I’m a former teenage girl: mess with Wuthering Heights and you mess with me

You think I’m reviewing the movie a week late – but I’m also reviewing the book 178 years late. No real spoilers, I promise.

Teenagers feel stuff acutely, especially girls.

I remember reading Wuthering Heights on a train. In my 17-year-old mind, this heightened the romanticism – even though the train was just the Southerner, chugging unromantically from Invercargill to Christchurch. The trip was quiet enough that there was no one sitting beside me, so I stretched my legs as best I could across two seats, laid the book on my knees and hunched over it.

When I got to the bit where the first Catherine dies, I hoped no one could see my feeling. Back then, and still today, teenage girls could be seen as dramatic or silly, and I didn’t want to prove the point. I pulled my hair over my face to hide my crying, as I sometimes still do.

Despite being a rubbish reader, I was wholly absorbed by Wuthering Heights – and it’s the only book I’ve come back to a bunch of times. My re-reads have followed a pretty common trajectory.

Teenage me: That was kind of hot.

Twenties me: Actually, that was messed up.

Thirties me: OK, a bit of column A, a bit of column B.

Forties me: Oh, I think I get it now. That was masterful.

I'll probably keep re-reading in decades to come, seeing new things. Somewhere or other, I still have the cheap, raggedy, much-loved paperback edition I held on the train so long ago.

I knew that going to the movie was a bad idea. I went anyway.

I don’t mind creative adaptations of the classics, or when the images on screen don’t fit with the ones in my head. And I don’t mind sexy people just going around being sexy for no reason: I thank them for their service. But the movie stripped out some of the stuff that meant a lot to teenage girl me, even if she hadn’t fully figured it out yet.

I’m not a literary critic. I mean, there’s so much in this world to criticise, and most of it takes less effort than books. But I want to tell you, even if it’s a bit dramatic and silly, why I think no movie should mess with Wuthering Heights.  

The book has clever storytelling – which is why movies don’t seem to work

Without getting too technical, you’ll remember Wuthering Heights is actually told by a narrator, Mr Lockwood. I think Lockwood’s character is genius. He splains. He makes it about himself. He gets man flu and will not shut up about it. It’s just so clever. Wuthering Heights doesn’t need Lockwood to make the story work, but Emily Brontë chucked him in anyway, creating this low-grade annoyance of a guy everyone still recognises, especially women. Today’s Lockwood is thin-skinned Jeff who sulks when the work meeting starts with karakia, because no one cares about his rights, then leaves his dirty mug in the sink afterwards, for someone else to put in the dishwasher.

When Lockwood narrates, he’s actually retelling stories from Nelly. She, of course, is the housekeeper for the families at the centre of the book, and she’s seen everybody’s dirty laundry. By the time she talks with Lockwood, she’s getting on in years, and she’s reflecting.

Nelly’s a good person, more or less, but also knows she can be judgy, gossipy, a little bit righteous. She feels bad later, but the urge still gets the better of her. She’s important to me because there’s a little bit of Nelly in all of us. We know we shouldn’t bitch about Jeff, but God, he’s such a dick.

There’s no Lockwood in the movie, and Nelly’s not really a three-dimensional character. Bang – stuff that resonated with (ex)teenage girl me is gone straight away.

Race and class really matter, and if you tutu with that you change the story

OK, this debate is super interesting.

In the book, Heathcliff is dark-skinned. We don’t know his ethnicity, because we don’t know his family: Mr Earnshaw, Catherine’s father, rescued Heathcliff as a boy from the streets of Liverpool. When I first read the book, I thought Heathcliff’s skin colour was another way to signal he was an outsider. This isn’t very nice, for sure – but books often use physical traits (like race or disability) as a crude way to make hints about the moral value or status of characters.

More recent researchers into Wuthering Heights think something different. Liverpool was a major slave-trading port, so it’s quite possible Heathcliff was of African descent. In fact, he might have been fathered by a wealthy white man who forced himself on an enslaved woman – a man like Mr Earnshaw, even. Emily Brontë lived not far from a notorious family of slave-owners and she knew about current events, including the fight for abolition. In writing Heathcliff’s backstory, she trickily left a bunch of questions open.  

Casting Jacob Elordi, a white guy, as Heathcliff, takes a person of colour out of the story – but it also stops Emily Brontë playing her trick on us. It seems to offer women viewers eye candy instead of food for thought. Truly, we can handle both.

Catherine and Heathcliff don’t shag in the book, and that’s important

I’m not being precious here, I promise. Historical smut is the best smut: change my mind. I just don’t think it had a place in the Wuthering Heights movie.

As a teenage reader, I couldn’t figure out the relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff. I assumed they were meant to hook up – realistically too much to expect from a book assigned by my Catholic school – but page-turn after page-turn left me disappointed.

