After watching Hamnet twice in a week last month, my fizzing excitement and awe have finally died down to a gentle, ever-burning ember – just retreated into the background enough for me to become hot and riled up again as the release of Emerald Fennell’s pitiful take on “Wuthering Heights” looms nearer.
I believe there are a few instances in which it’s okay to slag off a film before watching it. Everything my eyes have been subject to about this train wreck – from the promo, the trailers, the billboards, to interviews with the creator herself – has told me that this film is going to be nothing but an utter pile of rot. And the only reason it’s going to be an utter pile of rot is because of the way it has obliterated one of the greatest novels ever written.
I’m not talking ‘the book was better’ or ‘it wasn’t a faithful adaptation’ – I’m talking she chewed up the book in her brainless 14 year old self’s mouth and regurgitated it twenty-five years later. If she even read it.
I have no expectations for a faithful adaptation
Like so many other people who are seething with rage, I first read Wuthering Heights in school and it immediately became one of my favourite novels. Through studying it, I didn’t fantasise about a Cathy who looked like me and a Heathcliff who also looked like me – I, along with my classmates, picked apart the text and the context, explored themes and wrote essays that always included something about Heathcliff’s ambiguity and ‘otherness’, Cathy’s ‘wildness’. Then I read it again for fun almost every winter as a young adult and, now, a fully-fledged adult.
I was obsessed with the unhealthy obsession, the moody moors, how fucked up the characters are – not because I thought it was a beautiful dark romance but because of the exploration of human psychology and the complexities of the characters. At the time, I was also writing stories involving gory murder and blood, torture and kidnapping etc etc. My teachers weren’t impressed, I think.
Embarrassingly, I probably identified with Heathcliff more than I care to admit. I would never hang a dog or marry someone just to get back at their brother twenty years later, but I would definitely dedicate my entire life to revenge against anybody who has wronged me.
You can imagine my dismay when I learnt Ms. Millionaire-Heiress decided to create a smutty fanfic out of a story about revenge, prejudice, and destructive love – in which she has cast herself as Margot-Robbie-Cathy instead of someone who is true to book Cathy.
I first saw the trailer for “Wuthering Heights” when I went to see Hamnet – the first thing that ticked me off was the Cinema Guys assuming literary people would enjoy it. You like Shakespeare, you will also like this. Moodiness, fine. Jacob Elordi’s accent, also fine. But that’s it. The trailer doesn’t tell me anything so you’re led to believe you should already know the story, so that squashes the arguments that ‘it’s not an adaptation of the book!’.
Fennell said it was a version of the book. It’s not. Why does blonde, sparkly-pink-dress-wearing Cathy have her fingers in Heathcliff’s mouth? Why am I being shouted at that this is the ‘greatest love story of all time’ when the first time Heathcliff met his estranged son, he called his mother a slut and told him how pathetic and feeble he was? Cathy is the worst person in the world and repeatedly described in words that are closely related to ‘pert’ and ‘wild’ – why is she constantly looking coy and sad in the trailer for this film? Where are her dark eyes, those she shares with Hareton? Where is my Charlotte Riley? Where is Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity, either in skin or features?
On Heathcliff’s race
I don’t believe Heathcliff was black or a a deep-skinned Indian. People who are demanding such an actor in Heathcliff’s role are also misinterpreting the novel – the entire point in his racial ambiguity is that it is ambiguous – ambiguous enough to not be a White Man entirely (to whose definition, I cannot say), but not necessarily less-so to be obviously brown. It is crazy to me that people think Emily Bronte was an idiot – or that people in general are idiots – dark-skinned, in the context of this novel, doesn’t need to literally mean a deeper skin-tone. It doesn’t need to mean Dev Patel. You can be dark-skinned, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, without being dark-skinned.
I’ve seen a lot of people skim-reading the book and immediately taking to social media to talk about how Bronte described Heathcliff as “Romani” – she did no such thing anywhere in the book; she never used that word, so I’m wondering why people have put their woke hats on to grab a microphone and talk about a book they haven’t even read.
