I reread Wuthering Heights last year for the first time since I was a teenager and was, truly, blown away. It is a great novel, capital g. The Emerald Fennell movie, which is like an iceberg we can all see before us but have no choice but ram the good ship Discourse right into, can’t quite make me regret this decision (and was in some sense responsible for it) but it’s certainly trying. If I hadn’t reread Wuthering Heights I wouldn’t have a lot of opinions. But I did, so I do. (Also, I would.)
So, yeah. Wuthering Heights, 10/10 novel. Emily Brontë is not going places, she’s dead, but she can provide material for a hit movie anyway. Well, a movie, hit status to be determined. Is this movie going to be bad? I’m going to say… “probably.” I think Emerald Fennell can compose striking images but I’m not sure she can make good movies. Promising Young Woman was a movie that often looked great but which was best called “fine.” To really, truly have an opinion on this I’d have to watch Saltburn. But I have fifty volumes of The Space Cats of Glorp to read and I already liked Sophie Ellis-Bextor so I feel like it’s just not a good use of my time. Also, I don’t want to. So the poster looks great, the teaser looks great but… that’s what Emerald Fennell is good at.
Anyway, though, my problem is not really with her. She is what she is. She made what she made. It’s with the following people.
The ones who say stuff like, “a white wedding dress isn’t historically accurate.”
I’m sorry, Wuthering Heights, you know, the story with a ghost that also feels pain in it, won’t be filmed in a way true to history? Wuthering Heights, the famous record of “true historical events that happened”? That Wuthering Heights?
I do have some sympathy for this position in the sense that if I knew a lot about historical costuming I’m sure most period dramas would drive me nuts. But asking a movie director not to use a very recognizable piece of visual iconography like a wedding dress in a movie seems unreasonable to me. It’s big, it’s dramatic, and you instantly know what it means. Still, I can get their pain, as opposed to…
The people who say “Wuthering Heights is not romantic because it’s about a toxic relationship.”
Of course it’s romantic. Heathcliff and Cathy are both monsters, yes, but their magnetism is undeniable. Their love is real! They’re just bad people.
But also, Wuthering Heights is romantic because it is ultimately a story about love winning. It is a story that plays out over three generations. By the end, Heathcliff and Cathy are in some way reunited. The generation that comes after them has changed the hell that Heathcliff tried to construct for them. They are working toward happiness. I’m sure none of this part will be in the movie because it never makes it into the movie. But that Heathcliff gets his version of a happy ending is a part of the redemptive movement of the whole book.
However, honestly, I’d rather deal with these people than…
Your cool English teacher who’s here to tell you “kids, Emily Brontë was a hornt up little freaky bitch” or whatever.
I find this more annoying than “it’s nooot romantic” because I at least understand that the “not romantic” people are having a reaction to the text (repulsion and disgust). This kind of attitude on the other hand was created to shock classes of students who are assumed to think classics are “stuffy.” It is a reaction to whatever you think is going on inside the heads of other people. Do these kids actually exist, or are they just ignoring you, their teacher, to call each other slurs on their phone? I do not know. I have my guesses.1
I do know that the best way to cure people of thinking Wuthering Heights is “stuffy” is to get them to read it and the best way to get them to respect Emily Brontë as a writer is not to treat her writing as the effluvia of unsatisfied horniness.
But even those people aren’t the most annoying. The most annoying prize has to go to…
Me
Why am I spending time getting mad at people who are mad about the Wuthering Heights movie? What is wrong with me? At this rate, the space cats will never even get to Glorp.
There is certainly a developmental moment at which we all suddenly get hit with the thought that everybody else also has genitalia, even adults, and all that fact entails, but is this sort of weird, condescending prurience the best way to get kids through it?
I am probably all of these people to a degree, alas, but especially the first. But it's not the dress that gets me-- it's the nuns. It bothers me immensely that there are catholic nuns running around 1800 England, or that Fennel thought that "nun" was a good visual signifier for "old timey England."