Period, the podcast
A podcast about all things Period...period adaptations that is.
Period, the podcast
Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights"
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Emily Brontë's wild and strange novel, Wuthering Heights, is widely considered a classic in English literature. This week, we explore the latest, controversial adaptation of the novel, 2026's "Wuthering Heights" directed by British filmmaker, Emerald Fennell.
Together with Victorian literature professor Catherine Robson, we dive into what we think the film got right, what's missing (spoiler: a lot), and whether it's even possible to adapt Brontë's complex masterpiece.
Welcome to period. I'm host Allison Thowett de Castillo, and in each episode, we'll see how an adaptation holds up against the original work, what was preserved, what was changed, and what those choices reveal about the time then and the time now. On this episode, we're gonna talk about the one, the only, the totally crazy Wuthering Heights. You may have heard something about it recently, as it is everywhere. We're gonna discuss the Victorian novel as well as the 2026 film adaptation by director Emerald Fennel and starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Alordi. Our guest today is Catherine Robson, a professor of Victorian literature at New York University, currently at their London site. Welcome to period, Catherine.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Allison. Nice to be here.
SPEAKER_00Now, you are uniquely qualified to talk about Wuthering Heights, not only because of your expertise, but your personal connection to the story. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_01Well, um, I'm actually named after Catherine Earn Shaw. There's always a lot of Catherines in English departments, but um the day I was born, a neighbour came down with a cake that said, Welcome Catherine Mary. And my mum said to her, I hadn't actually decided on the name yet. And she's the neighbour said, But you love Wuthering Heights so much, I'm sure you said you were going to call your baby daughter if you had one after Catherine. So I had that early connection, and then when I was eight, my family moved from London up to West Yorkshire, and I grew up in Huddersfield, which is about 10 to 15 miles away from Howarth, where the Bronte Parsonage is. So her landscape was very much my landscape, many trips there, both with my family and with the school. And I feel a real tie not just to this book, but to all of the Bronte's and to that particular place and how that one parsonage created such amazing resonant literature that still thrills people today.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely. Well, we should probably start there. To catch our listeners up, to anyone who has somehow missed the recent Wuthering Heights Mania, here's a quick history on the story. Emily Bronte started writing the novel in 1845. She was one of the three famous Bronte sisters, Emily, Anne, and Charlotte, and they were all three authors. They lived in the English village of Haworth in Yorkshire. And Emily was only 27 years old when she started writing Wuthering Heights. It's her only novel, and it centers on a young woman, Catherine Earnshaw, your namesake, and a man named Heathcliff. Hello, this is Alison, interrupting myself to give you a Cliff Notes version of Wuthering Heights the novel before Catherine and I dive into how the film interprets it. Wuthering Heights follows the perspective of a man named Lockwood, who has come to Yorkshire to rent a home. He arrives on a blustery snowy night to Wuthering Heights, the home of his landlord named Heathcliff. Lockwood stays the night and has an unpleasant encounter with the ghost of Kathy as a child that essentially tries to crawl in through the window. Terrified, he goes to Nellie, the older housekeeper who unfurls the infamous story of Kathy and Heathcliff. Basically, when she was a child, Kathy's dad, Mr. Earnshaw, brings a strange boy, Heathcliff, home one day as a sort of adoptive son. Kathy's brother Henley is mad about this. Kathy and Heathcliff become friends, running amok on the moors. Later on, Mr. Earnshaw dies, and Henley takes control of the house and finances and reduces Heathcliff to a servant of sorts, alongside Nellie and another servant, Joseph. As they get older, Kathy catches the eye of their rich neighbor, Edgar Linton of Thrushcross Grange. She tells Nellie she's going to marry Linton. Heathcliff overhears this and then runs away. Kathy gets married and moves in with Linton and his sister Isabella. Heathcliff returns years later, strangely rich, creates chaos, and then runs off with Isabella to make the now pregnant Kathy jealous. Kathy then dies in childbirth. This is the end of part one, the only half of the novel that the movie adapts. But part two of the novel continues Heathcliff's revenge on the next generation, his son with Isabella named Linton, Kathy's daughter, named Kathy, and Henley's son named Heriton. A lot unfolds in part two, centering on how generational trauma plays out among the children of Kathy, Heathcliff, and Heriton. So that's the plot summary done. Now we can return to the podcast and hear from Catherine about her thoughts on Wuthering Heights.
SPEAKER_01It's an incredibly rich reading experience. It's put into a really rock solid box and how Emily Bronte at that young age created this complicated double narration system that made put such energy and violence inside it. How she did it, Lord only knows.
