My Descent from Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte Turning Over in her Grave?
Reading the novel before seeing the movie is usually a good idea. It is not necessary, particularly if the film carries a plot that is entertaining, the acting is strong, and the production standards are tight. But it helps for understanding the motivations of main characters, particularly if their values conflict and have layers of meaning.
Regarding Emerald Fennell’s production of Wuthering Heights, it is not only unnecessary to have read the novel, but that may ruin the experience. That’s saying something. Why is this important? Because author Emily Bronte’s sense of life, however tainted it may have been, was exquisitely featured in her novel. And my evidence for that is the details of Emily’s mind as expressed by her sister, Charlotte,
My sister Emily was not a person of demonstrative character, nor one, on the recesses of whose mind and feelings, even those nearest and dearest to her could, with impunity, intrude unlicensed; it took hours to reconcile her to the discovery I had made, and days to persuade her that such poems merited publication.
Love and recognition may have been unattainable to Emily because of sexism, isolation, and the death of two siblings, but the depth of Bronte’s characters was drained for Fennell’s cinematic vanity. In contrast, the novel had a plot – Heathcliff’s revenge for the cruelty of his stepbrother and the inhumanity of a segregated culture.
Like modern art in general, this motion picture – ostensibly of love and romance, did not show me an intelligible purpose, except for the purpose described by another celebrated female novelist, Ayn Rand, in her non-fiction, The Romantic Manifesto:
Decomposition is the postscript to the death of a human body; disintegration is the preface to the death of a human mind. Disintegration is the keynote and goal of modern art—the disintegration of man’s conceptual faculty, and the retrogression of an adult mind to the state of a mewling infant.
Whereas Bronte’s novel ended with the rebirth of reason and benevolence (they are related), Fennell’s movie ended with Heathcliff as a mewling infant and the postscript to Catherine’s decomposing body. Literally.
Regarding disintegration, the character of Heathcliff’s stepbrother, Hindley Earnshaw, was folded into their father, Nelly was conceived as a manipulator, Isabella Linton was eventually transformed into a masochistic sex-slave, and Cathy Earnshaw into an overly decorated rag doll for Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. But that’s not all. The Wuthering Heights estate was debased from black-stoned Gothic glory to a neglected slum while Thrushcross Grange was opulent beyond belief.
Upon leaving the theater, I had to ask myself, why? Why the wildly exaggerated contrast of the Heights and the Grange? Why the soft-corn porn depiction of Heathcliff and Cathy reunited as adults?
It seems Fennell’s purpose was to focus on the love story, and for that it needed a catalyst that was different from the novel. While confiding to Nelly, Heathcliff overheard Cathy saying that it would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. We can assume she meant socially degrading and that he heard spiritually degrading. But what Cathy Earnshaw said in the novel was far different,
Nelly, I am Heathcliff, 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 - so don’t talk of our separation again.
That evasion of the consequences of her marriage to Linton is what likely led to Cathy’s psychosis. But in the movie, Fennell resorted to Naturalism. The characters in the movie did not think deeply. The physical surroundings of architecture and costumes were non-essential window-dressing. And the surreal quality of it all was to be held in contrast to main characters conditioned to behave instinctively.
Unable to capture Cathy’s psychosis after her marriage to Linton, the movie settled for the metaphor of padded walls in the bedroom. And to have included the role of the local attorney and the parson in the film would have gotten in the way of sex as an expression of defeat instead of the achievement of profound love.
It begins with the opening scene. The nearby village of Gimmerton was portrayed as a medieval hell hole. As children, Cathy and Nelly were visiting the town and enjoying the spectacle of a public hanging, which sets up society as the source and the sanction for the cruel behavior of the Earnshaws. Accordingly, if the intended audience for the film prefers emotion stripped from reason, this film will do very well in today’s postmodern culture.