When Wuthering Heights (first published in 1847) is splashed across the front page of the Daily Mail as a free offer to readers and sells more than ten thousand copies in a month, you know that this says something significant about our current cultural tastes.
Just as Mr Darcy’s soaking shirt was a pivotal moment for millennial women in the 1990s thanks to the television adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, so another screen version of a 19th century novel written by a woman has captured the imagination of young adults, Gen Z.
It is, however, doubtful just how many of those who buy Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights as a book will manage to read over 300 pages. A generation weaned on Twitter/X and TikTok is obviously unused to paragraphs of more than 140 characters, and comprehending the complex plot and Victorian vocabulary of this convoluted classic is clearly proving a challenge to some.
Already social media is awash with complaints from baffled influencers who say that getting to grips with Brontë’s prose is giving them ‘brain rot’. But the trigger for the current Wuthering mania is of course not the original novel itself, but the latest movie version starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie that went on general release this week.
Anyone who saw director Emerald Fennell’s 2023 film Saltburn, which also starred Elordi and had Robbie as a co-producer, will have some idea of what to expect from the new film. That bizarre tale of effete aristos, class snobbery, and perverse eroticism has already acquired a cult status with its scenes of Irish actor Barry Keoghan drinking Elordi’s semen-flavoured bath water and copulating on his freshly dug grave.
Stand by, then, for shots of BDSM action, and Robbie’s character Catherine Earnshaw masturbating in the wild Yorkshire moorland setting that never featured in Brontë’s tortured tale. For this is a very 21st century vision of her novel, just as the 1939 film of the story, starring Merle Oberon as Catherine and Laurence Olivier as her demon lover Heathcliff spoke to a different Britain in that era that was as tightly buttoned as one of Olivier’s fancy waistcoats.
Social media is awash with complaints from baffled influencers
Already, in our racially obsessed times, the new film has been attacked because Elordi is white. Brontë specifically stated that Heathcliff is a gypsy, yet in some critics’ eyes, Fennell clearly missed a politically correct trick in not having him played by a black actor.
The bewilderment of new readers coming to the novel with fresh eyes is excusable given the sheer oddness of the story born of Brontë’s extraordinary imagination. Whatever liberties Fennell has taken with the story cannot match the sheer brute power of Brontë’s gothic creation. Above all, it is the dark mystery of Heathcliff that has drawn our fascination across the centuries. Where does he come from and where does he go? How did he acquire his wealth when he reappears at the farm? What is the real nature of his consuming love for Catherine? The consummation of their love cannot come in this life but is only possible posthumously when Heathcliff commands that he is buried alongside Catherine, so that their bodies will finally meet and mingle as they decompose together.
Any director is entitled to interpret the only novel produced by Emily in any manner that they see fit, and endow her story with their own interests and obsessions, but the saga of the three doomed Brontë sisters and their tragic lives is quite strange and striking enough in its own right to stand on its legs unaided, without adding the props of our own contemporary embellishments to their tales.
How miraculous it is, after all, that the unlikely setting of a bleak parsonage in a remote Yorkshire village nurtured not one, not two, but three literary geniuses of first-class stature who briefly overcame disease, prejudice and provincial isolation to produce works of art that continue to amaze and enthrall us today.
Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë are rightly hailed as heroines of feminism, but their lives and works far outstrip the narrow boundaries of such fashionable causes: they are astounding evidence of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of pitiless adversity. No wonder that we find them difficult to understand in our debased age.
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