SPEAKER_00It is really an amazing book. I've read it a few times myself and had the luxury of learning about it more in college, and there's so much I want to delve into here. But first, for some of those who haven't read Wuthering Heights and you teach so many students about it, what is sort of your elevator pitch of how you describe the book?
SPEAKER_01Um, I think it is completely one on its own. Um, I teach Victorian novels all the time, the other works by uh the Brontes, by uh Charlotte and Anne. I teach Dickens, I teach Hardy, I teach George Elliot, and I love many of them tremendously. Um, but in some ways they are safer. This is the most dangerous Victorian novel you will read. There is so much violence, passion, anger, and cruelty inside it. It's just not like any other book.
SPEAKER_00I would agree with that. I always tell my friends, Wuthering Heights is like the original train wreck. It's like the Victorian version of reality television. It was crazy when it came out.
SPEAKER_01You cannot believe how nasty these people are to each other. And the fact that it has this sort of reputation as one of the great romances. You think, have you read the book? Um there's biting, there's scratching, there's kicking. Um, you know, Kathy and Heathgift cling on to each other sort of like two animals. Um it's it's passionate, but like not passion in a Valentine's Day, red roses and um hearts and flowers sort of way. It is elemental passion.
SPEAKER_00And well, it's it's funny that you say that because the movie came out around Valentine's Day and was touted as the greatest romance of all time. And before we get into all of the details of the film, what did you think of this new version overall? Um, shall I be diplomatic or shall I be honest?
SPEAKER_01Put it out there, Catherine. Um, well, I'm really glad that, as you've probably noticed, book sales are sky high. As we've been saying, it's not an easy read, but you know, more people will get to this novel because of this film. I was sort of um transfixed by the film. I kept thinking, what does this remind me of? I did, I did watch the film Crimson Peak recently. I thought, oh yeah, that's that's the visual style there. But more than anything else, I thought it's like one of those perfume ads at Christmas with, you know, Natalie Portman running along with you know lots of silk billowing behind her, and it looks like an advert. And then I realized, well, it's commercial. People, um, it's got a certain style that is like in three-minute videos or adverts. Um it's sort of incoherent, I think. There is certainly a lot to say about the visual style of it. I know a lot of people have been commenting on the costumes. Certainly, Fanel has decided not to be historically accurate. There's sort of it looks kind of like plasticky or sort of cellophane. Um so she's doing something with those fabrics, which I think are a kind of clue for us. She has said, I think, in interviews, that this is my 14-year-old fever dream. This is what I, when I saw Jacob Belordy, you know, and obviously he was in Saltburn as well, that's how I imagined how Heathcliff looked when I was 14. You can see that it's the thrill of a 14 or even a preteen girl. The if you remember the dress that Kathy is wearing when she's still at Wodering Heights, it's kind of Disney princess. It's a bit like the snow white dress with that kind of red and the white bonnet, uh, the bodice and so forth. So, yes, it's it's about, you know, passion and sex and desire, but there's so many things that the novel does that it doesn't do. Um, I didn't hate it. I was sort of as I say, I was sort of transfixed by it. Um It was hard to look away from. Yeah, and like those eggs, those broken eggs that come up in that sort of viscous. We're gonna get to all of that. Yeah. So what did you think? What were you transfixed?
SPEAKER_00You know, I I think the moment I saw the images from the film and then the trailer, I was just like, oh, these are just two separate things. This is Emerald Finel's fever dream of what Wuthering Heights is. It's not the book. And I'm just gonna go into it, just kind of enjoying it and giving myself that freedom. You know, I think one of the traps we always run into as readers is that we read this book, we envision it a certain way, we absolutely love it, and then anyone else's interpretation is wrong. So in a in a certain way, I kind of enjoyed that she just threw the guidebook out the window and was like, I'm doing whatever I want with this. Because to me, that just said, oh, this is very loosely inspired by the story of Wuthering Heights, but this is not Wuthering Heights. So it, you know, it it is always hard when you're seeing a version that you you have differently in your head. But it's also kind of fun to see someone else's interpretation, especially one as just visually insane as this.
SPEAKER_01Bonkers, absolutely bonkers, and you also that sort of get out by putting the scare quotes round Wuthering Heights as if to signal this isn't Wuthering Heights, this is Wuthering Heights, you know. Um, so there is some admission of that.
SPEAKER_00Well, we know there's a lot of differences between the movie and the book that we're gonna go to. So I thought we'd start with the shorter list first of um what was similar to the book. Um they kept some names, um, they changed some characters. We'll talk about that in a bit, but there were some direct lines. Um, that's kind of where my list ended. So I wondered if you had anything to add about what was similar to the book.