Bronte uses “dark-skinned g*psy” – but let us remember that the race pool in the UK was different in the Before Times. In 2026, we have white, white white, black, brown, light-skinned, dark-skinned etc etc and a multitude of ethnic slurs to go with all of these things – in 1845 rural England, although other races were around, you were white or not white.
She also uses “little lascar” and “an American or Spanish castaway”, amongst others, so it’s worth remembering that, in Victorian England where pale skin was the beauty standard, ‘not-white’ – as described to Lockwood in various ways by Hindley and Edgar Linton (all through Nelly, who is just as xenophobic as the rest of them – or more-so, depending on how unreliable you think she is) – could very well mean someone who is simply not English and whose ancestors sat out in the sun all day.
But I’m playing devil’s avocado. Heathcliff had something very visibly not English about him and was not a white man, or at the very least was a white man mixed with something else – what that thing is, I cannot say.
In defence of the POC argument, Fennell could easily have cast a brown or brown-ish man in the role to make Heathcliff’s otherness obvious and therefore better adapted to modern day readers who need everything very on-the-nose. Shazad Latif, who plays Edgar Linton, was right here. She could have cast Dev Patel. She could have even spray-tanned Jacob Elordi, because, much to the chagrin of those who hate the pasty white boy in this role, he has dark features. So really, once again, the issue is just her.
In Emerald Fennell’s rich white mind, the two lovers whose souls are the same are both obviously white because, as she put it, that’s just how she imagined it. She wanted the passionate lovers to be white – in particular, the jock and the cheerleader – and she wanted the pathetic, snivelling man Cathy is stuck with to be brown. Heathcliff’s race and circumstances are just so unrelated to the story!!!!
Where is my beloved Hareton?
In an interview, Fennell also admits to cutting Hindley, Frances, and Hareton out because she wanted to keep it under two hours. Absolutely insane thing to admit.
Hindley, extremely crucial to the story. Hindley, who shapes Heathchliff to the point where the latter spends the rest of his life playing the long game and plotting his revenge. Hindley, whose son is raised as an uneducated brute by Heathcliff as payback for his own mistreatment. You can’t just cut Hindley out of the story because you don’t think he’s important – what exactly is the plot then? Two forbidden white lovers who are just obsessed with each other?
If you wanted to cut out two hours, get rid of the smut (of which there is absolutely none in the novel. I can’t believe, reading this book as a child, this is what you got from it? Rather than two toxic people unable to be together due to Heathcliff’s social circumstances, causing generational revenge and trauma, you got Heathcliff sucking on Cathy’s fingers? Get HELP instead of subjecting us to your weird porn-rotted brain).
As a rich white woman who can desecrate whatever she wants, Fennell says ‘you can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book. I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible. What I can say is I’m making a version of it’.
First of all, ITV did it perfectly. You are not making a ‘version’ of it, because there is no version of Wuthering Heights in which Heathcliff’s background isn’t the crux of the story, where Hindley and Hareton don’t exist (or the entire second vol of the book, for that matter – although I’ll allow that many adaptations have only been of the first volume). All I hear is ‘I lack the brain capacity to read and understand the novel, its themes, and the context in which it was written; I interpreted the book as a sexy, smutty dark romance and I need to make my dream come to life! Also Heathcliff is white like me!’
To the girl on TikTok who is drearily talking into her microphone and urging everybody to avoid engaging in conversation about the film before seeing it, I’ve got a better idea. How about not engaging in conversation about the film before reading the novel – because I haven’t come across one single person who has read and enjoyed the novel and is also excited for this godforsaken film.
If you’re zooming in on one aspect of a novel so closely that you’re ignoring all the themes attached to that aspect, you’re no longer making a ‘version’ of it. It is your own fanfic that you’ve written after interpreting the book wrong. Make the film, but don’t call it “Wuthering Heights”.
Now playing: Wuthering Heights – Kate bush
Note: This post was originally published on Substack. Subscribe to receive free updates via email.