Revisting Wuthering Heights
This time around, I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Joanne Froggatt of Downton Abbey fame, and it genuinely transformed the experience for me.
I have never quite understood people's passion for Wuthering Heights. I loved it, and considered it a brilliant read, but it will never head to my favourite's list. My original reading left me feeling that it was dark, depressing and, at times, hard work. I particularly struggled with Emily Brontë's phonetic rendering of dialect, often finding myself concentrating more on deciphering what was being said than on the story itself.
Listening to Froggatt's narration removed that barrier entirely. Having a talented actor interpret those voices meant I could simply immerse myself in the story and its characters. So, if you've always found the language of Wuthering Heights a little impenetrable, I highly recommend giving the audiobook a try.
Is it really a romance?
Despite Wuthering Heights often being spoken about as one of literature's great romances, I have never experienced it that way. To me, it is a story about intergenerational trauma, abuse, obsession and the damage that people inflict upon one another.
Emerald Fennell, however, approaches the material from a very different angle.
Her adaptation leans heavily into the romantic and sexual relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff. The film introduces scenes of physical intimacy that are either absent from or only implied in the novel and places much greater emphasis on longing, desire and romantic connection than I ever found in Brontë's text.
I am not a purist when it comes to adaptations, and I have no objection to a filmmaker reimagining a classic. In fact, I think the scale of Fennell's changes works in the film's favour. The alterations are so significant that it becomes easier to approach this as a new interpretation altogether, rather than constantly measuring it against the original page by page. Smaller changes might have invited endless comparisons, but these changes create something fundamentally different.
The changes that didn't work me
If I had to take issue with the adaptation, it would be on two points.
Firstly, I struggled with the reimagining of Heathcliff's relationship with Isabella. In the novel, Isabella's marriage is clearly depicted as abusive and inescapable. In the film, however, there seemed to be an implication that she actively participates in, and perhaps even derives some satisfaction from, the cruelty of the relationship. Whether or not that was the filmmakers' intention, it sat uncomfortably with me.
Perhaps this is the community lawyer in me speaking, but I am sensitive to the ways abuse, particularly violence against women, is portrayed on screen. I couldn't really see what this change added to the story, and it risked muddying the novel's much clearer depiction of coercion and abuse.
Secondly, with such a strong focus on the romantic and sexual relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff, I found the film surprisingly slow. There is a great deal of yearning, pining and emotional intensity, but not a lot else happens. I kept waiting for the story to shift gears or build towards something bigger, and then suddenly the ending arrived, feeling more anticlimactic than devastating.
Final thoughts
Did I enjoy the film? Yes, I did.
Was I particularly excited by it? Not really.
I didn't object to the reimagining of the plot, nor did I feel protective of the source material in the way that some viewers seem to have been. My issue was simply that the resulting film felt a little too uneventful for my tastes.
It's a perfectly watchable adaptation and an interesting reinterpretation of a classic, but it isn't one that I imagine I'll be raving about or rushing to recommend. If nothing else, though, it did encourage me to return to Wuthering Heights itself, and thanks to Joanne Froggatt's audiobook, I appreciated the novel far more the second time around.
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