SPEAKER_01Well, I think she does take one very true thing about Kathy's feelings for Heathcliff and Heathcliff's feelings for Kathy, that it is this not exactly pleasurable but really intense obsession. And I like it that she didn't try to make Kathy likable or relatable. You know, this is one of the things that people who don't like the novel say, oh, there were no relatable characters. Emily Bronte doesn't care a fig whether you like or relate. She that is not her project. She's wanting to show power and uh passion. And I thought the the movie was honest about that. The Margot Robbie version of Kathy, she's not a particularly lovely person. She looks beautiful, but that is true to the novel, that it is not about a loving kindness and what would be best for my partner. None of that stuff is there in the novel.
SPEAKER_00It's like not so sweet and empathetic.
SPEAKER_01Not in the least, no.
SPEAKER_00You know, I want to talk about Emily Bronte for a little bit here because she obviously is the powerhouse behind all of this. Without her, we wouldn't be talking about this. Um, so can you give us a quick lesson on Emily and where she was sort of situated in the Bronte family in general? Can you tell us a little bit about that sort of family relationship?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think it's important to start with. There were six children, and the two oldest, Mariah and Elizabeth, died very early on. Their mother had already died. The uh the four oldest girls, Mariah, Elizabeth, Charlotte, and Emily, went away to a school at a place called Cowan Bridge. And anyone who has known has read Jane Eyre, um, Charlotte's most famous novel, will know that that school gets represented in this awful institution, Low Wood. So after Mariah and Elizabeth die, Charlotte and Emily are brought home, but they've, you know, they've gone through such awful losses at such an early age. But once they're home, they're home with their brother Branwell and their little sister Anne. The father is there, but it is a house without their mother, it's a house without their two apparently brilliant and wonderful older sisters. But the four remaining children develop this intense creative life. The little boy, Branwell, is given a set of wooden toy soldiers, and they start to write a whole series of little stories about these soldiers' adventures. And there's two different kingdoms, and there's all these kind of fantastical uh events that happen in which the toy soldiers are heroes and amazing things, non-realistic things happen. So they've got a kind of early training in writing, but the time comes where they realize they need to make some money, they they try at going out, the girls going out to um be um governesses to live in a you know, it's really not very nice teaching position in other people's homes. You've got a very uncertain status. Are you a member of the family? Are you a servant? Agnes Grey by Anne Bronte is about that. Absolutely, as as is Jane Eyre. Um but so they they they hate being away from home, this uh their parsonage in this very exposed little hill town in West Yorkshire. And so they come up with the idea of starting a school, and they think, ah, we need to get our French better if we are going to you know advertise this as a school for young ladies with extras like foreign languages. And so Charlotte and Emily go off to Belgium, and this is something that's often missed out in the you know, what is kind of called the Bronte myth. It's like, oh, Emily never went anywhere, and all she did was walk on the moors with her dogs. And but you know, she goes to she goes to Brussels, she hates it, her sister loves it, but Emily is horribly homesick, she stops eating, comes back, and they then decide maybe that school idea wasn't gonna work, let's make money with our pens. And they have poems, they self-publish them under pseudonyms which are kind of not exactly male, not exactly female, Cora Bell, Ellis Bell, and Acton Bell, and then they start writing prose fiction as well. And Charlotte writes a novel about um um the experience in the boarding school in in Brussels. Emily is writing Wuthering Heights, her sister is writing Agnes Grey. They get sent out the latter two ones, they don't find a publisher, but then when uh Charlotte writes her second book, Jane Eyre, it's a huge success. And um at that point, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey are brought out two volumes of Wuthering Heights and one volume of Agnes Grey. But by this point, Charlotte is the only one of the siblings who is still alive. Um, both Emily and Anne have died probably of tuberculosis. The brother Branwell, really sad life story here, awful series of failures, affairs with the married woman where he was trying to be a tutor in a house, um, tries to go to London to be a successful painter, is addicted to alcohol and opium and dies a horrible, raving death. So by the time Wuthering Heights comes out, um Charlotte is the only one. The reception is what is this wild, crazy novel? Is it an earlier something from the wonderfully successful writer Jane Eyre? Is it perhaps something she wrote earlier? So there's a lot of confusion about you know who these um pseudonymous people, uh, Cara Bell and Ellis Bell were. And that's why Charlotte writes um a couple of really useful prefaces to later editions which um give a kind of biographical note to explain. But she doesn't entirely tell the truth about her sister. I am I always believe in this life there are Charlotte people and Emily people, there are Jane Eyre people and Wuthering Heights people, and you can probably guess which camp I'm in. I can't stand Charlotte, I can't stand Jane Eyre. Um, I teach it all the time because I'm really impressed by it. It's again, it's a novel of huge power, but it has nothing of the genius in my mind that Wuthering Heights has. And when Charlotte describes it in that biographical notice, she doesn't really get it. She tries to tame it down a bit. There is something that I think tidy minds don't like about Wuthering Heights. It's it's too dangerous.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. And Charlotte Bronte later kind of stopped republication of Wuthering Heights too, right? I feel like if Big Sister Charlotte didn't like Emily's Wuthering Heights, she would have hated Emerald Finel's version of it. I I feel like half the audience went and saw this film because they love Wuthering Heights, and the other half saw it for the sex. So you you talked a little bit about it, the egg thing. We see it, we hear it, we hear what sounds like sex but isn't, such as the opening scene. Um, tell me a little bit about that and why you think the director focused so much on titillation, for lack of a better word. And for those who haven't read the book, Kathy and Heathcliff do not have sex in the original text at any point. So tell us a little bit more, Catherine.
