“Wuthering Heights” Bad, a Comparative Literary Analysis

IS EMERALD FENNEL STUPID?

When people say Wuthering Heights is “not a love story”, they don’t mean that the feelings between Catherine and Heathcliff are dubiously romantic. They mean that the story is deconstructive and philosophical.

Lockwood comes to stay at Thrushcross Grange and finds that his cruel, Byronic landlord is haunted by a ghost. The housekeeper tells him the story of how this situation came to be: that his childhood love Cathy married a richer man. So at first it seems to be a straightforward sort of story you’d read back then about tragic cross-class love; but the more and more Nelly tells Lockwood, the stranger and more disturbing the story becomes, and more and more the expected “centre” of such a narrative recedes into the moors, making you wonder by the end what it was all actually about.

Such a construction implies that the true story of Wuthering Heights lay beneath the surface layer of “plot”, which is what makes it so famously difficult to adapt. Emerald Fennell’s 2026 adaptation “Wuthering Heights” rightly discards the importance of literal events and seeks to draw out the story’s thematic unconscious. Using implication and visual symbolism and the wild Hinterland as the interior Self personified, to indirectly evoke a tapestry of meaning. With full respect to this genuine artistic effort, I do unfortuantely have a few concerns about the story that cohered from all that banal chaos.

CATHERINE IS NOT A SEXUALLY REPRESSED 30 YEAR OLD HOUSEWIFE

Because Wuthering Heights contains elements of class and was written by a woman there is a temptation to read it as a sort of Austen or George Eliot-esque social novel with a sadistic twist. But Wuthering Heights is not concerned with class neurosis, sexual or otherwise, so much as it is obsessed with examining the border between nature and civilization. 

This border is policed by race, class, and sexual objectification, but in the novel is primarily metaphorized in the passage into adulthood. Cathy says that Heathcliff is her soul because their relationship lies in the realm of childhood, where Ego formation is incomplete and violence can be committed in innocence. Cathy and Heathcliff are violent and savage towards each other because they are children who lived in an irrational, pre-Christian world together. 

Cathy’s self imposed choice between Edgar and Heathcliff is actually an ambivalence towards growing up and entering society. She fantasizes while dying about returning to her childhood bed, to the last night Heathcliff was allowed to sleep with her in it– this is right before she begins puberty, of course (Cathy and Heathcliff don’t share a bed in the movie). Catherine dies at eighteen because she cannot reconcile the conflict presented by puberty. When Heathcliff (childishly pantomiming a “gentleman”) pleads with her ghost not to leave him, alone, in this abyss where he cannot find her, he means adulthood.

A GILDED CAGE?

With all the imagery of cages and collars in the film, to imply a sort of servitude to the quaint and comfortable Linton life… but what is Cathy trapped by? The puzzle of Cathy’s soul is the mystery of Wuthering Heights. She pursues both fortune and self destruction actively, without reflection or resolution– that’s what makes it a ghost story. In the novel, her attraction to the Lintons is aesthetic and self aggrandizing, but Fennell’s Cathy is passively coerced by downward financial pressures that are absent as a primary emotional concern in the novel.

Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw is spoiled and dictatorial. She thinks she is the smartest person in the room, she thinks she can arrange everything and had her cake and eat it too. She kills herself to hurt Heathcliff because they have run out of people to hurt besides themselves.

Catherine suffers beneath an abstract environmental repression: the choice between becoming a “lady” and living in society, or to remain “Heathcliff”– savage on the moors, where one’s Persona is undefined by civilizing structures; ie: to have the autonomy to self define, endlessly, in the child’s imaginary realm. Not incidentally Catherine imagines herself as an androgynous being on the moors, merged with her male mirror. When she realizes that she cannot be both civilized and wild– rather she can’t be “herself” in society– she fucking dies, leaving Heathcliff behind like a Revenant to wreck havoc. Catherine is expansive: she is everything of the moors, and when she dies the moors become everything of her.

