Opposite of Good

Emily Brontë’s Bible of Hell from Page to Screen

Whether it is right or advisable to create beings like Heathcliff, I do not know: I scarcely think it is. But this I know: the writer who possesses the creative gift owns something of which he is not always master—something that, at times, strangely wills and works for itself.

—Charlotte Brontë, Preface to Wuthering Heights (1850)

She played gaily with words, speaking about broken eggs, and then broken eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable.

—Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (1928)

I once believed, I once believed I was free

—Charli XCX, “Altars,” Wuthering Heights (2026)

Writer/director Emerald Fennell has enclosed the title of her new Wuthering Heights adaptation in quotation marks. As she explains,

“I can’t say I’m making Wuthering Heights. It’s not possible. What I can say is I’m making a version of it.”

Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel thematically depends on the irony of its narrative viewpoint, a distinctly literary technique usually elided by filmmakers. The violent romance between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff in the titular estate on the Yorkshire moors, its severing by her later marriage to the wealthy Edgar Linton of neighboring Thrushcross Grange, and this love triangle’s consequence for their progeny—all this obviously lends itself to dramatization and spectacle. But the story is told not by a third-person narrator or by one of the main participants in the action. Instead, it’s narrated by an outsider named Mr. Lockwood, a tourist fleeing metropolitan life for the putatively Romantic charms of Northern England.

When Lockwood encounters the savagery of Heathcliff’s family life, not to mention the ghost of Catherine Earnshaw outside Wuthering Heights’ window, and falls into a fever, the Earnshaws’ and Lintons’ longtime servant Nelly Dean takes over the narrative and relays to him the entire family saga. This wild and bewildering genealogy of recurrent names and doubled identifications looks forward to such 20th-century classics as Absalom, Absalom!, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Midnight’s Children, each an epic novel in which a provincial dynasty’s rise and fall allegorizes a national destiny. Less tragic than its modernist and postmodernist successors, Wuthering Heights concludes in apparent optimism, with the Earnshaw and Linton scions preparing to form the civilized alliance their parents’ generation could not achieve.

Instead of the Rousseauist or Wordsworthian natural idyll he had been expecting, Lockwood discovers the slow conversion of a brutal landscape, whose inhabitants’ titanic feeling is scarcely distinguishable from the eponymous “wuthering” weather, into just another outpost of well-ordered middle-class modernity. This ingenuous tourist and the commonsensical servant Nelly Dean oversee this transformation from the Gothic to the domestic with a satisfaction evoked in the novel’s ironic final sentence, as Lockwood imagines the once passionate Catherine and Heathcliff peacefully asleep in the grave:

I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

But the normative and normalizing perspective of its narrators is not Emily Brontë’s, however; Wuthering Heights derives its impetus, and impresses upon the reader its strongest effect, through the introductory imagery of untamed natural and spiritual passion (combined with the declamatory fury of its central sufferers). The novel’s second half, which works out the Earnshaw-Linton lineage’s slow achievement of order,¹ pales before the glamorously mythical theatricalism of the first half.

I have always thought of the novel as both an embodiment of and an allegory for the transition from Gothic romance to Victorian realism, since it begins in the one genre and ends in the other. Filmmakers have made a habit of discarding the later chapters, of ending their adaptations at the book’s tragic mid-point with the tableau of Catherine Earnshaw dead from longing for her lover-doppelgänger before Victorian respectability can take hold.

Emily Brontë belongs to a company of Romantic writers—Blake, the Shelleys, Byron, Melville—determined to rewrite Paradise Lost’s wars in heaven and on earth with the poet’s brooding and baleful Satan as a heroic revolutionary challenging divine repression. In Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff and Catherine together, a single soul self-exiled from paradise, represent this Satanic hero—“I am Heathcliff!” Catherine exclaims to Nelly—while respectable Christian society, on the eve of its triumph over their theretofore unincorporated landscape, serves that jailer God whom Blake derided as Nobodaddy. As Catherine explains to Nelly in one of the novel’s most celebrated passages:

“If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable.”

“Because you are not fit to go there,” I answered. “All sinners would be miserable in heaven.”

“But it is not for that. I dreamt once that I was there.”

“I tell you I won’t hearken to your dreams, Miss Catherine! I’ll go to bed,” I interrupted again.

She laughed, and held me down; for I made a motion to leave my chair.

“This is nothing,” cried she: “I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

The narrating Lockwood and Nelly, then, act as the heavenly order’s angelic enforcers comforting themselves and each other with the bedtime story of the rebel angels’ defeat, even as their auditors—i.e., generation after generation of the novel’s readers—thrill illicitly to the hellish passion these narrators cannot help but convey.

Every time over the last two decades an unsuspecting reader took to social media to report in therapeutic language that they had eagerly begun this “classic love story” only to find it ridden with “toxic” and “abusive” relationships, they have spoken in the regulative double voice of Lockwood and Nelly. None of which is to say that Brontë represents Catherine and Heathcliff’s behavior, destructive of both self and other, as itself ethical or healthful, only that her novel elevates its sublimity over the triumph of a cossetted, corseted order that strangles all natural and spiritual ardor.