More importantly, I was confused. The traditional script in my head told me a man and a woman with intense feelings for each other have sex, or at least want to – and unless their romance somehow turns to tragedy, Romeo and Juliet style, then happy-ever-after should follow, right?

People still debate whether Heathcliff is a romantic hero or monster, a good guy or bad guy. I don’t think that’s the right question.

The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff is sexual in some kind of way, for sure, but it’s more nuanced than the movie’s cringy, blunt links between sex and violence. Looking at it as an adult woman, it’s still kind of hot, but self-involved and self-defeating, traumatised and screwed up and addictive. These two people are the same person. The ambiguity is the point.

Again, I don’t know how Emily Brontë nailed this so exactly that almost two centuries on, it still hits you right between the eyes. A woman who picked up Wuthering Heights for the first time today would start out patiently waiting for Catherine and Heathcliff’s wedding, and finish with a large glass of wine in hand, wondering if she should delete her dating apps.

Isabella is an abuse victim, plain and simple – and there’s nothing erotic about it

This is where the movie lost me. Beware: there’s the mildest of spoilers here.

In the book, Isabella is a naïve teenage girl who makes a mistake. She’s not stupid, although she’s never quite given the chance to be smart – and she doesn’t yet know her mind, although she’s headstrong enough to get herself in trouble. She’s dramatic and silly, at least in the eyes of Catherine, who warns Isabella her youthful crush is a dangerous man, then cuts the teenager loose almost vindictively when she refuses to listen.

If Heathcliff’s relationship with Catherine is ambiguous in the book, his marriage to Isabella is as clearcut as it gets. Isabella delivers herself into the hands of an abuser. She is a means to an end, an object caught up in a stoush between men. She doesn’t get to tell her own story: her physical injuries tell it for her. In the movie, by contrast, Heathcliff negotiates consent with a sex-obsessed Isabella. He explains exactly how he plans to treat her and she willingly signs up. Does this plot change matter?

I think it does. It’s not that the erotic story is necessarily a bad one – it’s been told a bunch of times, most notably through Fifty Shades of Grey, and enjoyed by a lot of women. But it’s a different story. This blurring between love and abuse bothers me, because it’s not a theoretical problem for young women, even today.

Back in 2024, I wrote a piece called Consent, intent about the rough sex defence. Evidence from Aotearoa was scarce, so I looked internationally. To quote what I said back then:

In 2019, the BBC commissioned research into the rough sex experiences of over 2000 women aged 18-39. The women were asked if they’d ever experienced slapping, choking, gagging or spitting during consensual sex. If they said yes, they were asked ‘How often did you feel pressured into it?’. The women answered:

• Every time (8%)
• Most times (12%)
• Sometimes (22%)
• Never (56%)
• Prefer not to say (2%)

Of all the women in the research who’d had rough sex, whether they wanted to or not, 20% said they’d been left upset or frightened.

In short, blurring the line between consent and abuse has real life consequences.

As a teenager, it was easy to read Isabella as dramatic and silly, even while feeling sorry for her. I don’t see her that way anymore.

Because you know an Isabella, like I do. She’s the girl who got drunk at the party or walked home alone, but it was the judgement after – she kind of asked for it – that ultimately hurt her more. She’s the one who’s still with that creepy guy, and you get so frustrated you sometimes want to shake her, but you know her reasons are emotional and complex and deep.  

She’s your friend or your cousin or a girl you went to school with. Maybe she was you. Her story’s as relevant as ever – and until it’s not, it deserves to be told as it is.

I wish I could’ve taken Emily Brontë along with me to the theatre, shared my popcorn with her in the dark, asked her what she reckons.

In 1847, when Wuthering Heights came out, many critics were horrified or outright disgusted. Everything about this book seemed messed up, in its cruelty, its sexuality – this story without a moral that left no one a better person, neither characters nor readers. It was published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, so people assumed it was written by a man. Three years after publication, when readers found out Ellis Bell was really a woman, it could only have been more shocking.

By then, Emily Brontë was dead. A year after Wuthering Heights she succumbed to tuberculosis, a painful illness that had slowly destroyed her as she wrote. She was only thirty. She must have worked on her novel for years before her death – starting when she was not much more than a teenage girl, dramatic and silly.

No one knows what made Emily Brontë audacious enough to write like she did, or how she felt as her critics disparaged her work. There must have been a streak of defiance about her, this young woman in a man’s age who never lived to feel the respect she was owed, a prodigy trapped inside a tragedy.

I hesitate, just a teeny bit, when others recreate what cost her so much to create.   

One ex-teenage girl to another, I feel like I owe her that much.

References

There are vast amounts of writing on Wuthering Heights, but a recent article in The Conversation, about Heathcliff’s ancestry and a possible connection to slavery, is here.

Some commentary on Emily Brontë’s life and writing is here.

My own piece from 2024, Consent, intent, is here.