Fennell’s Catherine is emotionally small, unfinished, chained to a suffocating house and undermined by her haranguing father. In the novel, Catherine and Heathcliff peer into the glimmering, soft-edged Linton estate from their hard and rash wilds, and the reader can rightfully wonder which pair of siblings it is who lives in the Garden of Eden. There is no Garden of Eden in “Wuthering Heights”.

There are bourgeois financial anxieties. Margot Robbie as Cathy mopes passively, dreaming of her ticket out of her circumstances. She is not rooted, she doesn’t know what she needs, and what she needs is frightening. She is huffy and willful because she secretly craves submissive sex, and is helpless to control herself against Heathcliff’s seduction and Edgar’s suspicion. She dies of sorrow, separated from a ravenous lover by her wet cuck of a husband. We never see her body put into the earth- or removed from it, for that matter. Her need of Heathcliff is not the need of her soul for authentic existence, but a desire for sexual release that is forbidden by the propriety of upper class womanhood and concerns about her family’s “position”.

This is Scarlett O’Hara- absent the Libertarian framing which allows Scarlet to actualize as a Randian hero, free to discard love for land. Robbie’s Cathy wants neither and nothing: she is a lock who needs a key, and to be protected from the pain of her own decisions. She needs a male leader, like the maid she observes being dominated on a pony’s bit by her father’s servant. This sexual freedom, of course, must be sourced from the social underclasses, who being free of social responsibilities are naturally childlike and happy and noble savages.

HEATHCLIFF, SIR NOT APPEARING IN THIS FILM

This theme of dual potential for danger and freedom in sex is undercut by the whole centrepiece of the movie, however– which is the long, rolling sequence two thirds in where Catherine and Heathcliff fuck. Tender, vanilla sex, where they cry and say “i wuv you i wuv you” over and over again, a montage of soft-lens sexual congress which neither frees nor damns its participants, and nothing really dangerous or scary happens during it or because of it.

In fact, the consequences of Cathy and Heathcliff’s affair are malevolently and externally imposed by a third actor, casting a pall of innocence onto their “dark” affair. After the point in the film where they have sex, all tension deflates.

In the book, you know, Heathcliff is like a spousal abuser who murders his own son through malicious neglect. Of course, Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff is a swooning cover illustration to a Joanna Lindsey book, running last century’s arsenal against a generation of 21st century BookTok love interests who will stalk you, train you, trap you, kill and dismember your ex, and shove your face into a shark tank while fucking you from behind. He is Catherine’s sulk-eyed knight in shining armour. He is her dog crawling on all fours. He may be rough and intimidating, but she owns him. She has a posh accent and is small and dainty, and he is big and dirty with a working class drawl. The attraction between them is visually dimorphic, based in their undeniable biological differences rather than their psychological similarity.

Rather than Heathcliff being the abused untouchable whom Cathy chooses to align with, Fennell’s Heathcliff is the one who arrives to save Cathy from her dreary life. He chooses to take beatings for her. He shelters her from the rain, and protects her from the dirtiness of the world by preserving her sexual innocence. The Heathcliff of “Wuthering Heights” is a lackadaisical Revenger, and appears to have returned to the moors simply to show Cathy that he now wears a sexy little earring.

Fennell accurately perceives precisely that the fantasy at the heart of the Bad Boy trope is actually security. A dangerous man who is only safe for you, a man so obsessed he’ll never think of another woman, he is a masturbatory object. But Elordi’s Heathcliff is neither dangerous nor passionate; maybe a little bit cheeky. Heathcliff’s re-appearance in the novel has the metaphorical effect of a sickness relapsing. The relationship is familiar to anyone who has a mental illness: it is your constant companion, it is and isn’t you.

