Even before, let alone since, the release of Ms Emerald Fennell's film “Wuthering Heights” there has been a flurry of activity on the Internet with posts about the film alongside mainstream articles in the press. Most of these have ranged between the scathing and the excoriating. They almost read as if we had been presented with “Carry On Wuthering Heights”.
The film is, of course, Ms Fennell’s adaptation ( and that word is important in the context of the film ) of the late Miss Emily Brontë’s everyday story of farming folk set in the Yorkshire Dales in the years 1770 to 1801. Often described, as it is by Ms Fennell, as a great, or even the greatest love story, it is, in fact no such thing, as is made clear in a good video about the family which can be viewed at
Wuthering Heights Was Never a Love Story | The Brilliant Bronte Sisters
It is a bleak story of revenge and retribution. One does rather begin to wonder what was going on in the mind of the author as the daughter of a clergyman of the established Church. Amongst the comments on the online videos about the new film one contributor quoted a tutor who described it as a story of some mentally ill people sexing their way through a property dispute. Very romantic.
Now I must confess that I have never read the novel, but the raised interest online has led me to do some wider research on the Brontës and their lives and literary output.
I have visited Haworth once and would recommend anyone interested to do so. The family home at the parsonage is very well worth visiting and to experience this relatively cramped house which in the 1840s was gone to so much literary talent. The village is picturesque in a dour Pennine way. The literary pilgrim can walk west from the village to the remains of Top Withins, which is widely believed to be the location for the imagined Wuthering Heights. There is a helpful video about the walk and the ruins at
The Problem With The 'Wuthering Heights' Ruin
Top Withins may be an only a ruin but nothing, alas, remains of High Sunderland Hall, which lay just outside Halifax, some miles to the south of Haworth but known to the Brontës. This architecturally important building with its likely literary connections to their novels, was demolished in 1951. One would hope that such a loss would not occur today.
Wikipedia has an illustrated account of the house at
High_Sunderland_Hall
Like I suspect quite a number of people my view of the Brontës and their works is somewhat coloured by reading Stella Gibbons’ marvellous Cold Comfort
Farm with Mr Mybug and his theories about the Brontë family, as well as the late, great Michael Wharton’s ‘Peter Simple’ column in the Daily Telegraph with its character Julian Birdbath living in a disused lead mine in Derbyshire whilst he researches his life of the tweed suited and pope-smoking lost Brontë sister Doreen….
More recently the Radio 4 comedy series about literary Before they were Famous ‘unearthed’the fact that Wuthering Heights originated with a gardening column contributed by Emily Brontë to a local Keighley newspaper ….
In other words I am not in awe of the tropes and themes, the sweep and scope of such fiction - sometimes described as ‘loan and love-child’ stories.
I come from the lowland, not the Pennine part, of the West Riding, but my paternal ancestors lived from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in an area very similar to Haworth, but about thirty five miles to the south and on the Yorkshire-Lancashire county boundary, so I have perhaps some genetic awareness of the power of such a landscape and social setting.
With that in mind and as an historian approaching what I know about the adaptation that has created this film there is quite a lot to criticise.
First of all I do not like adaptations that diverge unnecessarily from the text. Constraints of time and cost will often require some consolidation - not everything can be like the television version of Brideshead Revisited- but fidelity to the text should always be a principle, and a dominating one.
Secondly there should be authenticity to the era presented in matters such as location and costume. This film appears to pay scant regard with dresses from a later period and even, apparently, made of plastic(!). In some images Margot Robbie looks like Disney’s Snow White. Ms Fennell did not manage to include the Seven Dwarfs apparently.
Thirdly, and even more grating, is colour-blind casting, which simply looks like heavy handed DEI pressure. Ironically the casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has been stigmatised as ‘white washing’. Heathcliff is meant to be an outsider, distinctively so, but Emily Brontë appears to have been unclear in what way he is meant to be “other”. Is he to be seen as of part Mediterranean, Arab, Sephardic, Gypsy, Indian or Black heritage? Given the textual evidence and the stamp Olivier put on the part Mr Elordi with his own Iberian heritage seems quite credible. Miss Brontë was not writing about twenty-first century ‘multiculturalism’.
In conclusion reading about the film reminds me of a conversation I had some years ago with a fellow son of the West Riding in Oxford. My friend opined that people in southern England thought that the long-running television series Last of the Summer Wine was a comedy programme but that we knew it was in fact a fly-on-the-wall documentary….. That principle might, I suggest, be applied to Ms Fennell’s film somewhat along the following lines when conversing with the unwary or uninitiated….
“Well ya maight think yer like it but don’t you go nah think in’ it’s sum fancy made-up tail. That’s ‘ow it is oop heer, wi’ driving rain and storms all’t time, and nowt but sheep and people tha’ ates, an that’s on a gud day. Don’t you be coming wi them fancy la-di-da southern notions. It’s tuff oop here, always was, always will be. Nowt but drudgery. But ‘appen it’s gud for them’s as can bear it”
*This post has not been sponsored by any Yorkshire Tourist Board but is written by One Who Knows
