What was once shocking becomes quaint: That’s how it goes. The Charleston now looks like a silly dance, Elvis is just a sweaty guy, nobody’s fainting while watching screenings of “The Exorcist” anymore and jazz is now the province of turtlenecked nerds. We’re assured there was a time when van Gogh’s paintings horrified audiences, but today reproductions of them hang in college dorm rooms. This process is not tragic; as these things lose their power to shock, they reveal new virtues. Nothing stays boundary-pushing forever — except “Wuthering Heights.”
On its publication in 1848, “Wuthering Heights” was received as a “strange book” (The Examiner), as “strangely original” (Britannia), as “a strange sort of book — baffling all regular criticism” (Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper) and as “a strange, inartistic story” (The Atlas). When Charlotte Brontë revealed her by then deceased sister Emily’s authorship of the novel, she wrote that she understood that to many people the book “must appear a rude and strange production.” She undersold it.
The passage of nearly 180 years has changed nothing: “Wuthering Heights” remains a strange book. Its ornate language, its complex structure, its landscapes, its weeping ghost, its portrait of love, its brutality — at one point, a character runs into another who is “hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway” — there is nothing really like this book, not before it and not since.
Now we have a new film adaptation from the director Emerald Fennell, which opened this weekend and has already drawn criticism for betraying the spirit of the novel — though in what way exactly depends on who is declaiming the betrayal. Having seen it, I’ll add my complaint to the heap: This adaptation, as a love story, is a dud. This movie is simply not strange enough, or romantic enough, to bear the name “Wuthering Heights.”
To understand the story’s enduring power, you must go back to the source. For some readers, Brontë’s novel is the interminable story of two terrible people determined to destroy everybody around them. (It often features in the answers to social media prompts about the worst book you had to read for school or classic novels you hate.) For others, the novel is one of the greatest love stories of all time. The secret to its enduring strangeness, though, is that it has always been both.
“Wuthering Heights” is a story in which love is an all-encompassing obsession that destroys anything in its path. It is also a story about how love, sustained through generations, eventually redeems that destruction. These aspects of love, the novel tells us, are both fundamental; one is not more truly love than the other. Love is not the foundation of a shared life, or a self-contained (if tragic) story — it is something more real than reality, both intrinsic to and incompatible with human life.
“Wuthering Heights” tells this story through a series of nesting narratives. In brief, the book is narrated by a character named Lockwood, who comes as a tenant to a property owned by Heathcliff, a “reserved” yet ferocious man. The housekeeper tells Lockwood the back story: how the old master of the household, Mr. Earnshaw, went to Liverpool and brought back Heathcliff, a strange child. Heathcliff formed an intense friendship with Catherine, Earnshaw’s daughter, and an equally intense antipathy toward Hindley, his son. As the children grew older, Catherine became ashamed of Heathcliff, her unsophisticated, uneducated companion.
When Heathcliff discovers that Catherine finds the idea of marrying him degrading, he leaves Wuthering Heights in an effort to become worthy of her company. In his absence, she marries the heir of a neighboring estate, and, in revenge, Heathcliff marries the heir’s sister, who bears him a son. Catherine dies in childbirth; her daughter is also named Cathy. Heathcliff, arguably a person at least as sinned against as sinning when he left Cathy, has returned from his travels a complete monster, and these children ultimately end up under his control. His only goal is abuse, to repeat the misery of his own childhood through the children of these people he despises, a list that includes himself.
Why should it be so terrible to say that this is a love story?
Heathcliff and Catherine, treated cruelly, became cruel people. Heathcliff abuses his wife, almost killing her dog in front of her to prove he can do whatever he likes, and plots to ruin the lives of children. What is remarkable is not that they are monstrous but that even at their darkest they have between them a bond that nothing can break. Created and shaped by the same home and the same abuse — then driven apart by both Hindley’s hatred and their own pride — they share a frightening love bound up in a sense of mutual identity.
Before she marries the heir to the neighboring estate, Catherine tells her housemaid that she’s had a “queer dream” in which she was in heaven, but “extremely miserable,” and “the angels were so angry that they flung me out, into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.” She concludes that Heathcliff is “more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
If Heathcliff and Catherine are too wicked for heaven, at least they will not be alone in hell. Their love destroys everything in its path, but it is also their redemption. Neither can live among other human beings without lashing out at them, but they can live together in the wilderness. Brontë gives them as happy an ending as they can stand, implying that their ghosts are reunited in death.
Is this story healthy? No. But is it romantic? Very.
Whether or not we’d want to be around Heathcliff and Catherine in real life is irrelevant to whether or not we can be moved by their love story. And whether or not their story is one we’d want for ourselves is irrelevant to whether or not “Wuthering Heights” says something true about love.
For this pair, love is where you find your lost other half, your twin, something deeper than even a best friend, something as inextricably you as your own organs. (“Nelly, I am Heathcliff!” Catherine says.) In this story, sometimes love kills us and sometimes it frees us; sometimes it degrades us and sometimes it saves us. Sometimes it does both at the same time.
Who can deny that love wears all these faces? The mechanisms through which Heathcliff and Catherine are eventually redeemed and reunited are dramatically satisfying because in real life obsessive love usually does not have such consequences.
Not every love story is a happy story, meant to instruct us on what to avoid and what to seek. For those whose hearts crave the bleakness of the wilderness, for whom love represents not a pair of doves or a box of chocolates but two hawks stooped to kill, Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” will remain waiting to be read, and recognized and cherished. Perhaps one day it will even find a film director brave enough to tell that love story, and not turn what’s inherently strange and shocking into something tame and banal.
B.D. McClay is a critic and essayist.
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