Hindley Whips Heathcliff- ‘Wuthering Heights’ (Andrea Arnold, 2011)

Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece of literature that has never gotten the adaptation that it deserves; while this is in part due to the fact that almost none of the film versions bothered to include the second half of the novel, they’ve also avoided the racial subtext that is critical to understanding the intentions that Emily Bronte had. Andrea Arnold was bold enough to approach these themes by casting a mixed-race actor, James Howson, as Heathcliff, and showing how he is harassed and insulted with racial epithets.

The strongest scene in the film involves Heathcliff being whipped by Hindley (Lee Shaw), Catherin’s (Kaya Scodelario) older brother. Hollywood has clearly decided to treat Wuthering Heights as a romantic epic (which it isn’t), and have whitewashed and streamlined subsequent adaptations; Emerald Fennell’s film doesn’t just ignore the racial commentary, but doesn’t even include Hindley as a character/ (Liam Gaughan)

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Written in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell, this novel follows a fiercely independent orphan who refuses to let a restrictive Victorian world break her. After surviving a cruel childhood and a harsh boarding school, Jane takes a job as a governess at Thornfield Hall. That's where she meets her brooding employer, Mr. Rochester. Their emotional connection is incredibly deep, but it gets completely derailed by hidden family truths and intense societal pressures.

I know it sounds weird to call a classic gothic tale cozy, but watching Jane fight for her personal freedom and moral clarity while falling deeply in love is deeply satisfying.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Brontë sisters were having an absolute moment in 1847, because that was the exact same year Emily published her only novel under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. This book trades the polite ballrooms for the wild, windy English moors, delivering a story built on raw passion, class divides, and relentless retribution.

The central relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and the brooding Heathcliff is famously messy, showing just how destructive love can become when social structures tear people apart. Honest take: it's definitely darker than a standard ballroom romance, but the sheer emotional intensity will completely pull you under. (Jesús López)

The mounting number of biographies of Emily is a testament to her elusiveness. Like a moth, she has been caught, chloroformed and staked onto the page many times over, but always with a new label. First, she was a genius recluse, then a wild spirit, and more recently an agoraphobic anorexic. But as Emily herself put it, ‘Vain are the thousand creeds’, ‘worthless as withered weeds’: she is not a woman who stays pinned for long. It is refreshing, therefore, that in Deborah Lutz’s This Dark Night: The Life of Emily Brontë, she has dispensed with these deadening labels, with what she calls the ‘twentieth and twenty-first-century ideas and identities [that] don’t import easily into the past’. Instead, she sets out simply to render the ‘texture’ of Emily’s days, ‘to ponder what she wore, saw, heard, smelled, and felt along her skin’.

This tactile approach, a method Lutz developed in her earlier book, The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects, is employed to great effect. The Haworth Parsonage, with its graveside aspect, rears up darkly before our eyes, and the smell of its peat fires, of the various dogs and cats, of tallow candles and pungent bedpans wafts out from the page. With only four rooms, it was a crowded home for its many inhabitants, but when we learn that every member of the family aspired to be a writer, the space feels smaller still. What could be seen represented only a sliver of the bustling reality of this house, in which whole universes were dreamt up by children who found as much freedom in them as they did on the wild Yorkshire moors. Goethe wrote that ‘talents are best nurtured in solitude’, but it was among the chiming clocks and creaking floorboards of this cramped and dimly lit parsonage that three great writers were born.

Given that creativity in the Brontë family was always a collaborative affair, no biography of Emily could consider her in isolation from her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, or from her wayward brother, Branwell. Even the ghosts of her mother and her two older sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, were ever present – their successive burials in the family vault having had a profound effect on the minds of the surviving children. Emily was not, then, as Lutz explains, the isolated genius of the Brontë myth but connected, as though by a series of ‘underground rivers’, to a shared familial source. Lutz is particularly good at setting out the various components of this spring of intellectual and creative life: Blackwood’s Magazine with its dungeon tales, Irish folk stories, the well-stocked library at Ponden House with its pornographic volumes, copies of Byron, of de Sade, of Virgil, of Horace, books on geometry, and a well-thumbed History of British Birds representing only a fraction of their shared reading. Like Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen before them, George Eliot and, later, Virginia Woolf, the Brontë sisters had the run of their father’s library but with very little guidance. It was in this permissive atmosphere, and out of the tomes of a patriarchal culture, that they would make something entirely their own.

