Victorian Visual Culture

Adapting a beloved book into a visual format is also difficult. Even some of the most perfect book adaptations, like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, have their faults. Some adaptors do not even try to faithfully adapt their source material, like David Benioff and D.B. Weiss who gave a horrible adaptation of the A Song of Ice and Fire series, known now as Game of Thrones. Unfortunately it looks as if the new Wuthering Heights movie, directed and written by Emerald Fennell, looks like it will be falling into the ladder category. 

Adaptations of Emily Bronte’s famous work have been iffy at best. They are not the best things in the world. Fennel’s take on the classic novel looks horrific. The book follows Heathcliff, an ethnically ambiguous and odd man from boyhood into adulthood and his obsession with his housemate Catherine. The book follows their obsession with each other and how Catherine, after her death, haunts Heathcliff. The duo are played by Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, who are a tad bit old to be playing teenagers/young adults. 

Period dramas are infamous for not being aesthetically accurate to the time period they are portraying. Wuthering Heights takes this to a new degree. What we see of the men’s costuming is fairly accurate to the mid Victorian aesthetic. None of Margot Robbie’s costumes as Catherine are not aesthetically correct. Some of the basic silhouettes are there, like an oval neckline for fancy dresses and the general shape of the skirt, but the rest is historical fiction. The neckline is often too low for the period and in several outfits a mid 18th century colonial neckline is used. Some of these outfits are just plain ugly too. The costuming decisions look like they wanted to dress Margot Robbie up as a classic Disney Princess, like Cinderella. 

The vibe of the movie is also waaaaaaay off. Like Emerald Fennell’s previous film, Saltburn, this adaptation of Wuthering Heights feels perverted and is used as an excuse to create yet another horny period drama (Can’t we just live with Bridgerton?). There was romantic tension between the main characters, but there were no intense makeout scenes or scenes of sexual bondage (I honestly don’t know what else to call it), as shown by the brief scene featuring Ewan Mitchell and some random woman he is strapping a strange metal device to. It is just too horny, and nothing about Wuthering Heights, the book, is like that.

To also release this movie on Valentines Day, the hallmark holiday of love, when Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship, along with several other relationships within the book, are toxic is wild. Wuthering Heights is not a Hallmark movie story. This book, nor film, should be the example of love in any capacity. 

We have only gotten a glimpse of what I firmly believe is a horrid monster. This may be one of the worst book adaptations ever created. Emily Brontë deserves so much better than this. Emily, I am so sorry. 

~ A. E. McKaelen