The Commentary B-Side

Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” has captivated audiences since its publication in 1847, but the attention it drew wasn’t necessarily positive. Critics called it

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In a new, special print edition of “Wuthering Heights,” complete with a leather harness on the cover, Emerald Fennell notes this reaction from critics back in 1847. It might be that she imagines her version of “Wuthering Heights” to be much of the same — violent, immoral, weird or fascinating — but her interpretation doesn’t reach the same captivating, complex, moral grayness of Brontë’s original story.

violent and immoral, and even Brontë’s older sister Charlotte

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admitted it was a “rude and strange production.”

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Yet, it’s this very violence, coupled with the text’s complexity, that continues to shock and fascinate readers 179 years later. The transcendent complexity of “Wuthering Heights” is most present in its cast of complicated and morally ambiguous characters. The reader follows the Byronic Heathcliff from childhood to the grave, and this progression from young man facing racist mistreatment to an abusive villain in his own right is what lends sympathy and complexity to Heathcliff’s most heinous actions. He mistreats his wife, obsesses over Cathy, his foster-sister-turned-twin-flame, and later plots to own both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange for his own sense of revenge. Through it all, the reader still carries the slightest hint of sympathy for him because they understand how he arrived at his worst self through a destructive, racist system. While Heathcliff stands out as a complex character for the stark divide between his younger, more sympathetic self and the antagonist he becomes, almost every other character exists between the two paradigms. Heathcliff finds a counterpart in Cathy, who is vivacious and passionate, but also driven by social ambitions. This is realized in her marriage to Edgar Linton, heir to Thrushcross Grange, that will ultimately limit her. Her inability to choose between her two desires is what causes her decline in health and eventual death. She is never wholly sympathetic, though. She, too, wants to own Heathcliff — as the famous “I am Heathcliff” line makes abundantly clear — but also wants to maintain the security that a life with Edgar guarantees. Brontë’s attention to Cathy as a character at this point in literary history, with complicated heroes aplenty but few complex heroines to match, is especially enthralling. It’s the characters in the second half of the book that take the faults of their parents and undo their harm.

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Many adaptations of “Wuthering Heights,” Fennell’s included, regrettably leave out this portion of the narrative for the sake of centering Cathy and Heathcliff. Because the characters of the second half resolve the deep-rooted conflicts first initiated by their parents, these romance-focused takes leave Brontë’s complex story a little more hollow.

The pain the first generation of characters inflict on one another reappears in the lives of their children. Heathcliff’s son, a mirror of his abuser, is manipulative and entitled, but also desperate to marry to escape his father. Cathy’s daughter has the wild and sometimes taunting nature of her mother, but is also kind and hopeful for a better future. Hareton, the son of Heathcliff’s abuser and all too similar to the man himself, is gruff and mistreated, but kind-hearted and strong-willed. He ultimately finds a match in Cathy. These three characters are left trying to escape and remake the awful circumstances of their family situation, and they’re only able to do it through reconciliation and love for one another. With this in mind, one considers how Brontë’s text is not necessarily lacking morality as critics once suggested.

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That is, the text of “Wuthering Heights” concludes with the idea that reconciliation and love overcome the harm caused by revenge, but this ending can only be achieved with the inclusion of the second half of the book. Without it, the story is only one of obsession and vengeance, which is interesting, but not necessarily as complex as it can be. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, adaptations of the text often exclude this part of the narrative.

The novel ends with a sentiment familiar to us, but new then: a cycle of generational abuse broken with genuine care in the place of all-consuming obsession. Brontë achieved this with an approach original to her time that amplified her characters’ most intense qualities, both good and bad. She created a world where her figures moved as people, not as pillars of virtue, and that is what has kept “Wuthering Heights” so captivating for nearly two centuries. Emily Brontë could draw in audiences, then and now, with these complex, sometimes sympathetic and sometimes awful characters that fascinated as much as they shocked. Now we come to Emerald Fennell, who has taken it upon herself to adapt this rich, complex and harrowing novel. She might seem like a good choice on paper. She’s devoted to this gray space in her previous work, stating in a

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Fennell’s previous film, “Saltburn,” is especially famous for this. Starring a scholarship student (Barry Keoghan) who preys upon a wealthy classmate’s (Jacob Elordi) family and status, she calls the film a satire of “our fixation with films like this.” To that I ask, films like what? Rags-to-riches films? Films obsessed with wealth? Either way, she doesn’t portray Keoghan’s character in the most sympathetic light, and she’s caught some flak for making victims out of the wealthy elite — especially as a member of the same class.