While Lutz is attentive to this shared life, she tries not to lose sight of Emily for too long. We glimpse her ‘peripatetic creativity’ in the image of her reading while kneading dough, or writing on palm-sized pieces of paper that could be secreted away in an apron; we get a sense of her fierce stoicism from the story of the dog bite wound that she seared with a red-hot iron; from the various descriptions of her animals – including her intimidating mastiff, Keeper, and her wild falcon, Nero – we see a woman who gloried ‘in the ferociousness of nature’; and in her stream-of-consciousness-like journals and academic essays we recognise the cast of that original mind that would go on to write poetry like ‘No Coward Soul Is Mine’, and create the dark, primordial world of Wuthering Heights.

But these are only glimpses, occasional flashes of illumination in a biography that otherwise contains a large amount of speculative padding. Few paragraphs go by that don’t pose unanswerable questions (‘Was Emily a whistler?’, ‘did she make herself sick, perhaps by not eating?’), and the phrase ‘she may have’ is used as reflexively as a full stop. Large swathes of conjecture about what Emily might have seen or done (often based on Charlotte’s experiences) serve as descriptive stepping stones when the facts are too thin on the ground. And a lengthy plot summary of Wuthering Heights reads like a narrative sleight of hand, meant to distract us from the fact that, with no original manuscript, we will never know how it was written. Obscured by a blizzard of unanswered questions and hypothetical experiences, Emily appears just as she did in her self-portraits: with her back to us, a subject who does not want to be known.

Quoting Julian Barnes, Lutz prefaces This Dark Night by asserting that all biography is ‘a collection of holes tied together with a string’, and that ‘with Emily Brontë this is doubly true’. However, whether a biographer succeeds depends entirely on how she chooses to bridge the gaps. Were it only that Lutz relied too heavily on conjecture about what Emily saw or felt, it would merely be a frustrating book; but because her speculation extends to how Emily washed and with what material she managed her menstruation, it is a fundamentally flawed one. Never mind that no biographer of a male author would think to ask how he trimmed his nasal hair or applied his haemorrhoid cream, Lutz seems to have forgotten that her subject is the sublime poet who wrote: ‘I am happiest when most away / I can bear my soul from its home of clay’. She can look for Emily in her slop pails as much as she likes. She will not find her there.

Virginia Woolf wrote that ‘there is no “I” in Wuthering Heights’, but she could equally have written that there was no ‘I’ in Emily Brontë. Like the bluebell, which Emily called a sacred watcher, she observed the world unhindered by the blot of the self – saw it as if from the falcon’s untethered eye, as if from some far-flung perch in the boundless universe.

It is no wonder she remains so elusive. (Charlotte Stroud)

With its plethora of independent stores and coffee shops, walking up the village’s Main Street towards the Bronte Parsonage in 2026 is, of course, a very different experience to how it would have been when those three writerly sisters called it home.

But now the village has been faithfully recreated as it would have been in the 1840s - in miniature.

Paul Crossley is a volunteer at the Parsonage, and his impressive diorama, some three years in the making, merges his two passions: model making and the history of the Bronte family.

A fan since being mesmerised by The Brontës of Haworth TV series in 1973, he has a particular interest in Branwell Bronte, who struggled with addiction.

“I was reading one of Ann Dinsdale’s fabulous books about the Brontës. She’s the curator of the Parsonage and in the book was a map of how the street would have looked in the 1840s,” Mr Crossley explained.

“And it got me to thinking, what if I could make a model of that? I’ve been doing model making for 60 years now and it’s almost a kind of illness.”

Using a scale of 2mm to a foot, Paul recreated the maps on his kitchen floor, sellotaping A4 pieces of paper together to work out the exact layout of his planned village.

“Lots of the buildings described have since been demolished,” he explained “So I had to use my imagination - I see myself as a bit of a frustrated architect.”