My own interpretation is informed by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s in their landmark work of feminist criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, where they construe Wuthering Heights as Brontë’s “Bible of Hell,” a Blakean myth about the descent of a cosmic “Original Mother” and her alternate selves, including Catherine and Heathcliff, first into “nature, the perversely hellish heaven which was their home” and then into “the fallen world of culture.” George Bataille’s interpretation of the novel in his Literature and Evil also applies:

The lesson of Wuthering Heights, of Greek tragedy and, ultimately, of all religions, is that there is an instinctive tendency towards divine intoxication which the rational world of calculation cannot bear. This tendency is the opposite of Good.

I emphasize these Satanic, Blakean, or “evil” readings of the novel because Emerald Fennell’s movie maintains greater faith with their counter-religious credo than her superficial alteration of the narrative might suggest.

Fennell has pared the story back to its bare outline. She eliminates not only the novel’s second half, but also Catherine Earnshaw’s mother and older brother Hindley. She presents only Mr. Earnshaw’s return to Wuthering Heights after a drinking bout (rather than the novel’s business trip) with the foundling Heathcliff in tow; Catherine and Heathcliff’s alternately violent and affectionate childhood devotions and adolescent amours; Catherine’s opportunistic marriage to the nouveau riche manufacturer Edgar Linton, an alliance she enters in order to save herself from the ruin of her fallen farming family; Heathcliff’s consequent flight and return as a rich man who buys her father’s estate, followed by his own vengeful and abusive marriage in turn to Edgar’s ward, Isabella (in the novel, Isabella is Edgar’s sister); and the pregnant Catherine’s final pining unto death for Heathcliff. In the novel, Catherine gives birth to Edgar’s baby before she dies, setting up the next generation’s “fall into culture,” but the film kills off mother and baby alike in a spectacular gynecological bloodletting that terminates both the Earnshaw-Linton lineage and any possibility of converting erotic savagery into public order.

While Fennell finds no place for the tourist Lockwood in her scheme, she cannily transforms Nelly Dean’s role in the story from mere servant to Catherine’s lady companion, a lonely spinster who resents Catherine and Heathcliff’s bond and plots to destroy it. Fennell similarly excuses Heathcliff’s abuse of Isabella by transforming that character into an eagerly and affirmatively consenting masochist who thrills when Heathcliff chains her up like a dog and makes her bark in the parlor of Wuthering Heights. With these deft revisions, emphasizing Nelly’s cold enmity to the central romance and Isabella’s hot affinity to the prevailing ethos of fetishistic desire, Fennell comprehends and extends Brontë’s amoral outlook.

But Fennell translates the Romantic author’s essentially metaphysical worldview into a decidedly physical cinematic language. When the film’s trailer was released in September, hinting at Fennell’s obtrusive stylization and emphasis on the erotic charge between her sexy leads Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, audiences feared that the director would merely trivialize the source material for the era of “romantasy” fiction and its quasi-pornography of maidens and monsters.²

Fennell was previously renowned as the writer/director behind the high-end exploitation films Promising Young Woman, a MeToo-era rape-revenge black comedy whose original screenplay earned her an Academy Award, and Saltburn, an eat-the-rich phantasmagoria about a class climber’s infiltration of an aristocratic family. The latter film’s most notorious scene, where the protagonist slurps the inseminated bathwater of the family’s golden boy (played, like Heathcliff, by Elordi), suggests Fennell’s artistic tendency toward provocation.

Some viewers will no doubt find their fears borne out in Fennell’s Wuthering Heights: early in the film, for instance, Heathcliff happens upon a masturbating Catherine on the moor and licks her wet fingers clean. In another scene, his large hands grip her mouth and eyes as they look down through a slit in a barn floor as Wuthering Heights’s groom puts a horse-bridle in the mouth of his servant paramour before they make love. In the film’s tone-setting overture, as we listen to creaking and moaning over the black screen of the credit sequence, we imagine someone in the throes of copulation only to find, when the first image fades in, that we have been listening to a (tumescent) hanged man’s death rattle, as a young Catherine lustily watches the execution.

We might say, then, that Fennell’s commitment in this film to sexual transgression, to converting Catherine and Heathcliff’s love into an explicitly sadomasochistic obsession linking love and death, crassly literalizes the not especially bodily (or bawdy) romance offered by the novel’s infernal gospel. Fennell appears less inspired by Bataille’s reading of Brontë than by the philosopher’s own pornographic novella, Story of the Eye. Fennell nowhere lists Bataille among her influences, citing instead prior erotic cinema like Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter, David Cronenberg’s Crash, and Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, but both Story of the Eye and Fennell’s Wuthering Heights share a notable erotic fixation on the breaking of eggs, both for the sheer crunching and sliming tactility of the act and for all that this motif portends of an eros decoupled from life and reproduction, pledged instead perversely to pleasure and death.

