Does Emerald Fennel’s “Wuthering Heights” misinterpret Brontë’s classic as a romance?

Since it first appeared in 1847, this novel has been cast as misunderstood. “The immature but very real powers revealed in Wuthering Heights were scarcely recognized; its import and nature were misunderstood,” Charlotte Brontë wrote in a biographical preface to an edition of the book released three years after her sister Emily’s novel debuted (Emily lived only about a year after her book—her only book—was published). “‘It still has the ability to shock’: Why ‘masterpiece’ Wuthering Heights is so misunderstood” the BBC titled an article last February.

Like the eternal rocks beneath

As much as literature itself, misunderstandings and misinterpretations of literature reveal what society values, what it condemns, and what it allows. There is power even in what is classed as misunderstanding versus misinterpretation; one being entirely dismissive, and the other granting the reader the benefit of lucidity.

The impulse to view Wuthering Heights as a romance is a modern one, and one that has been quickly categorized as an egregious misunderstanding of the text, brushed to the side as a teenage fantasy.

Acutely aware of this sentiment, as a teenager I was sure to denounce any romantic notions of the novel. Truthfully, I was then, and still am now, discomfited by the intensity of emotion of the novel, and how moved I am by some of its most famous lines:

“My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly I am Heathcliff,” or “You say I killed you—haunt me then! [...] Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”

Amid their passions, Cathy and Heathcliff are violent, vengeful, and cruel: antithetical to the traditional romantic hero. Yet, on the same level that Wuthering Heights is a novel about race, class, and propriety, it is a novel about the doomed love between Cathy and Heathcliff.

In that way, is it so absurd for a teenage girl, at a time in life where you have next to no autonomy, but are brimming with passion and hormones, to experience Wuthering Heights as a romantic novel about two people torn apart by society? Is that a misunderstanding of the novel at all, or is it simply an uncomfortable interpretation of it?

What is romance worth?

Unfortunately, critics, scholars, and readers alike share a flippancy for the romance plot. The moment any form of art with romance at its center is categorized as valuable or meaningful, it must be described as more than a romance. In this view, romance on its own is not worthy of being investigated with care and criticism.

“If Wuthering Heights is a love story then Hamlet is a sitcom, Tristan und Isolde a musical and the Sistine Chapel a cool piece of interior design,” Martin Kettle wrote in response to the 2007 UKTV Drama poll that voted Wuthering Heights Britain’s Greatest Love Story of All Time—the same branding we just saw with Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (styled in quotation marks by the filmmaker). Similarly, scholar Deidre Lynch insists that Jane Austen is more than a “rom-com writer.”

An offensive interpretation?

The romance plot speaks to the most intimate part of humanity: the desire to love and be loved. The impulse to view meaning in romance as more, rather than a natural extension of the romance plot, is inherently dismissive. In the refusal to grant literary merit to the romance plot, we lose the ability to examine what these plots reveal about us.

The mid-19th-century understanding of novels was that they were meant to be morally instructive, but in the 21st century, expectations of literature are much looser. It is this freedom of perspective that allows us to interpret Wuthering Heights as romantic. Acknowledging that the driving force of Wuthering Heights is the intense love between Cathy and Heathcliff does not have to coincide with deeming them (or their love) morally good.

Classifying a romantic reading of Wuthering Heights as a misunderstanding reveals a cultural impulse against discomfort and a puritanical sensibility about what can and cannot be depicted in art. It reveals a cultural desire for things to be black and white and reinforces the dismissal of women’s voices.

This impulse towards a seemingly contrarian, but truthfully conservative opinion—one often based in intentional misunderstanding—is ever present in society today. It is in this spirit that Lolita becomes a glorification of pedophilia, Catcher in the Rye a tale of a petulant rich kid, and Wuthering Heights a novel that would be entirely offensive to interpret as romantic.

An opportunity for uncomfortable questions

That’s my trouble with Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights”: it refuses the viewer the autonomy of interpretation entirely. It takes all the twisted darkness of the novel that fascinates and confounds people, and strips it down into an uncomplicated, sex-fueled love story featuring a neutered Heathcliff and lobotomized Cathy. Outside of condescending to its viewers, the focus on this entirely altered romance plot explicitly at the expense of other themes only reinforces the idea that romance plots must exist separately from the exploration of serious ideas.

To me, exploring Wuthering Heights as a romance is meant to ask uncomfortable questions about what we have taught young women to accept and expect as behaviors of love from men. It asks us to confront our own penchant for cruelty and forgiveness. It forces us to consider the destructive capability of love, not just its sanguine effects.

Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” had the opportunity to give legitimacy to a reading focused on the romantic tension of the novel without abandoning its other themes. Instead, this adaptation strips agency from the reader, and keeps this powerful story captive to the fallacy that romance is a second-rate misinterpretation of Brontë’s novel.

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