Elordi’s Heathcliff pouts and glowers, but his interjection into Margot Robbie’s life with the Lintons is pleasurable. It is a maddening glimpse into the tender and passionate world that Cathy chose to throw away. She dies for lack of it. Converse to the marketing, the sexual desire between Fennell’s protagonists isn’t particularly twisted or kinky either- Cathy calls Heathcliff a “brute” in the film as a sexual tease: oh, she wants him to throw her over a barrel and fuck her. When book Cathy mocks him for being dull compared to Edgar (because Hindley works him too hard to read books!) she is trying to shame him and hurt him for not enthusiastically participating in her new value system. Heathcliff decides to become as stupid as possible to spite her.

Brontë’s Heathcliff, being barred from Society by Hindley, is ambivalent towards it. He can’t stand that Catherine would want to be part of it. They were violently separated the moment she returned from the Grange, beautified and civilized, because they could no longer recognize themselves as selfsame reflections. They are war from that point on. The “love” between Heathcliff and Cathy is actually their desperation to claw back the sameness that existed between them in childhood, and their irrational, immature denial that it no longer exists.

The sexual desire between Elordi and Robbie was never arrested that way, at the very cusp of sexual maturity. Because they never shared a bed as children, the Catherine and Heathcliff of “Wuthering Heights” are still a mystery to each other. Their relationship is trembling with potential. It’s in danger of evolving, it’s fertile with urging to become something else (adult), and the way in which their affair is depicted frames it as quenchable, but forbidden.

This Cathy and Heathcliff, rather than being twin devils, are co-abused children at the mercy of an abusive father figure, who keeps them in filth and poverty. The girl is a willful tsundere with a soft centre. The boy has an obvious crush on her, but remains stoic and takes blows for her. They grow up as a degraded lady and servant. She teaches him how to read. He’s hot and works in the stables with his sleeves rolled up. They are not so much trapped in their past as they are denied a future. They could save each other, if Cathy got her head straight and stopped chasing her family’s security over chemistry. 

There is a relationship in the  ‘Wuthering Heights’ novel that fits this description, btw– and they are the protagonists of the novel’s second half: Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw. Catherine (II) and Hareton’s romance is what redeems Cathy and Heathcliff by providing a copacetic mirror of their dynamic. With their wills authentically aligned Catherine and Hareton are able to confront Heathcliff about his tyranny. They drive him into psychological and eventually physical retreat, and they get everything they want and will be quite happy in the end; and Catherine and Heathcliff are together too, to decay with each other forever on the moors.

For the thirty minutes I believed “Wuthering Heights” was doing this on purpose– writing Cathy/Heathcliff as Catherine/Hareton– I thought I might be watching something kind of brilliant. Unfortunately, Emerald Fennel is stupid, and she was doing something else completely.

DAE: ELLEN DEAN IS THE REAL VILLAIN OF WUTHERING HEIGHTS?

There’s this famous read of Wuthering Heights, first articulated in a 1958 by academic James Hafley, which suggests quite mischievously that Nelly the housekeeper is the actual villain of the novel. 

The theory goes that Nelly heard and saw everything the day Cathy decided to marry Edgar. She knew that Heathcliff was listening and let it happen, and she never explained the misunderstanding to either of them. She controls the letter correspondence between the Heights and the Grange, and in the end she gets everything she wants (as the honorary custodian of Wuthering Heights). Furthermore… might it be that how sick and insane Catherine and Heathcliff appear to be could be a privileged fabrication? Naturally, Nelly would make them look bad in her own telling of the story, since she is the one who ruined their lives. At the centre of all things, you will always find her: Ellen Dean.

You might have noticed that this is a mostly accurate recitation of the film’s plot as well, whose Nelly hovers around edges nebbishly pulling strings, withholding information, and observing the inexorable fallout ever a stoic, receding pillar. This would be fascinating character were the film’s plot structured around her, but like Heathcliff’s half-baked brutality the subject of Nelly’s villainy is handled with the lightest touch, floating at the surface of the text to justify its revolutions rather than bolstering its spine.

