Withering hates

News of a new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights directed by Emerald Fennell (of Saltburn fame) led me to re-read Emily Brontë's classic novel.

It brought back many memories. I was raised close to 'Brontë Country' in the 1960s when that area of the West Riding of Yorkshire (as it still was then) remained very much as the Brontës would have known it: remote, bleak, inaccessible and inhospitable. Today, while the moors, apart from a few jarring wind turbines, remain as ruggedly magnificent as ever, the gaunt 17th and 18th century millstone grit farmhouses have been transformed.

Fifty years ago, their cold, stone-flagged floors, rattling sash windows and smoking chimneys made comfort hard to find. Only the main living room, t' house in dialect (in Brontë's text as in my youth), had a constantly-burning range, while rag rugs helped keep the chill off our feet. Almost all have been modernised, if not outright suburbanised. Paved driveways, landscaped gardens, double-glazing, solar panels, conservatories and central heating now prevail. Not nearly so picturesque but a damned sight more comfortable to live in I'll wager.

Any road up, back to t' novel. Reading it again after many decades (so you, gentle reader, don't have to) I was struck by how utterly mad it is - atmospheric certainly, but totally bonkers. You have to wonder if our Emily hadn't been on brother Branwell's laudanum. Even those who haven't read it will have a hazy notion of its contents, based on partial dramatisations and Kate Bush's incomparabe 1978 song. 

Apparently, she hadn't read it either but was inspired by its wild, Romantic reputation. Her version's hauntingly evocative refrain, "Heathcliff, it's me, I'm Cathy/ I've come home, I'm so cold/ Let me in your window" succinctly encapsulates the mood of the original, to the extent that one almost doesn't need to struggle with it. However, as the book is a classic of Eng Lit I suppose we should all give it a go, if only to be able to boast we have tried.

Emily Brontë's only novel, it was published in 1847 but set in the last quarter of the 18th and just into the 19th century. Those of us who saw the 1939 William Wyler black-and-white Hollywood film version before reading the book may have been surprised that the setting of the book wasn't contemporaneous with its publication but actually fifty years earlier. 

Wyler's version, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon, updated the costumes* but Brontë evokes the late-Georgian era rather than the mid-Victorian. She does so by referencing the spirit of Romanticism and the Gothic - more William Wordsworth and Mary Shelley than Anthony Trollope and Mrs Gaskell. Featuring untamed nature, psychological disorder and the supernatural, the physical and emotional landscape Brontë evokes could hardly be farther away from the scientific rationalism and technological advancement.of her own time.

For a modern reader, the novel is highly problematic. The leading characters, Heathcliff and Catherine 'Cathy' Earnshaw, are deeply-flawed and unsympathetic, indeed almost repellant. Egotistical, cruel, controlling, manipulative, neurotic and mercurial, to the point of psychopathy, these are hardly heroic figures. Even the main storyteller, the supposedly saintly (in her own estimation at least) housekeeper-cum-governess, Ellen 'Nelly' Dean, is morally culpable, making her an unreliable witness at best. Other characters are shown to be weak, gormless (or gaumless in Brontë's transliteration), self-indulgent, delusional, hypocritical or hypochondriacal. 

It's a wonder, given this unpromising dramatis personae, that any filmmaker would take on the task of trying to bring them to life on the screen. The first, silent, version was made in 1920, directed by A V Bramble, since when many have struggled with it. Fennell is just the latest to attempt a satisfactory film adaptation, with what success we shall find out next year when her film is due to be released. She certainly has her work cut out for her given the troublesome source material.

Peter Kosminsky's 1992 version, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, tried to shoehorn both parts of the novel (Wyler only covered the first) into 1 hour 45 minutes. This was widely seen as biting off more cinematically than he could possibly chew but it was a valiant effort nonetheless, set in the correct historical period with location shooting in North Yorkshire, it gained a reasonable critical response.

Andrea Arnold's 2011 version, which I haven't seen, gained a four-star review from The Guardian, which praised its pared-back, unsentimental realisation. Only covering the first part, as Wyler's, seems to have worked better cinematically. It also directly confronted Brontë's 'gypsy' origins for Heathcliff and cast two black actors as the young and adult character. 

Fennell's casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff has already been criticised on the grounds that he is white Australian, which ignores his Spanish origins, and Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw, although Australian herself, has been accused of being too 'Californian' having played Barbie in the movie of the same name. 

Yes, identity politics poses an ever-present casting challenge these days.

*The film was shot on a tight budget. California doubled for Yorkshire, surprisingly well, and mid-Victorian costumes from the wardrobe department were recycled. Seemingly, all the hoohah over 'Gone With the Wind', shot the same year, made crinolines and ringlets more attractive to cinema audiences than muslin Empire-line dresses and Grecian hairstyles.
 

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