SPEAKER_01Well, I'm so glad you've brought that opening scene up. I think I was trying to repress it, but Emerald Fennel, for reasons of her own, decides to invent a whole scene of her own that has no bearing, there's no um appearance of this in uh Bronte's novel whatsoever. She starts at a public hanging, an execution. There are plenty of public hangings in other novels, uh, in Dickens, in Hardy, but I kind of think it's in there to sort of signal something. And, you know, it is a sad but I think true fact that when men are hanged, they often have an erection. And this is pointed out at the beginning of the film, um, in case we are not quick enough to notice this. There is a slight sort of plot reason that Fennell has to have it there that when Heathcliff comes back after that absence, um, and then she hears, oh, there's going to be a hanging, you can see that the Margot Robbie character is thinking, Oh, I hope it isn't it isn't Heathcliff is going to be hanged. But this has got nothing to do with the novel, but it I suppose it does send a certain sort of signal at the beginning. Um you said a moment ago that um Charlotte Bronte might have hated the film. Charlotte, the sexuality in Jane Eyre is sort of more straightforward and it is, you know, um Jane Eyre is hot and heavy. I mean, Jane really desires Mr. Rochester. There's a moment when, you know, the uh the first Mrs. Rochester, who's that mad woman kept upstairs in the in the mansion, comes down and sets fire to Mr. Rochester's bed, and Jane rushes in and you know, throws water on it. And you know, you say to students, Hmm, the bed is on fire here, and then it's a really wet bed at the end. What you think's going on here? So, in a way, the outright sexuality or that viscous um eggy mess is. It's kind of more in the Charlotte place. Interesting.
SPEAKER_00I never would have thought it that way.
SPEAKER_01There's no genital, there's you know, obviously you could say, well, of course there's no genital sexuality in Victorian novels. The sort of the standards of the day wouldn't allow that kind of representation. But you know, if you know how to read sort of coded text, and I think you know everyone's good at doing that, we know when you know something's being signified by other means.
SPEAKER_00Um, this wasn't coded so much as just explicit in the movie.
SPEAKER_01It's explicit in the movie, but this the sexuality that is in Emily's novel is much more sort of pre-puberty, and there's no evidence of Emily having romantic feelings for anyone in her life, whereas there's lots of evidence that Charlotte did. Charlotte does marry, and she does, unfortunately, she is pregnant when she dies. She is dead before her father as well, and um, so this is this is not a great story of long lifespans here. But the sexuality of the novel of Wuthering Heights is more like 12-year-olds wrestling, and so that has led some critics to sort of think about Emily's relationship with Branwell. One of the things that is clear in both the novel and the film is it's kind of a sibling relationship. Um, Kathy and Heathcliff grow up grow up in the same house, and so there's something a bit too close about their closeness, and there are different ways to sort of follow that idea of maybe he is a sort of half-brother, but adult sexuality, it's it's not in Emily's novel, it is in Fennel's film. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00It felt almost when reading it, it's well, and you know, Kathy says it like talking about their souls, it it feels more of an ethereal love, something sort of deeper than just the sexuality that we saw on screen with this film version. And I didn't feel that that came across as strongly as in the book or other adaptations I've seen of how tied they are.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it as you say, it is it is a merging of identities rather than physical consummation. And the scene that, you know, is in Fennel's movie, but this is the one in the novel that people go to, the moment when Kathy is 16, she has met Edgar Linton, who's much more of a gentleman, well, Heathcliff isn't a gentleman at all. Um, and Kathy has just had a proposal from Edgar, and she's talking to Nellie in the kitchen, and um she kind of wants to talk through her different feelings for these two young men in her life, and she utters one sentence which is it would degrade me to marry Heathcliff. And what we see both in the novel and the movie is that um Heathcliff hears this sentence. He's kind of sitting in a different part of the kitchen and where she can't see, and um, that's he leaves then. That's when he leaves, he goes away for three years. But had he stayed, had he been there longer, he would have heard Kathy say, Nellie, I am Heathcliff. And that is a really strange um sentence, and yet I think people who've been in love often think, Yes, that person is me. Um, I cannot see where he or she ends and I begin. But it is such an amazing sentence in this novel. Um, particularly, and shall we are we gonna go to race now? Should we talk about that?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that that was my next question. I mean, one big critique in this film is the casting. Jacob Lordy is cast as Heathcliff. He is a presenting as a white man, and yet Heathcliff, we know from the book, is talked about in a very othering way. We know that he is described as dark, um, of different origins many different times. Uh, you brought up he's speaking a different language. Um, why is this such a focal point? And what do you think of the casting for this character in particular?