Such a Bartesian reading of the text as “Nelly Dean is the villain of Wuthering Heights” is obviously a game. The accusation of Nelly’s meddling rests on the power she holds within the novel’s architecture as The Narrator. The reader “knows”, instinctively, that Nelly’s apparent omnipotence is for our convenience, and so we “ignore” it. Nelly needs to know everything and read every letter so she can tell us about it. The joke of Hafley’s essay is how you can so easily and thoroughly manipulate the facts to say that Nelly acts maliciously, but you also know it isn’t true– because Nelly is a fictional character.

What is actually being implicated is the role of the narrator in literature. But Nelly is not the narrator of Fennell’s film, which is told loosely from Catherine Earnshaw’s point of view. Nelly, absent the powers of narrative omnipotence that make her villainous in Hafley’s reading, partakes in actions which must be judged diagetically in the text alongside Cathy and Heathcliff’s.

In “Wuthering Heights”, Ellen Dean is the bastard daughter of a nobleman, hidden away in the moors because of her race. She was brought to the house by Mr. Earnshaw for mysterious reason,s and became a companion for young Catherine. When a new boy arrives, Cathy becomes fascinated by him and tosses Nelly aside. Nelly internalizes this and grows vindictive over the years, taking out a series of petty revengences on Catherine that end up killing her. 

Yes, Nelly is Heathcliff, and she kills Cathy by accident, and between the three of them is an unacknowledged triangle which should be the drama driving the film. But that isn’t what “Wuthering Heights” is about. The the theme of “Wuthering Heights” is that Jacob Elordi, is bigman sexy. Don’t you think so? He’s like seven feet tall, holy shit. And we absolutely cannot implicate him or his sexiness in any of his actions.

YEAH, WHAT I’M TRYING TO SAY IS THAT THE FILM IS VIRULENTLY MISOGYNISTIC, BUT NOT EVEN IN A WAY THAT HURTS MY FEELINGS, MAN, I’M JUST SAD FOR YOU

So Wuthering Heights has this proto-feminist sort of subplot where Cathy’s sister-in-law is tricked into marrying Heathcliff, and he abuses her monstrously until she’s forced to flee with their infant child, and then she lives as a single mother in the 18th century. The pitiable ninny Isabella living with Heathcliff learns to lie and mock and fight and survive. 

Her tragedy is absolute, and when Heathcliff repossessed their son after her death, it it complete; but her empowerment is also explicit. Isabella learns the “truth” of the world, and she holds a weapon in her hand, and all this changes her. Was it the Earnshaws or the Lintons who lived in Eden, btw?

Isabella’s empowerment in the film comes through, what else: a consensual alignment with Heathcliff in his jealous games against Catherine. Fennell plays her off as stunted-development Nerd, one who is a little gross, with secret pervert desires. She’s suppressed and desperate for the “dih“, unconcerned with being used as a literal prop and in fact invigorated by the objectification. The last time you see her on screen she is barking like a dog at Heathcliff’s feet. People actually like this character, she’s very funny. 

But there’s an odious subtext here, a sort of “one time at band camp” cruelty in this depiction of “The Weird Girl”. Book obsessed Isabella is a sort of pathetic masturbator with a recursive, abstracted sexual drive. She keeps a miniature replica of her house, and makes dolls from her companions’ hair. A beautiful woman imagines herself as a sexual Object, which is normative female sexuality (Catherine’s virginity even comes gift-wrapped), but a female who places herself as the Subject in the fantasy, and watches the Object for her own pleasure can only have gotten that way because she is an undesirable pervert.

Of course, Emily Brontë herself was actually a sexually recursive weird girl. She was an unmarried, offputting NEET who liked dogs and books and not talking to people, and was only briefly a governess like her sisters, which exposed her to a way of living which she obviously had complete contempt for– the Brontës were middle class landowners, think of her as the daughter of a struggling used car dealership owner, living in rural Pennsylvania or something, and she grew up writing fantasy RP logs with her sisters and they conspired together to publish a bunch of edgy novels that would provocatively tease the border of propriety and also address and bunch of their pet fandom discourse issues, filling their books with subversions and deconstructions of familiar characters and plots they thought were dumbfuck. 

