{"id":295732,"date":"2026-02-21T21:41:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-21T21:41:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/295732\/"},"modified":"2026-02-21T21:41:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-21T21:41:10","slug":"we-arent-all-reading-the-same-wuthering-heights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/295732\/","title":{"rendered":"We aren’t all reading the same “Wuthering Heights”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the months leading up to the release, social media, and #booktok in particular, prepped for the deluge of yearning by picking up a copy of \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d \u2014 and shortly afterward realizing that the book bears no relation to the trailer<\/a> for Fennell\u2019s film, in which images of lusting, open mouths (is that? \u2014 yep, that\u2019s someone licking a door) alternate with scenes foregrounded by sweeping gowns and dramatic horseback riding. What the hell did I just read? Are we sure this is the source material? Shouldn\u2019t the main character not die so early? Is this even supposed to be a romance? are among the sentiments shared in innumerable TikToks whose creators sometimes seem to be taking the discrepancy between their Jacob Elordi-fied imaginations and the raw anger and outright abusiveness of the novel\u2019s leading man very personally.<\/p>\n

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(Warner Bros. Pictures.) Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d<\/p>\n

For decades, there have been two distinct \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d experiences. One is the dense, dialect-heavy Gothic novel, 400-plus pages of exposition told second- or even thirdhand. This version of \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d is intense and slow and often one where readers find themselves having to take a break within the first few chapters to sketch out a couple of family trees \u2014 without them, it\u2019s a challenge to follow a decades-spanning plot with a profusion of characters who in many cases share names with other characters. (There are dozens of different editions of the book; for best results, try an annotated one.) The unrelenting, full-tilt brutality of this \u201cWuthering Heights,\u201d according to Bront\u00eb historian Samantha Ellis<\/a>, led one critic to assert, \u201cHow a human being could have attempted such a book . . . without committing suicide . . .\u00a0 is a mystery.\u201d\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

Most of its well-known screen adaptations, by contrast, are much less severe, the narration more direct, and the relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and her adopted brother Heathcliff firmly centered. In the category of books whose modern adaptations excise important context from their narratives, \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d is an all-timer: Long before Fennell\u2019s film entered the chat, the title alone was pop-culture shorthand for doomed, star-crossed obsession. MGM\u2019s classic 1939 adaptation starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon was billed as \u201cThe Greatest Love Story of All Time . . . Or Any Time!\u201d a pronouncement that the trailer for the new film echoes.<\/p>\n

Andrea Arnold\u2019s<\/a> spare, hauntingly earthbound 2012 rendition<\/a> captured the bleakness of the story (and, notably, cast a Black actor to play Heathcliff, whose ethnicity Bront\u00eb described as \u201cgypsy,\u201d but who was almost definitely not white); still, like the 1939 film, it declines to include the book\u2019s violent second half. And Kate Bush\u2019s immortal 1978 single, with its swooping, operatic drama, interpretive dance\u2013filled video and ghostly narrator only strengthened the book\u2019s rep as a tale of exquisitely tortured love. (Each July since 2016, fans of all genders don their flowiest red garments and gather in city parks from Adelaide to Amsterdam to re-enact the iconic video<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

These adaptations, along with a 2009 BBC production starring Tom Hardy, have to halt where they do because the Heathcliff of the book\u2019s second half is irredeemable \u2014 drunk, violent and passing intergenerational trauma down like it\u2019s a gold pocket watch. \u201cEmily Bront\u00eb\u2019s Wuthering Heights,\u201d released in 1992, is the sole screen adaptation that doesn\u2019t ignore the second half of the book. Ralph Fiennes<\/a>, in his debut, is a trip-wire Heathcliff, a man unstrung less by love than by mania who, after the death of Juliette Binoche<\/a>\u2019s Cathy, turns his fury on his family, her family and, unfortunately, dogs.<\/p>\n

Its trailer,<\/a> in which a voiceover intones: \u201cA passion . . . An obsession . . .\u00a0 A love that destroyed everyone it touched,\u201d is a bit unsettling to watch from the vantage of 2026, when love that destroys everyone it touches is generally understood to be suboptimal for all involved. Even at the time, the overheated language was belied by the filmic metatext of the author herself (played by an uncredited Sinead O\u2019Connor<\/a>), warning viewers in the film\u2019s opening that her story is not one to be swooned at, but a study of unrequited love as a kind of sociopathy.<\/p>\n

