Speaking to RadioTimes.com, Juliet Barker, author of The Brontës, Lucasta Miller, author of The Brontë Myth, and Claire O’Callaghan, Editor-in-Chief of Brontë Studies – the official journal of the Brontë Society – talked us through the shocking past of the text.
“If you imagine literally portraying on-screen a grown man rubbing a child’s wrist up and down on a broken window until the blood runs down. People would be running out of the cinemas.”
O’Callaghan, who works closely with the Brontë Parsonage Museum, explained: "The hyper sexualisation of the film right now and the controversy that that’s created is a complete echo of the controversy that came about when Emily published the book.
“It shows us how we have very different attitudes to what’s provocative and what’s not. What the mistake with some of that though is to assume that Emily didn’t write a book filled with erotic tension because she did.
She added: “One of the most famous reviews was ‘Read Jane Eyre, burn Wuthering Heights’. I haven’t seen anyone calling for people to burn Emerald Fennell’s film.”
First reaction to Wuthering Heights
View Green Video on the source websiteBrontë biographer Barker explained: "It’s the fact that it’s amoral. There’s all this casual violence in it, casual cruelty. Heathcliff setting the trap over the lapwing’s nest, completely unnecessary.
“The same thing with Hindley Earnshaw and the way he treats Heathcliff, too. There’s this theme of unnecessary violence. Reviewers were particularly alarmed by that. One reviewer said there is not ‘a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible’.” (The reviewer is from The Atlas, 22 Jan 1848)
Controversy around Wuthering Heights has stood the test of time and O’Callaghan remarked it remains “one of the most provocative books”.
Reaction to Emily Brontë’s secret
One of the most shocking revelations pertaining to Wuthering Heights came when its author’s true identity as a woman came to light.
Once it was discovered the author was in fact a woman, Miller noted the “moral reactions” towards Wuthering Heights “got much harsher”.
“It was because a group of Branwell's friends claimed (after his death) that he had read some of his novel to them and they thought it was Wuthering Heights,” Barker said. “In fact it was likely the beginning of a story with a similar setting which Branwell had started but never finished.
She added: “Everybody always asks, where does Heathcliff come from? Did Emily have a passionate love affair? Of course, she didn’t. And this isn’t a love affair.”
“The Bell brothers, who were then discovered to be women, and not just women, the daughters of a clergyman, absolutely shocked the Victorians,” O’Callaghan said.
The Oscar-nominated 1939 Wuthering Heights film influence
Wuthering Heights has fascinated audiences since its first retelling on-screen in the silent movie in 1920, which has been lost.
“But one of the things that’s happened increasingly over the years, particularly with Hollywood, and I guess we’re seeing that again now, is this focus on the passionate elements of the narrative, and the bond between Catherine and Heathcliff and how that is positioned as a love story above all else.”
“The really interesting thing about the Laurence Olivier version [is that] it turns Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff in particular, into a romantic figure. And it becomes a romantic love story.
“He goes away, he comes back and he’s a wealthy man. And that’s the American story.”
“That’s why I’m sure they sanitised it for the 1939 version. So many people talk about it as a love story but that’s not really what the book is about. It’s about destructive passion and about what happens when that passion spills over.”
Miller said: “[Arnold’s version] is completely the opposite of what this new Hollywood blockbuster is doing. It’s very gritty. It’s very downbeat. It’s no make-up, no music.
“Candlelight, with a hand-held camera. It works well. It doesn’t mean a completely different take is going to work. No single version is going to get the full Wuthering Heights.”
Wuthering Heights now
View Green Video on the source website“It doesn’t make sense in any way,” Barker said. “The whole second generation is the redemption. And the redemption comes through education, because there is the second generation Cathy, Catherine, teaching Hareton, who has been brutalised and treated like Heathcliff had been.
Nearly 200 years after the book was published, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights could prove to be the most controversial adaptation thanks to her many bold directorial decisions.
The 5 most scandalous novels of all time
Claire O’Callaghan unearths the five most scandalous books in history:
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D H Lawrence (1928) – Subject of a famous scandalous trial for obscenity and also because of its explicit sexual content.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847) – With its portrayal of outspoken children, a governess who falls in love with her employer, a hidden wife in the attic and attempted bigamy, Brontë’s novel was accused of fostering rebellion and being unchristian.
Wuthering Heights is now showing in UK cinemas.
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