Time interview that seeing both good and bad in her characters is essential to understanding her films.

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And the mixed reception her releases always garner — fans screaming in theaters, detractors screaming on X

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Something eternally fascinating about Fennell is that the cultural determination of the quality for her three films still doesn’t seem to have landed. Despite “Promising Young Woman” having a decent award season, she hasn’t seen much critical success. But “Saltburn” and “Wuthering Heights” have both become box office buzz demons, completely eating up the conversation during both of their debuts. Fennell admits to attempting to manufacture the reactions that her films have garnered in theaters. She chases details and spectacle, all in search of communicating a feeling and forging a connection with audiences. It’s a dangerous mode to operate in, one that is only rewarded by a world of marketing that thrives on sensationalism and quick hooks, long abandoning sense and thoughtful plotting.

— echo some of the sentiments surrounding the initial reception of the novels she adapts. Her films are consistently gorgeous, confident in design and presentation, characters and set pieces. But Fennell’s themes are always a bit scrambled. “Wuthering Heights” suffers from this: Cathy and Heathcliff live isolated, repressed lives, which is why in the film, they are so old when they finally start to give in to their desire. But at the same time, the opening scene of the film depicts Cathy exploring a debauched town with overt depictions of sensuality in every corner. The film seems to rely on the central characters being so isolated that they become alien, but it sacrifices this for its splashy, sexy entrance.

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This echoes Fennell’s first film, “Promising Young Woman,” in which the central character Cassie (Carey Mulligan) plays extremely drunk in order to get predatory men to take her home. She goes with them and then enacts her revenge. The film’s set-up leads you to believe that she kills the men she “takes home.” But Cassie believes just scaring them — tying them up and giving them a lecture — is enough. Although Fennell’s original ending had Cassie becoming a murderer, she ultimately found it unrealistic that a woman could be in a group of men and actually be a threat to them. I’m not saying Cassie should have been a murderer, but it’s interesting that Fennell has a tendency to fall into this pattern. She takes her plots just far enough to get a reaction, but not far enough to dive into the most interesting aspects of her projects.

Another notable example of this is Fennell’s portrayal of Nelly. Although Nelly is often considered the villain of the book, Fennell doesn’t agree with that assessment.

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Nelly, like the rest of the characters, exists somewhere between a complete villain and a beacon of morality. As the character recounting a good portion of the narrative, she’s the one who tells Mr. Lockwood — and, by extension, the reader — of his childhood and eventual abuse at the hands of Hindley Earnshaw. Still, she, too, speaks cruelly to Heathcliff, and some readers interpret her as an unreliable narrator.

Her rendition of “Wuthering Heights” collapses the complicated framing of the novel into a simple misunderstanding orchestrated by Nelly. Instead of becoming another layer of a complex clash of dispositions and morality, Nelly is portrayed as the central gatekeeper of knowledge and authority and a direct manipulator of Cathy and Heathcliff. This is only something she is able to become because of the pair’s shifted dynamics. In the novel, Cathy is embodied by her indiscriminate desire. Unlike in the film, her marriage to Linton is considered a love match.

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In the book, Cathy’s love with Linton is still considered a young love. She meets the Lintons when she is 12 years old, staying at their house for five weeks and drastically altering her disposition as a result. In the same way that Nelly burns Heathcliff’s letters to Cathy in the movie, Nelly also burns the correspondence between Cathy and Linton to discourage their relationship. The dynamics are not as one-note as they are in the film.

Yes, she loves Heathcliff, but part of the controversial and uncivilized aspects of the novel come from her mutual love for each of the men. It’s not simple, and it didn’t make sense to the audience it was written for. It’s a difficult aspect of the novel to capture in a different format. But Fennell’s movie completely obliterates this complicated, confusing and controversial love story

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Fennell has noted the complicated nature of adapting a book that’s not only complex, but is also, at times, dense. While that’s true, that doesn’t mean it’s impossible to engage with the text’s complex themes of revenge, abuse and racism without sanitizing it with tedious romance and sadomasochism. With her rendition of “Wuthering Heights,” Fennell has attempted to present a version of the story that appears just as interesting as the original, but Brontë’s is so compelling that it continues to out-do its modern adaptations.

, one where Cathy’s emotions extend in all directions, into a simplistic plot of misunderstanding swiftly followed by jealousy and suffering. Fennell’s film misrepresents Brontë and recklessly misunderstands the power of controversy.

‘Wuthering Heights’ is weird.