{"id":53590,"date":"2026-03-25T13:19:54","date_gmt":"2026-03-25T17:19:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/?p=53590"},"modified":"2026-03-26T14:16:46","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T18:16:46","slug":"lets-talk-about-wuthering-heights-what-really-matters-in-a-film-adaptation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/2026\/lets-talk-about-wuthering-heights-what-really-matters-in-a-film-adaptation\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Talk About “Wuthering Heights”\u2014What Really Matters in a Film Adaptation?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Let’s Talk About “Wuthering Heights”\u2014What Really Matters in a Film Adaptation?\n <\/h1>\n \n \n\n

By Ayla Sully<\/p>\n\n\n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n \n

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\n About Ayla\n <\/h2>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n \n\n

Ayla Sully is a fourth-year English student who loves writing, reading Bront\u00eb and Dostoevsky, studying history, and engaging with our cultural moment. She encourages all Arts and Social Sciences students to interrogate, reflect and think critically on the debates happening around them\u2014if it’s interesting, talk about it!<\/p>\n\n\n <\/div>\n\n

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Whether through Instagram, TikTok, or otherwise, everyone has heard about the new Wuthering Heights<\/em> adaptation\u2014or, perhaps more accurately, about the debates<\/a> this movie has sparked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Going into my English <\/a>degree at Carleton, Wuthering Heights<\/em> was one of my favourite novels. After reading it five times now, I still feel that there are hidden layers which I discover on every re-read. So, upon hearing that there was going to be an adaptation, I was both excited and terrified. After watching the movie, starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, I was honestly conflicted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yes, the movie stripped much of Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s complexity, but I also can\u2019t say that I hated <\/em>it. <\/p>\n\n\n

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I kept coming back to one question: How much responsibility does a movie director actually <\/em>have to remain faithful to the text?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I think that this is central to the debate surrounding the movie\u2014people who hate it, hate it because it was an unfaithful representation of Wuthering Heights<\/em>, but a lot of people also enjoyed the movie because of its cinematography. So, what really <\/em>matters? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I spoke to Paul Keen<\/a>, a Professor at Carleton University who specializes in Romantic literature, and he thought that if you are going to make a movie adaptation, you may as well play with it\u2014use the medium to adapt and mold the text, so that it is relevant to today\u2019s audience. An example of this is the 1996 Romeo + Juliet<\/a><\/em>, directed by Baz Luhrmann. While it departs from Shakespeare\u2019s original script, it is an intentional <\/em>departure. While the family rivalry is accentuated and stretched to become \u2018gang\u2019 violence, the spirit of the play is still present. And this is what Keen believes is important: If the text held meaningful political or cultural commentary (important enough that it still<\/em> remains relevant to today), then we don\u2019t want to lose that. So, did we?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Immediately, a layer of the novel was stripped in the decision to remove Nelly as the unbiased narrator and to end the movie halfway through the novel. However, this is not what the conversations surrounding the adaptation have centered on. Inevitably, in today\u2019s cultural climate, our debates tend to revolve around the big three of contemporary politics: class, race, and sexualization. As Keen puts it, \u201cWuthering Heights\u2019 <\/em>account of the doomed relationship between a well-off local girl and the menacing \u2018dark\u2019 orphan brought into their mix speaking \u2018some gibberish that nobody could understand\u2019 makes these questions inevitable.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the novel, Bront\u00eb creates nuanced class dynamics, which director Emerald Fennell has been criticized for excluding. Keen highlights that all the characters in the movie have working class accents, which already removes a layer of complexity and historical accuracy\u2014Catherine, as a daughter of local gentry, would not have had the same accent as Nelly and Heathcliff. However, I would argue that, while complexity was lost, the movie did not strip the book entirely of its class dynamics but rather explored it through a more contemporary lens\u2014such as Catherine\u2019s gaudy, \u2018over-the-top,\u2019 costumes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the critiques of Fennell’s adaptation was that she chose to cast a white man as Heathcliff. In the novel, Heathcliff\u2019s background is unclear. The fact that he is twice referred to as a \u201cgypsy\u201d reinforces both the racialized aspect of Heathcliff\u2019s background and the ambiguity this implied. \u201cGypsy\u201d referred in its most formal sense to the Romani people, but it tended to be used more broadly as a slur on anyone who was not quite English, or not English enough. The concerns surrounding Fennell \u201cwhitewashing\u201d Wuthering Heights<\/a> <\/em>then, are not entirely unfounded, as Heathcliff is the epitome of the threatening Other\u2014an individual who would not have been white in the English sense of the word. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, Fennell received backlash for the overtly sexual nature of the movie. This is where I would argue that the movie completely strays from the book. As Keen explains, the novel belongs to the gothic genre, a genre which is about unfulfilled<\/em> desire. It is a genre about thwarted desire, it is about impossibilities, it explores where this desire comes from, exposing a \u2018lack\u2019 in the self that can only be fulfilled through the Other, and instead of this desire actualizing, it becomes a destructive and malevolent force (which is very obvious in the novel).<\/p>\n\n\n

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It is this subverted desire and the resulting cycle of vengeance and abuse which fuels debates on whether Wuthering Heights <\/em>is a romance or an anti-romance, and is what makes this novel so complex and interesting.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

So, by Catherine and Heathcliff acting on this desire in the movie, Fennell completely ignores the premise of the gothic and, in turn, erases these complexities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, again, I come back to this question of whether we completely lost the spirit of the text. Here, I would like to consider one final detail. CBC explains<\/a> that the movie is meant to be \u201ca re-creation of memory, a stylized evocation of an experience the Saltburn<\/em> director had reading the book as a starry-eyed fourteen-year-old.\u201d When I read this, the lack of complexity in the movie suddenly made complete sense. I was fourteen when I first read the book, and all of which I have just discussed went completely over my head. Leaving the movie theatre, I felt the way I did when I first read the novel\u2014a deep devastation for these two characters whose choices lead them on a path of self-destruction. Sure, as a twenty-two-year-old English major, I can now read the book and understand how interesting this novel is in its historical context and narrative choices, but when I was fourteen? Not so much. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, yes, I do believe the political and cultural debates of the novel were, for the most part, lost in adaptation. However, in some ways, I believe the spirit of the novel (perhaps only in its emotional provocation) was captured, which is why I left the movie theatre so conflicted. And I was not alone in my confliction. One critic expressed that, \u201cin spite of the disgusting coarseness of much of the dialogue, and the improbabilities of much of the plot, we are spellbound.\u201d Another argued that\u00a0Wuthering Heights<\/em>\u00a0\u201cbaffl[es] all regular criticism;\u00a0yet,\u00a0it is impossible to begin and not finish it; and quite as impossible to lay it aside afterwards and say nothing about.\u201d These reviews were published in\u00a01847, and here we are, in 2026, still having similar debates, still not knowing quite what to do with this story. Perhaps this is what makes a faithful adaptation impossible.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether you hated or loved the movie, I believe something we can all agree on is the power of literature, and stories more broadly. Here is a book from 1847, which remains relevant to today and is still <\/em>fueling debate. That, in the world of an English major, is the ultimate take-away. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whether through Instagram, TikTok, or otherwise, everyone has heard about the new Wuthering Heights adaptation\u2014or, perhaps more accurately, about the debates this movie has sparked. Going into my English degree at Carleton, Wuthering Heights was one of my favourite novels. After reading it five times now, I still feel that there are hidden layers which I discover on every […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":120,"featured_media":53158,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[25,849],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-student-blogs","category-student-voices"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/120"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53590"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53590\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53729,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53590\/revisions\/53729"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/53158"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/fass\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}