The new Wuthering Heights film sparks debate among fans and critics | UK | News

Even though it was written nearly 200 years ago, Wuthering Heights is still read and loved. And now it’s finding even more fans, with a resurgence of interest with the release of Emerald Fennell’s big-screen version in time for Valentine’s Day—coincidentally coinciding with the release of my novel, Catherine: The Retelling of Wuthering Heights.

Fennell’s film will be the latest in a long line of adaptations for both the big and small screen, all of which feature unique visions of Emily Brontë’s own creation. The original, tamed and sanitized Hollywood version, made in 1939, presented the gritty gothic novel as a sweeping romance, with less focus on the scenes of gore and trauma present in the book.

At least the 2011 version directed by Andrea Arnold showed the Heathcliff character receiving just as much racist abuse as a person of color; This “difference” was one of the main themes of the novel. From his first entry in the book’s pages, Heathcliff is portrayed as the frightened orphan boy Cathy’s father rescues from the streets of Liverpool.

Various characters later describe him as “dark as the devil”, a “swarthy gypsy”, a “dark villain”, or a “foreign castaway”. However, there are also more exotic images, with Nelly Dean (the main narrator and onetime servant at the Heights) speaking of Heathcliff as handsome, with black eyes that sparkle with fire; He even suggested that his father was the Emperor of China and his mother was probably an Indian queen.

The novel never reveals the truth about Heathcliff’s birth.

But his otherness leads to his brutal loneliness and obsession with revenge when the love of his life chooses to marry someone else. Cathy, in her hasty naivety, truly believes that she can have her cake and eat it too; She moves in and out of the arms of her rich “golden” husband while keeping Heathcliff as her lover. He has no idea of ​​the misery and pain his actions will cause.

How far will Emerald Fennell go as she discovers the truth about Heathcliff’s origins and what he did in the three years he left Wuthering Heights before returning to a rich man obsessed with stealing Cathy back from her hated husband?

One thing is for sure, the teaser trailers that have already been released have sparked heated debates on social media. Those less familiar with the book express excitement at what promises to be the dizzying chaos of a stylized romance. Those who know this a little better are perhaps less convinced.

It’s true that some bold choices were made in the casting; One of the most important of these is Cathy, who had dark hair and was only 18 years old when she died in the book, while her image in this movie is blonde-haired and more mature. When it comes to costumes, from a purist perspective, they are inaccurate for the time period, the late 1700s.

While the scenes on the moors look truly wild, some images of Thrushcross Grange, where Cathy lives when she marries, are so brilliantly designed that they could have been taken from the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.

Does Fennell want us to be shocked, to view the story through a terrifying psychedelic lens, and for the gothic and erotic qualities to escalate as Cathy descends into madness and despair?

Fennell has said in interviews that this film reflects the vision she envisioned when she first read Wuthering Heights at the age of 14; whereas my introduction was when, when I was six or seven, my mother and I spent a winter Sunday afternoon listening to the wind and rain beat loudly against the windows while we were immersed in the melodramatic old black-and-white movie.

I may have been too young to understand the sexual tension, but could Laurence Olivier have been more thoughtfully romantic? What about Merle Oberon – as seductive as Cathy?

Oh, how miserable I felt when the two died and the ghosts of the cursed lovers disappeared into the snow drifting down over the moors. Like Fennell, I first read the novel as a teenager and was completely consumed by that haunted passion, crying for hours when Cathy died, but actually having little interest in the characters whose lives were hers.
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But the genius of this novel is that it changes with each reading, depending on age and life experience. As well as depicting a bond that transcends death and the grave, it is the starkest depiction of life’s brutalities and hardships, with a keen understanding of how childhood abuse and grief can corrupt the adult psyche.

Now I see Cathy falling into the abyss of despair. I see Heathcliff as a man twisted by hatred and revenge, determined to sadistically destroy the families he believes caused the destruction of his life. I can now appreciate the synergy between the two halves of the novel and how the second generation provides a mirror to reflect all the wrongs of the past.

So will he be able to right these wrongs?

It is, after all, a story of redemption, and in my own retelling I focused on the point that made me so obsessed with it as a child: the story of a ghost.

What if Heathcliff raises the spirits of the woman who has been dead for over 18 years by defiling her grave to take her back into his arms?

What did this ghost remember from the life she knew before, with all the intimate scenes that maid Nelly Dean could never see? What did my Catherine hope to do when she observed the evil of the boy she had once admired, comparing him to the man who was now bent on destroying the daughter born on the day of his death?

So what would he think and feel when he saw the fate of his daughter, who was now imprisoned and the victim of so much cruelty?

Did I dare to be as brave as Emerald Fennell? Maybe not visually, because I did my best to stay true to the period, language, clothing, and settings of the book.

But I created new scenes, and whatever I imagined was hidden between the lines, no one can deny that Emily Brontë’s gothic novel is a cauldron of passion, jealousy and madness. This is a novel that has the power to shock not only today but since its creation; Many early critics called it scandalous and suggested that it should never have been published with such depraved characters.

In my opinion, it is the depth of Emily’s understanding of the good and bad that can exist within every soul that makes her story so profound and still relevant today. Cathy and Heathcliff are not the sanitized ideals I first imagined in that old black and white movie.

They are flawed and they are real. They are so real that they seem to exist beyond the pages of the book. It’s as if we were looking through a mirror whose glass was wavy and strange. I hope my readers will enjoy the mirror in which I show Catherine as a ghost. It haunts my dreams to this day. I believe it will always be so.

• Catherine: A Retelling of Wuthering Heights by Essie Fox (Orenda Books, £20) is published 12 February