SPEAKER_01I think it connects in an interesting way to something you said earlier about when we read, we individually have the opportunity to visualize, to make a character look the way we think we're learning from these different clues in the novel. Obviously, when someone has made a casting decision, it's one person. And in this particular instance, it's Jacob Belordi. He has got dark hair, he's Australian, but he's of Basque heritage. Um but the novel refuses to tie down Heathcliff to any one particular ethnic origin. But the one thing you can say is that he's not like all the other people who live in these two Yorkshire houses. Um when Mr. Earnshaw brings him home from Liverpool, it's very important to say this is a port city. Um, and as you mentioned, uh this little boy, this six, seven-year-old, is speaking a different language. He is not the same as the indigenous people of these this this Yorkshire, uh, this Yorkshire village. But what Bronte does that is so amazing is she gives you too many possibilities of what he might be. Um the first time Mr. Lockwood, the the posh tenant, sees him, he describes him, quote, as a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect in aspect. Um this emphasis on the darkness of his skin comes up again and again. Um the he's described as possibly being Alaska, which is an Indian sailor, um, or possibly an American or Spanish castaway. This has led critics to think about this, um, you know, and think about what what are plausible identities? And because, as I say, Liverpool is a port city, could he be of African heritage? It was a slave port, like all the ports on the uh the west coast of Britain um in the time that's being written about. Could he be Irish? Um, could the darkness be uh an Irish figure here who were kind of described in more racialized terms in uh this this time and seeing as not being Anglo-Saxon and blonde and blue-eyed and and so forth. But the the single most important point is that Heathcliff is different from these people, and so when Kathy says, I am Heathcliff, that's a really interesting moment. But Panell's up to a game of her own. She makes a decision to make Edgar Linton, it's a uh British actor of Pakistani descent. She chooses a Thai actress for Nelly, so the whole racial mix is going on in a very different way, and so the the kind of points that Emily Bronte is making about sameness and difference don't apply across the the canvas of Finel's movie.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, it sort of removes the racial otherness from Heathcliff's character as a focal point of tension, but then seems to add that to Edgar Linton, particularly to Nellie. Uh what do you think was behind changing all of that up?
SPEAKER_01You kind of wonder whether it was a sort of um, I think when she saw Jacob Alordy for Saltburn, thought this is my Heathcliff, you know, she would have known you're gonna get pushback for choosing um a white actor. So she has made um the decision to cast people of colour in two roles who clearly are white in the novel. So I thought the actress um who plays Nellie was fantastic, and it was interesting that not only was her race changed, but her sort of class position is changed. Nellie is, you know, a Yorkshire rustic working class servant in the novel, and here we get a sort of companion. Um, she is, you know, the her clothing is quite elevated, and she's quite a sort of tricky character. And as she is in the novel, she is manipulative and um clearly plays favorites and hides bits of information in in both versions. But I think we feel the precarity of her position, don't we, in in the film?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I want to talk about Nellie a little bit more, and I want to talk about the changes of the characters from book to film. Some characters are just left out, such as the brother. He seems to be sort of absorbed in the father character. Joseph is made a young man, and and then Nellie is way more visible, uh, way more audible, and is sort of turned into a villain in the in the film version.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, those are all very interesting moves. And to take out Hindley and put all the kind of villainy just into the father figure, um, it doesn't allow, you know, some of the patterns that uh Bronte has are so clear that she wants to have um uh a kind of oppressed male and female with an older male oppressor um in both the first generation and the second generation stories. But I mean the you mentioned the Jay the Joseph thing. That I could never have imagined from my knowledge of the novel that I would see Joseph having sex. Remember the role that plays? I mean, he is this really grumpy old um family retainer, and students always hate him because it is so hard to decipher his Yorkshire accent.
