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The Trouble With Adapting Wuthering Heights

Why adaptations of Emily Brontë’s novel, across generations, have misunderstood the work and the its world.

The Trouble With Adapting “Wuthering Heights”

Why adaptations of Emily Brontë’s novel, across generations, have misunderstood the work and its world.

“Icould have told Heathcliff’s history, all that you need hear, in half a dozen words.” We are only a few chapters into Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights when Nelly Dean, the servant, foster-sister, and—crucially—narrator apologizes for how longwinded her tale has become. At this point, in fact, she’s barely begun. And just as Nelly is merely one of several narrators in Brontë’s novel, her version of “Heathcliff’s history” is far from the only one. The proliferating narrators set a model for readers’ attempts to adapt and transform Wuthering Heights—attempts that are nearly as old as the novel itself. 

These include, for instance, Charlotte Brontë’s 1850 preface to a new edition of her sister’s novel, in which she sought to explain (or excuse) the “coarseness” that had so shocked its first readers (other critics had deemed it “puzzling,” “baffling,” a work of “naked imaginative power”). At the time, Charlotte was still mourning her sister, who had died, at 30, in December 1848. Her preface can be understood as an early adaptation of the novel—an effort to translate it into a more legible idiom. This version of Emily Brontë, however, is nothing if not contradictory: a “homebred country girl” who was also “hewn in a wild workshop.” A savant that could not be held responsible for her creations: “Having formed these beings she did not know what she had done.”

“A publicist’s masterpiece” is how Anne Carson described the preface, in her 1995 poem “The Glass Essay”: “Like someone carefully not looking at a scorpion / crouched on the arm of the sofa.” To be fair, Charlotte had instantly recognized Emily’s gifts when she’d stumbled across her poems several years earlier. It was Charlotte who hatched the idea of publishing the three sisters’ “Poems By Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell,” despite Emily’s initial anger and reluctance. (It was also Charlotte who planned a trip to their London editors to finally expose their true identities; while her sister Anne accompanied her, Emily, typically, refused to go along.) In “The Glass Essay,” Carson’s homage to Wuthering Heights, the speaker is in the throes of a breakup and reads Emily Brontë during a visit to her mother; the poem muses over how many readers have projected onto Emily their own anxieties and desires. 

Carson’s speaker realizes she may be one of them: “I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë, / my lonely life around me like a moor.” Such lines ironically allude to what critic Lucasta Miller has called The Brontë Myth, but also, inevitably, end up trafficking in the same romanticized idea of a solitary female writer on the lonely moor.  By now it’s well established that the Brontës didn’t grow up in a remote, abandoned setting but rather nearby a bustling industrial town; that their father, Patrick, was hardly the belligerent, cold patriarch he was made out to be in Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1857 The Life of Charlotte Brontë. We know that Emily Brontë’s rich intellectual and literary inheritance included the works of Sir Walter Scott, the stories of James Hogg, and the poetry of Byron and Shelley; in other words, that Wuthering Heights is hardly a work of spontaneous creative genius. Already in 1905, Henry James was ruing what had become the “romantic tradition of the Brontës,” with “their dreary, their tragic history, their loneliness and poverty of life” a myth that “elbowed out” a true appreciation of their work. 

Still, there’s a reason the most powerful myths survive long past the moment of their origin. Many have decried Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” as an unworthy adaptation, the scare quotes of the title indicating Fennell’s casual disregard of her source material. The problem, however, is not infidelity. Across over a century of Wuthering Heights adaptations, the best of them have ambitiously transposed the original’s language and setting, as well as its details of plot. In doing so, they’ve rebutted Charlotte Brontë’s fear that the novel must prove “alien and unfamiliar,” its meaning “unintelligible, and—where intelligible—repulsive” to anyone outside Yorkshire. That isn’t because Wuthering Heights is a timeless love story, whatever that would mean, but rather because it is a haunting, though utterly recognizable, portrayal of the modern world’s cruelty, exploitation, and violence. This kind of violence, as Brontë teaches us, obeys no borders; it lies not behind or beyond but well within our pious scripts of love, property, and law. Any poet, screenwriter, or novelist wishing to pay tribute to Brontë’s novel would do well to grapple with this bleaker vision.

Afoundling’s arrival; a quasi-incestuous childhood friendship; a betrayal; an escape; a return; eventually, a standoff, followed by a heroine’s wasting away. Almost every adaptation of Wuthering Heights can be pared down in this way. William Wyler’s 1939 Wuthering Heights hits each of these points. But Wyler’s is also a recognizably post–Hays Code film, replete with Hollywood glamour, including an extended........

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