In fact, if I had to sum up the film’s aesthetic in a single word, it might be “squelching.” This is the sensuous-grotesque sound of Heathcliff fingering the broken eggs a prankish Catherine has deposited in his bed, of the servants washing Mr. Earnshaw’s drunken vomit from the estate’s flagstones, of the moist bread dough they knead as Catherine dreamily recalls her voyeuristic tryst with Heathcliff the night before, of the the gelled fish whose suggestive lips Catherine idly fingers on Thrushcross Grange’s lush dinner table when dreaming of the vanished Heathcliff. As those piscine labia imply, Fennell loads her film with innuendo, most memorably when the neurotic Isabella presents Catherine with a collaged scrapbook devoted to their friendship full of vulvic and phallic pop-up pictures.

The film’s damp saturation in nature, however, co-exists uneasily with Fennell’s dryly funny commitment to high artifice. The performances, for example, verge on camp or the tongue-in-cheek as each actor knowingly exaggerates and relishes their character’s distinctive persona, from Elordi’s mischievous wolfishness and Robbie’s imperious petulance in the leads to the supporting players, with Alison Oliver’s dotty perversion as Isabella and Hong Chau’s frigid menace as Nelly. For all the occasional inclusion of an English folk ballad, the pop soundtrack by Charli XCX further contributes to the film’s highly aestheticized distance from the subject matter.

Fennell’s visualization of the novel’s misty moors and decaying Earnshaw homestead is pro forma, adding little to prior adaptations, but her camera eye opens wide in Thrushcross Grange. The mansion’s elaborate frosted-cake interiors remind us that Fennell had also cited Bram Stoker’s Dracula as an influence, another free and highly sexualized adaptation of a Gothic classic noted for its garish, operatic set design. But, as Linton informs Catherine in the film, he and Isabella have decorated her room in the mansion in pale pink to resemble her own body, down to a brown spot on the wall doubling as the freckle on her cheek. The house, then, externalizes Catherine’s desire and becomes, more than the moors, the place where she couples with Heathcliff when their affair resumes toward the film’s finale. Wilderness and artifice meet.

This revision of the novel—transposing the locus of desire from nature to culture—represents just the betrayal Fennell-skeptics expected when she announced her adaptation, or so it seems. But we are a long way from 1847 and the reign of Victorian prudery. Though she died soon after her novel’s publication, Emily Brontë long ago won the argument for unbounded, amoral desire. We have built much of our current civilization around this desire’s satisfaction, nowhere more than in the very portal where you read these words. We therefore no longer suffer from the conflict between natural desire and cultural repression Brontë staged; our culture simultaneously excites desire endlessly and removes its appeasement from nature, whether wilderness or flesh. When Fennell transposes Catherine’s ardor from untamed landscape to cultivated boudoir, she faithfully reflects not only Brontë’s vision but also this momentous social shift between Brontë’s era and our own.

In one of the film’s climatic images, medicinal leeches crawl blackly and quiveringly up the perishing Catherine’s décolletage, and up her pale cheeks and brow, and up the flesh-pink bedroom wall behind her. Such an image is as emblematic as any of the novel’s now perhaps quaint Gothic devices: a decadent icon for our desiring culture’s latest rehearsal of Romantic self-annihilation.

—John Pistelli

1. The plot is famously complicated, often requiring diagrams and family trees to explain in the classroom, as well as guides to English property law, but I will here briefly recount the events of the novel’s second half for anyone unfamiliar with them. First, Catherine Earnshaw and Edgar Linton have a daughter, also named Catherine, following which Catherine Earnshaw dies in childbirth. To get the Linton wealth into his own family’s hands, Heathcliff manipulates Catherine Linton into marrying Linton Heathcliff, his own son with Edgar’s sister Isabella, whom he married and abused in requital for the first Catherine’s marriage to Edgar. When the sickly and querulous Linton Heathcliff dies, the second Catherine then falls in love with Hareton Earnshaw, the son of the first Catherine’s brother Hindley. Out of his enmity to Hindley, who’d mistreated him, Heathcliff has vengefully reduced Hareton to the status of an illiterate servant, but the second Catherine joins forces with him against the ailing Heathcliff to wrest the Earnshaw and Linton estates from his control. Crucially, stressing the importance of the civilizing arts in this process, the second Catherine teaches Hareton (note the animalizing name) to read. Filmmakers tend to omit all these developments, partly owing to their involution, but also to elevate Catherine and Heathcliff’s sublime romance over its subsequent anti-Romantic effects.

2. Social media controversy about the film before its release also focused on the casting of the white Elordi, even though Brontë depicts Heathcliff as ethnically ambiguous (“a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”) to augment his outsider status. Elordi’s Basque heritage, however, probably renders him exotic enough for 19th-century rural England. (Besides, Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation already viewed the story through the lens of contemporary racial politics: the villains spend that film heaping racial abuse on a sympathetic Heathcliff, played in youth and maturity by black actors.) More questionable is Fennell’s superficially race-blind casting of Southeast and South Asian actors, respectively, as Nelly and Edgar, in other words, as the enemies of desire, embodied less for this particular film by the shadowy Heathcliff than by the luminous Catherine. Fennell and her collaborators likely meant nothing consciously by the casting, but it faintly echoes immemorial western imputations of scheming ardorlessness and sly passivity to “the Orient,” perhaps a tremor of geopolitical anxiety about the end of western centrality in the film’s political unconscious.