SPEAKER_00Um which is written out phonetically in the book, and what everybody talks about as like why they put it down, because it's so hard to get through.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, as I say, I'm from this part of the world and it's hard for me, and I, you know, I try and read it out with my my best working-class Yorkshire accent, but it foxes me as well. But suddenly, you know, the fact that it's used to stir Kathy's desires, the fact that Joseph is getting it on with a servant maid. I never I did not see that one coming. Um the the deviousness of Nellie, um the thing is she is hugely present in the novel because she's the main narrator. Um, what I one of the things I love about it in that it's thinking so much about gender and power. You know, in a sort of standard power structure, Mr. Lockwood, the gentleman with money, who is the master, who is renting the house, should be, you know, at the top of the hierarchy. But he actually gets turned into Nellie's servant in a way. Nellie is his housekeeper, but because she's she is telling the whole story of what happened in Bosring Heights to him. He gets, he's the secretary, he's writing down her words, and so that's one of the very clever flips. So Nellie is everywhere in uh the novel. We don't learn, you know, we hardly learn anything other than what comes through her. So we get a bit of Lockwood's perspective, we get an amazing moment in chapter three where we get direct access to Kathy's um diary when she's 12. And so that's the only place you hear her direct voice. Everything else is told to us by Nellie. And Nellie has an agenda. Nellie, the person Nellie loves is Hindley. Um, it's a kind of mirroring of the Kathy and Heathcliff relationship. Obviously, you're not going to get any of this in the film because the film decides not to have the second generation story. It doesn't, you know, it die, ends with um a horrible leech-covered death and septicemia of poor Margot Robbie. I thought that was interesting that um uh Edgar actually says, it is septicemia, as if the audience need to be told what she's dying from. That was a strange moment.
SPEAKER_00It was an interesting choice to, you know, it just fully lops off, it makes no possibility of a second generation because there is no Hinley, so there is no Harriton. Kathy dies of a miscarriage instead of dying from childbirth. And then we never see Heathcliff's son. And so it it not only doesn't follow the second half of the book, it makes it impossible for it to exist and sort of ends. I mean, I I guess it's a question of does that end Heathcliff's I guess vengeance? Because in the book, he's got a whole other generation to mess with, but in the film version, it's just kind of cut off, and everybody is just kind of left to their own devices after Kathy dies.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think there's a lot going on in what you've you've just said about what it means to lop off the second generation. It means the really kind of profound thinking that the novel does about um inheritance, about revenge, about how a brutalized childhood, such as the childhood that Heathcliff has, will create this vengeful person who will then punish young people who kind of look like how he and Kathy looked. You don't get any of that. But it also means that the ways in which Rond is thinking about history and how historical change happens, none of that can migrate into Fennel's film. I mean, I thought, you know, the the death scene of uh Kathy with the Margot Robbie Cathy is, you know, it's sort of visually interesting and gross, and you know, all those kind of the black bits and then all the blood from the miscarriage, it makes a sort of gothic horror visual image. But what is so clever about having the two-generation story in the novel is you see how Heathcliff changes the system. He comes into a kind of closed system where you've got the yeoman family of the rougher farming folk, the Urnshaws at Wuthering Heights, and you've got the more genteel, gentry household of the Lintons Thrushcross Grange. Kathy wants two things, really. She wants to be with the um uh the rough diamond of Heathcliff, but she also wants the big house. She wants financial security, she wants position. What happens is Kathy One doesn't get it, but her daughter gets it. She gets everything that her mother wanted, but it takes this two-generation cycle to get there. And I'm always transfixed by this lovely detail at the beginning that when Nellie starts to tell the story to Lockwood, she said, Well, Mr. Earnshaw had gone off to Liverpool and he was going to bring back a violin for Hindley and a whip for Kathy. This is what they'd asked for, and he was going to bring a pocket full of apples and pears for me. In the, as it turns out, all he brings back is this dirty little neglected child who can't speak English. And uh Hindley cries because the violin's been crushed and he's lost the whip. But there is a way to read what Mr. Earnshaw has brought back is Kathy's whip. He whips that system, he punishes everybody. Um, and so it allows Kathy to get what she wants. Uh, but I say it's the second Kathy. Um, but there's no trace of Heathcliff by the end of the novel. Yes, there's a ghostly trace, but his one biological offspring, Lyndon Heathcliff, has died. And you've once again you've only got Earnshaw's and Linton's, but now the two houses are going to be um allied through the upcoming marriage of Hairton and Kathy too. So there's something about that revolutionary vengeful spirit that is bursts into the system in the personage of Heathcliff. Um I think Emily Bronte sees that as a kind of makes it a kind of allegory of historical change, but she makes the point that those that enact the violence are not always the people who reap the rewards. Um, so Heathcliff is written out of the system and the old families get everything.
