When Heathcliff returns to Yorkshire a rich man after a three-year absence and finds Cathy married to Edgar, the roles reverse. Now it’s his turn to inflict pain. He marries Isabella, “an abject thing,” whom he tells Cathy he’d only live with in “a very ghoulish fashion,” turning “the blue eyes black, every day, or two.”
Brontë’s Isabella (who is Edgar’s sister in the novel but his ward in the movie) doesn’t enthusiastically consent to her own degradation—but Fennell’s Isabella does. And although she naïvely crushes on Heathcliff because she thinks he’s sexily moody—rather than a lunatic set on the ruination of her and her entire family—the novel’s version is not a simpleton infatuated with dolls, as portrayed in the film.
That said, in the novel, Heathcliff is able to trick Isabella into eloping, putting himself in position to inherit the Grange, which he wants to spite Edgar. Once they’re married, Heathcliff reveals his true nature and begins terrorizing her, prompting Isabella to ask Nelly in a letter, “Is he a devil?” If readers are at all uncertain of his sociopathic tendencies, Heathcliff then hangs his wife’s dog. Jacob Elordi would never.
Instead, Elordi’s Heathcliff collars and chains Oliver’s Isabella herself, instructing her to bark like a dog. Importantly, this only occurs after he tells her he’ll “never love her,” will “treat her abominably,” and asks her no less than four times, “Do you want me to stop?” This is a sadist who is surprisingly committed to consent. Isabella becomes his willing submissive, a plot line that provides the film’s comic relief. When she calls Heathcliff “diabolical,” she means in the way he savages her body. Though momentarily amusing, it’s a total 180 from the book, in which Isabella demonstrates the most agency of any character: Horrified by Heathcliff, she escapes to London, where she raises their son, Linton, until she dies.
And that’s not the only sub/dom addition Fennell has made to Wuthering Heights. In the novel, the servant Joseph is a self-righteous zealot who’s always banging on about the Bible. His character is an avatar for the austere religion that threatens to impinge on the wildness that reigns at the Heights. That is to say, he doesn’t use farm equipment to have bondage sex with a housemaid in the stables—as he does in the film. (Joseph is played by actor Ewan Mitchell.) Believe it or not, there is zero bondage sex in Brontë’s classic.
If the book is psychosexual, the emphasis is on the “psycho.” In this buttoned-up Victorian milieu, all erotic desire is shoved under the surface, and Heathcliff and Cathy’s thwarted love, though all-consuming, is never consummated. Robbie and Elordi’s Catherine and Heathcliff, on the other hand, have a months-long affair in which they have explicit sex in a montage whose settings include her powder-pink bedroom, inside her carriage, on the moors, and atop a table.
In the novel, the closest the two come to sex is when Heathcliff digs up Catherine’s grave—not once but twice. The second time, he knocks out the side of her coffin and plans to do the same to his own, so that when he’s buried next to her, their decaying corpses will merge. Recalling the story, Brontë’s Heathcliff tells Nelly he slept well that night for the first time in 18 years, dreaming of himself dead with his “cheek frozen against [Cathy]”—a scene that for many implies a necrophilic embrace. In contrast, “Wuthering Heights” ends with Heathcliff cradling Catherine’s expired body on her deathbed. The poignant image is juxtaposed with flashbacks of them as children lying sweetly next to one another. (Can’t wait for Fennell’s reimaging of “A Rose for Emily.”)
The Lost Generation: Cathy II, Linton, and Hareton
As is tradition in adaptations of Wuthering Heights, Fennell’s film narrows its scope to Heathcliff and Cathy’s relationship and ends with her death. When the credits rolled, the woman next to me turned to her friend and exclaimed, “Wait, what? There must be a part two!” There is not. But her confusion was understandable, since Cathy dies just halfway through the novel—which is, in fact, split into two parts.
Natasha O’Neill
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