‘The greatest love story of all time!”
So proclaims the trailer for Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Images of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi looking moody and sultry abound. If the message isn’t clear enough, it’s also being released this Valentine’s Day. Did we read the same book, Ms Fennell?
Wuthering Heights, written by Emily Brontë and published in 1847, is one of the most original books in the English language. But a love story it ain’t. Open the book at any point and what you find is a devastating description of domestic violence and intergenerational trauma.
The story takes place in and around a farmhouse called Wuthering Heights on the Yorkshire Moors. During a business trip to Liverpool, the master of the house encounters a starving orphan and decides to raise him alongside his own children, Hindley and Catherine. He names him Heathcliff. Rather than welcoming the foundling, Hindley tortures him. He throws an iron weight at Heathcliff’s head then knocks him under a horse.
When Hindley inherits Wuthering Heights, he unleashes a reign of terror. During his drunken rages, he sticks a carving knife into his housekeeper’s mouth and drops his own baby over the banisters of the staircase. During these years, Heathcliff and Catherine develop a co-dependent bond while perpetuating the cruelty inflicted on them with everyone they encounter.
Heathcliff and Catherine describe their feelings for one another as “love”, but there is little romance. In a famous passage, Catherine tells the trusty housekeeper that her miseries have also been Heathcliff’s. “I am Heathcliff!” She says. “He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”
The intensity of their emotions, and their identification as a single traumatised unit, has inspired the reductive (and rather boring) notion that Bronte wrote a love story set on the moors. Jane Austen in gum boots, if you will.
Kate Bush’s brilliant debut single “Wuthering Heights” from 1978 perpetuated that myth. We’d roll and fall in green … You had a temper like my jealousy … I needed to possess you. What’s not to like? The name “Heathcliff” became a synonym for a brooding, sullen and desperately sexy rebel. The James Dean of English fiction. Or should that be Jacob Elordi?
Smash cut back to the book. In Bronte’s Heathcliff, we get a portrait of a psychotic misanthrope, who commits random acts of violence against everyone around him. When he marries, it’s not to Catherine, but a girl he hates. He jeers at her for mistaking him as a ‘hero of romance’, throws a carving knife at her face and hangs her dog. He then kidnaps Catherine’s daughter, forces her to marry his son, beats her about the head and dreams of – in his own words – submitting both of them to slow vivisection as an evening’s amusement.
“He’s not a rough diamond,” Catherine says at one point. “He’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man … There’s my picture: and I’m his friend.”
So where did Bronte get the inspiration for this bizarre and terrifying character?
Emily Bronte grew up in Haworth Parsonage on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Her mother died when she was little as did two of her sisters. The four remaining Brontë children – Charlotte, Anne, Branwell and Emily – struggled into adulthood together.
Emily felt a deep connection to the landscape of her home, just as Catherine does in Wuthering Heights. She only left Haworth on a few occasions and, each time, her mental health deteriorated. Her older sister Charlotte (author of Jane Eyre) described what happened when they went to boarding school:
Every morning when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her … I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall.’’
“He’s not a rough diamond,” Catherine says at one point. “He’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man … There’s my picture: and I’m his friend.”
So where did Bronte get the inspiration for this bizarre and terrifying character?
Emily Bronte grew up in Haworth Parsonage on the edge of the Yorkshire moors. Her mother died when she was little as did two of her sisters. The four remaining Brontë children – Charlotte, Anne, Branwell and Emily – struggled into adulthood together.
Emily felt a deep connection to the landscape of her home, just as Catherine does in Wuthering Heights. She only left Haworth on a few occasions and, each time, her mental health deteriorated. Her older sister Charlotte (author of Jane Eyre) described what happened when they went to boarding school:
Every morning when she woke, the vision of home and the moors rushed on her, and darkened and saddened the day that lay before her … I felt in my heart she would die if she did not go home, and with this conviction obtained her recall.’’
This terror is evident in the novels the three sisters wrote around the same time, each of which revolves around a violent maniac. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre is haunted by the “madwoman in the attic” at Thornfield Hall, while the heroine of Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is abused by her violent, alcoholic husband. And then there’s Heathcliff.
Knowing about Emily’s brother helps us make sense of Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship. I don’t read this as a romantic love affair, but the co-dependence of abused siblings. The inquiry running through Wuthering Heights isn’t “will they, won’t they?”, but something far more interesting. How do people move on from traumatic childhoods? Heathcliff and Catherine can’t, which is why Bronte bumps off Catherine halfway through the book.
Gradually, the focus moves to the next generation and the relationship between Hareton (son of Hindley) and Catherine’s daughter. They too are traumatised individuals, who have been tormented by Heathcliff just as he was in his childhood. At first, Hareton and Catherine Junior hate one another, but they make a conscious decision to break the cycle. They learn compassion and that, in turn, leads to love. If Wuthering Heights can be said to have romantic leads, it should be Hareton and Catherine Junior. But Kate Bush never sang, “Hareton, It’s me, I’m Cathy Junior” and they’re not even in the cast list for Emerald Fennell’s film.
Does it matter if a film adaptation promotes Wuthering Heights as the greatest love story of all time? In theory, no. Reinterpretation is what keeps stories alive. But I do have a problem with the way an perceptive portrait of domestic violence is continually translated into a sadomasochistic sex fantasy.
Almost two hundred years on from Emily Bronte’s day, domestic violence remains one of the intractable evils in our society. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, one in four women and one in eight men in Australia have experienced family and domestic violence by a partner or family member.
You can interpret Wuthering Heights in any number of ways, but you cannot take the domestic violence out of it. So the more we portray Wuthering Heights as a love story and Heathcliff as a sex symbol, the more we betray the intention of Emily Brontë’s complex masterpiece, blur the lines between desire and violence, and promote the age-old lie that true love hurts.
Wuthering Heights continues to inspire wonder in readers and is one of the syllabus set classics that most resonates with teenagers. I believe it does this because Emily Brontë set out to write something much more interesting than a love story – conventional or otherwise.
So, by all means, go see Wuthering Heights at the cinema – but maybe not on Valentine’s Day. (Jonty Claypole)
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