SPEAKER_00It's a very Victorian trope, right? Repetition with a change and sort of that new generation bringing the healing. Um, I'm curious. It just strikes me that I should ask the question when people ask, is this a romance, or think this book is a romance, what do you say?
SPEAKER_01No, I mean, I would say it's a reflection on power and violence and how systems change. And I think, I mean, I love the title, Wuthering Heights. There's so much in this novel about the power of the elements. Um, you know, we remember even though we actually get very little of the moors and the weather, we remember that because it's such a powerful image. But how do you show a force like the wind? You can only show how strong the wind is by the effect it has on trees or roofs. There's something about the power of this novel. It's talking about how do we understand these powerful impulses within people. We can only show it affecting things in the world. So it's you can only grasp power by looking at what power alters. And that is what I think is so remarkable about the novel. It's not really about character, I think. Um you've got if you have repetition, character sort of disappears because you are kind of, as you say, you're seeing um, you know, systems repeat themselves but with changes. It's not about defined identities, it breaks down that. You know, if you have a 16-year-old girl saying, I am Heathcliff, you're showing that identity is porous, that it's a construct. But these are complicated ideas, and it's very hard to put that into a commercial film. And so Fennel goes for other things like visually shocking images. Um when I looked at how my Yorkshire Moors are represented, I thought, what is she? She CGI'd the heck out of this. It is more Game of Thrones than it is the Moors.
SPEAKER_00Everything is very exaggerated. The clothing, the locations, the homes. You mentioned Crimson Peak earlier. It's it's a very which is directed by Guillermo del Toro. It's a uh very similar play on colour and drama and um the intense physical locations. It's it's certainly different from what were shown in the book, which is just kind of this old drafty house.
SPEAKER_01Miserable, muddy, cold, dirty place. So, I mean, the Crimson Peak, I mean I was I was sort of fascinated by it because you know what, you know, I thought, oh, Del Toro has taken he's done a kind of mashup of lots of Victorian tropes. I mean, it it's so Jane Eyre. It's like, oh, there are formal wives here. Should I look? You know, it's um and it's got a sort of Henry James Wings of the Dove plot as well. It's it's it's taking lots of things, but I kind of think hats off to him, he made up his own fake Victorian novel, and then he gives it this absolute over-the-top dark gothic horror to it, and brother and sister incest and all that kind of stuff. But the red and white, um you know, I think Fennel sat there and thought, I want me some of that. I'm gonna have red and white all over this night.
SPEAKER_00Especially in Kathy's death scene. Clothing, everything.
SPEAKER_01I was just gonna say, in um how the building of Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights should just be a long, low, miserable Yorkshire farmhouse. And instead it looks like the cross between a factory and an abattoir. And did I dream it? Or were there actually kind of white tiles with blood on them being hosed down at some point? It's like, what is this bizarre? It's not a farmhouse, is it? It's you know, and I didn't mind the sort of the factory chimneys. There actually would have been a fair amount of industry in this this uh this area, so that is not wrong. But the whole sort of Game of Thrones of these, you know, absolutely gothic landscapes, it's it's in another place, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Well, you mentioned this earlier that sales of the book have gone up. You know, the movie has been very well received, it was so popular in its first weekend, it made back all of its money. Memes are just crawling over social media, which has gobbled up the film. Why do you think people are so intrigued by Wuthering Heights?
SPEAKER_01I think it has name recognition, doesn't it? That people have, you know, they kind of have heard the name Wuthering Heights. There's this Kathy and Heathcliff thing, there's a Kate Bush song. Um, there have been many other adaptations, and it has come through to us as this sort of story of passionate doomed love on the romantic Yorkshire moors. There is a kind of um USP to that that lives, you know, has some connection to the novel, but it's really got its own power and structure now. It's it's a separate thing. And this film adds to that. It is novel adjacent, it is not actually the novel. Um, but you know, as I said, if more people read the novel, yay, that's a good thing.
SPEAKER_00Novel adjacent. Yeah, but there are so many different adaptations. If people don't like this one, you can check out the 1939 one with Lawrence Olivier, or 1979 with Timothy Dalton. There was another one in 1992, another one in 2011, another one in 2009. But that was a TV adaptation, which went a little bit longer. That's just to name a few. Do you have a version of Wuthering Heights outside of the book that you like or prefer or suggest to our audience?
