems to take a morose satisfaction in developing a full and complete science of human brutality. In Wuthering Heights he has succeeded in reaching the summit of this laudable ambition. He appears to think that spiritual wickedness is a combination of animal ferocities, and has accordingly made a compendium of the most striking qualities of tiger, wolf, cur, and wild-cat, in the hope of framing out of such elements a suitable brute-demon to serve as the hero of his novel. (North American Review, October 1848)
Coincidentally, this last one is the one Charlotte Brontë read aloud to her sisters on November 22, 1848.
Ellis, ‘the man of uncommon talents, but dogged, brutal, and morose’, sat leaning back in his easy chair drawing his impeded breath as best he could, and looking, alas! piteously pale and wasted; it is not his wont to laugh, but he smiled half-amused and half in scorn as he listened.
Anyway, a contributor to
BoredPanda predicts a flop.
The Telegraph and Argus shares 'A brief guide to what's happened during Bradford's City of Culture year so far' and here's one of the highlights for May.
May
In May, the moors that inspired Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights were taken over by sculptures by four contemporary artists; Steve Messam, Vanessa da Silva, Meherunnisa Asad with Studio Lél and Monira Al Qadiri, in Wild Uplands.
These will remain in place until October.
Rose Illingworth: Born to the Boats saw a new piece of theatre float along the Leeds-Liverpool canal.
The Brontës by Anita Rani: Sisters of Disruption took place at Pictureville. (Natasha Meek)
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