“IT’S NOT THAT DEEP”

“Wuthering Heights” is inspired by Emerald Fennell’s teenage desires, what she imagined happening off-screen when she read the novel as a fourteen year old. When I was fourteen, I too was arrested by the vile and gothic images of Wuthering Heights, especially the tantalizing implications surrounding Heathcliff’s romantic exhumation of Catherine’s corpse. This image does not appear anywhere in Fennell’s film. I imagined that Cathy and Heathcliff were on the moors planning to hijack a Spanish galleon, I imagined they wanted to sail to Gondal to discover Heathcliff’s royal lineage. I imagined that they were deconstructing a rabbit’s corpse– two sets of hands buried in the offal, conjoined through the violation of social structure. Recursive, perverted ideas of omnipotence.

It’s taboo in the gratification-dome of late capitalism to critique desire– of course, unexamined desire is the engine of consumerism. And more sympathetically, critique of desire can easily transform into suppression. The Romance genre is a churning flashpoint of this debate, and whenever it comes under scrutiny dozens of male Thinkers crawl from the woodwork to share their very important and deep thoughts on rape fantasy and false equivalences between words on the page and the porn industry, which is rife with sexual and labour abuse of real people who actually exist and are not fictional. 

But this does not mean that the Romance genre should be taken as a naturalized expression of female sexuality. Romance is a capitalist genre, concerned at its origin with a woman’s role in the management of gendered bourgeois property rights and the uneven expectations of monogamy foisted upon them in such an arrangement. Vintage Harlequin heroines had money and land, but needed a wild, low-status man to awaken their Divine Feminine so that they were not masculinized by the act of holding status. Modern Harlequin heroines are saved from the overwhelming drudgery of the wage slave rat race by dominating billionaires who “train” them into security and certainty. Rather than the man privately feminizing the publicly powerful woman, the zeitgeist of BookTok romance concerns women who absorb a libertarian “male essence” through extreme acts of surrender and masochism to a singularly powerful man.

The most intellectually charitable read of “Wuthering Heights” is that Fennell aimed to unite these two traditions– the class consciousness of vintage Harlequin with the sadomasochism of 21st century “Dark Romance”, but failed to achieve synthesis by soft-serving the latter and critically interrogating neither. Wuthering Heights’s untouchable status in the literary canon has a sexist subtext to it; because of its elusive meaning and moral ambiguity it remains one of the few works of complete philosophy written by a woman which male literary critics are willing to admit is philosophy. Women invented most genres of fiction, but are tightly constrained through passive social pressures to domestic realism and social commentary, observations on relationships between men and women, women and mothers, the various descending and overlapping layers of human interconnection and its consequence. Women’s writing must be socially responsible and is often read through a lens of moral didacticism even when it is not relevant. The unhinged nature of Wuthering Heights is therefore still highly subversive, even in 2026.

That Emerald Fennell has made an adaptation of Wuthering Heights which unironically reverts it into the sort of story Emily Brontë was likely making fun of is not itself grounds for critique. Stanley Kubrick did worse vandalism when he adapted The Shining, Lolita; and you know I don’t really think that Paul Thomas Anderson is politically the guy to always be adapting Pynchon. But fully engaging with “Wuthering Heights”‘s themes of submission and release and catharsis independent of the source material still finds them wanting. 

The childhood savagery of Brontë’s moors and D/s sexual dynamics can both be depicted as a simultaneous Heaven and Hell– a pre-Christian world where pain and pleasure are not forbidden because they have not yet been differentiated from each other. Religious Rites of the past would be classified as torture or compulsive self harm today. But “Wuthering Heights” drags its characters to neither location. So the only question left to ask is:

What did you mean, by taking a novel so grounded in the pain and self-exile women endure to preserve mental freedom, and transforming it into a paean to the joys of feminine submission?

If you enjoy my writing and find it stirring in some way, please consider sharing it with friends, or leaving a comment. The internet used to thrive on active discussion and I believe we can make it happen again!