SPEAKER_01Well, I kind of slightly said it already. I think Kate Bush's version. Yes, it's only a three-minute song, but it has it's interesting because I think, you know, the story is she was watching one of the TV adaptations. She didn't watch all of it, but she saw this amazing ghost scene at the beginning, which we don't get in the Fennel novel, and she wrote, you know, it's me or Kathy, I've come home. Um she, I remember, I think it was 78 and I was 16 at that point, and suddenly this sort of banshee with all this crazy dark hair is in a like a white nightgown, is on top of the pops, which was our kind of main um, you know, pop music uh TV show once a week, and she's doing cartwheels and she's singing this crazy song that is not like anything else in the charts at that point. I think she really captures something about the um the novel there, even though she hadn't read the novel at that point, there is something about the bonkers energy of it. Um it may sound as if I'm being silly, but I there is a Monty Python sketch, which is you know all of two minutes, but it is Wuthering Heights. I've seen it. It's so good, it's as never brought to you before in semaphore. And so Kathy and Heathcliff are standing on these different hilltops signalling to each other with with flags. It's Heathcliff, Heathcliff, my husband is coming. Oh no, Linton! And it's it's a hope, but it has something of the crazy wildness and the landscape. They actually went to you know round Howarth to film it, and I often show it to students because it's a quick way to say, This is Dedication. Dedication, and also, you know, the farmhouse that they use. That's what Wuthering Heights look like. Um, so it's a quick way for me to give some visual images.
SPEAKER_00What we can learn from Monty Python. You know, one can be. You know, I sincerely hope that Kathy and Heathcliff's ghosts are walking around singing Kate Bush's songs.
SPEAKER_01You know, that's what we can dream for those two characters. Well, there is something unearthly about it, isn't there? I mean, how did Kate Bush make that up?
SPEAKER_00Well, as we wrap up here, I wanted to ask if you had to sum it up, what is the message of the book compared to Emerald Finel's message from her film? Do you think it captured any kind of essence of the book?
SPEAKER_01I think Fennel is not bad an obsession. And even as I said that, isn't obsession the name of a perfume? Um she gets something about feeling so strongly that you just want what you want, and even though you can't have it, you want it. There is something about that that is good about the film, and there is a kind of craziness to it that I think go girl in a way. Um, but it doesn't make you think about so many, you know. What does it mean that there is this powerful relationship between an illegitimate dark-skinned boy, someone who has no access to power, and a woman, a young girl, somebody who also has no access to power? What does it mean he's only got one name? He hasn't got a surname. What does it mean that both Cathy's cycle through three different surnames? It's really attacking the um the fixed system that excludes some people from power and give power to others. So to me, that is a really interesting and complicated set of ideas put together in one novel, let alone the brilliance of its narrative technique, that she's made these incredibly skilled sort of Chinese boxes, and then out of this beautiful, beautifully exact structure, she makes wild power break out. I'm not getting that from Nell, but I am getting I am getting some kind of intensity. So maybe that's what I think.
SPEAKER_00It sounds like the film is sort of candy, yeah. And the book is sort of the meat and potatoes, and it's totally okay to just have the candy. I think. But maybe try the meat and potatoes too sometimes. Yeah. It's not- You know, we want to be entertained. We do it's certainly entertaining. There is a lot going on.
SPEAKER_01But it's not good for your teeth in the long run. Um, and sometimes you need a more nourishing meal, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So maybe, maybe we just need both, you know. We can love the candy, but let's every once in a while try some steak and potatoes too. I think that's go back to those original texts. That's not a bad place to go. Yeah. We've pointed out a long history of Wuthering Heights adaptations. We've gone into a lot of differences between the book and the films. But clearly we keep coming back to this story in particular. Why is it so endearing?
SPEAKER_01I think to my mind, even though I don't like Jane Eyre, how did that amazingly strong story, Anne Wothering Heights, burst out of these two unmarried women in a little Yorkshire village, no access to you know, London literary circles and so forth? How was it that they were able to create such resonant, powerful stories? It's it does say something about the human spirit, the human intellect, um, human emotion that two young women made these stories that continue to haunt us, that say something about passionate feelings, large-scale historical processes, Britain's relation with the rest of the world, all that stuff is in these stories. I still don't know how they did it. I also don't know how two such different stories came out of one little Victorian parsonage. Um, and I think when you read them, it's almost like they're red hot. There is such intensity and power in these penguin paperbacks or whatever you're reading, and they're still too hot to handle.
SPEAKER_00Too hot to handle. That's weathering heights in a nutshell. Well, thank you so much, Catherine, for coming on and talking to us about the book and the many adaptations of the film, particularly the newest one. Really appreciate you taking the time with us. Thank you, Alison. It's been a pleasure. And that'll put the period on this episode of Period. Thank you so much for listening. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. If you have any suggestions for what we should cover next, we now have an email. You can reach us at period.thelitpodcast at gmail.com. I'm your host, Allison, and our producer and editor is Maya Linne Bureau. As always, this podcast was made for listeners like thou.