The fact that the book is canonically the favorite<\/a> of \u201cTwilight\u2019s\u201d Bella Swan is a nod to the generations of pop-culture texts that inculcated The Youth with a certainty that nothing but the most glorious and tempestuous friction is worth striving for \u2014 the kind that once made The Crystals\u2019 \u201cHe Hit Me (and It Felt Like a Kiss)\u201d<\/a> an unremarkable bit of 1960s girl-group sentiment<\/a>. Heathcliff might have been the most overtly unhinged boyfriend adolescent girls encountered in their assigned reading list, but he was far from the only one, even within the extended Bront\u00eb universe. (Kate Beaton\u2019s<\/a> comic \u201cDude Watchin\u2019 with the Bront\u00ebs\u201d will never not be funny.) \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d knew what it was about, and Bront\u00eb, despite her lack of firsthand experience in love, had the scripts of normative femininity dead to rights with the book\u2019s relentless conflation of love and torment. She knew humans tend to make the same mistakes in love again and again and somehow never learn from them.<\/p>\n

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(Warner Bros. Pictures) Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff and Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw in \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d<\/p>\n

In doing press for the film, Fennell has been clear that she never wanted the new \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d to suggest that it is the \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d \u2014 which is why the title of the movie itself is styled with quotation marks<\/a>. \u201cYou can\u2019t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book,\u201d Fennell told Fandango recently. \u201cI can\u2019t say I\u2019m making \u2018Wuthering Heights.\u2019 It\u2019s not possible. What I can say is that I\u2019m making a version of it, [the] version that I remember of it, which isn\u2019t quite real.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fennell\u2019s emphasis on not claiming faithfulness to the text gives her \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d the soft-focus gleam of the romance fanfiction that much of her audience likely grew up on. For those who create and read fanfic, rewriting stories that aren\u2019t originally yours isn\u2019t wanton IP infringement; they\u2019re an extension of the formative, meaningful texts that, read over and over, feel like they become yours. Fanfiction that makes relationship and sexual dynamics thrillingly illicit is common; the genre arguably started with a Mr. Spock\/Capt. Kirk<\/a> pairing, after all. But consider the most successful fanfic adaptation to date: \u201c50 Shades of Grey,\u201d<\/a> which back in the 2010s reified the belief that women don\u2019t really want equality, but instead seek to be dominated by an exacting, cruel d-bags<\/a> in sharp suits. The \u201c50 Shades\u201d juggernaut began as \u201cTwilight\u201d fan fiction. Bront\u00eb was right: We are total drama queens.<\/p>\n

But when Gen Zs talk about their yearning to yearn, it\u2019s not necessarily about a need to reshape existing stories to their specifications, but about whatever arrangement of words and attitudes resonates with them. It might be the \u201cintense (but well suppressed) yearning\u201d of Jane Austen\u2019s \u201cPersuasion,\u201d or the confused yearning of the character whose lover up and becomes a nun or a mermaid or space alien, or the \u201chalf agony, half hope\u201d kind celebrated in one romance novel Reddit thread. (\u201cTHIS WOMAN GOT HER DEGREE IN YEARNALISM\u201d is the approving sum-up of author Lorraine Heath<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

There might even be a case to be made that Emily Bront\u00eb herself found yearning preferable to a flesh-and-blood love; it\u2019s definitely one reason why many Bront\u00eb fans were salty that 2022\u2019s fictionalized biopic<\/a> \u201cEmily\u201d retconned the origin story so that Bront\u00eb herself had an obsessive love affair. But what if Fennell\u2019s iteration of \u201cWuthering Heights\u201d exists precisely because it\u2019s comforting to think the happiest ending is made possible by a nonexistent beginning? Would that really be so bad? I don\u2019t think so, but it also doesn\u2019t matter: In times this uncertain, yearning doesn\u2019t have to signal the absence of something real.<\/p>\n

Read more<\/p>\n

from Salon\u2019s culture newsletter, The Swell<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the months leading up to the release, social media, and #booktok in particular, prepped for the deluge…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":295733,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[156,409,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-295732","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=295732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295732\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/295733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=295732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=295732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=295732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}