The Parsonage, the Sunday School and Haworth’s Church tower are all recognisable in Paul’s diorama, although he had to do some digging to ensure accuracy, particularly in the case of the church, which was partially rebuilt in the 1870s.

“I decided I was going to base the diorama in the year 1845, which was a milestone year in the Brontë saga. Patrick [the writers’ vicar father] had got himself a new curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who would go on to become Charlotte’s husband,” he said.

“It was also the year Anne resigned her job, Branwell got sacked and Charlotte discovered Emily’s poetry.”

Paul’s commitment to accuracy even stretched as far as ensuring replicas of gravestones were in keeping with the year he chose.

He brought his diorama to the Parsonage for a short display, where he was told by one staff member that she’d “never been able to visualise Victorian Haworth, but now she saw it in an instant.”

A spokesperson for the Brontë Parsonage said: “Paul has been a dedicated and valued volunteer at the Brontë Parsonage Museum for many years. We really admire the time and skill which he has put into this remarkable model, and we're all delighted that he's receiving recognition for his work.” (Victoria Finan)

As a filmmaker and historian, I’m fascinated by the ways in which cinema has been used as a propaganda tool. I thought about this when Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights came out, and even before I had seen it I sensed there was something else happening, from the clips shared on social media to the promotional images of pale-skinned Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi striking a pose reminiscent of Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind. I kept thinking about what the appeal of that cinematic past was, and how it found an audience in contemporary culture. Surely there’d been enough adaptations of this book to last us an eternity.

I’m familiar with Fennell’s work and her background as a former actor from an upper-middle-class family (her family used to holiday with Andrew Lloyd Webber), who has successfully moved into filmmaking. I took this context into account when watching her interpretation of Emily Brontë’s novel. Despite its box office success on release earlier this year, it has been widely panned by critics for various reasons, including the apparent whitewashing of Heathcliff, which distorts a core tension of what has made the book endure for so long. One Letterboxd reviewer put it bluntly: “Emily Brontë died of tuberculosis 177 years ago yet this adaptation is still the worst thing that has ever happened to her.” This film is simply erotica dressed up as a love story.

In 1975, Susan Sontag wrote “Fascinating Fascism”, an essay in which she took aim at silent-film-actor-turned-filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, arguing that, in the making of Nazi propaganda films such as Triumph of the Will, she exploited the tools of cinema to seduce the viewer. “Fascinating Fascism” covers other Riefenstahl works, including the photography book The Last of the Nuba, which clearly wasn’t state-sponsored propaganda, but was, Sontag argued, “continuous with her Nazi work”. What I’m drawn to is the argument about fascist aesthetics that Sontag made in relation to Riefenstahl’s films, which she describes as “epics of achieved community, in which everyday reality is transcended through ecstatic self-control and submission”.

I kept thinking about ecstasy and submission after watching Wuthering Heights, and how captivating it is to the viewer. Sontag wrote that fascist iconography carries a seductive visual power that operates independently of ideology:

In contrast to the asexual chasteness of official communist art, Nazi art is both prurient and idealizing. A utopian aesthetics (physical perfection; identity as a biological given) implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers. The fascist ideal is to transform sexual energy into a “spiritual” force, for the benefit of the community. The erotic (that is, women) is always present as a temptation, with the most admirable response being a heroic repression of the sexual impulse.

The aesthetics of power, hierarchy and the erasure of the individual, Sontag argued, can produce erotic as well as political responses, and those two responses share a common structure: beauty and domination are entangled in fascist art.

Fascist aesthetics are also obsessed with race. As Sontag wrote, Riefenstahl’s Nuba portraits evoke “some of the larger themes of Nazi ideology: the contrast between the clean and impure, the incorruptible and the defiled, the physical and mental, the joyful and the critical”.

In Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights, this choice is illustrated by the decision to change the brown ringlets of Brontë’s Catherine Earnshaw to Robbie’s very blonde version on screen. Sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom has argued that “blonde” has come to signify whiteness without being explicit: “We use ‘blonde’ (and if to a lesser extent ‘brunette’) to signal that someone is white without using a racialized term like ‘white’. It may also be more: a signifier of a type of white person.” [...]

Nostalgia is another signifier of these politics. The choice to yet again adapt a 19th century novel that has had at least eight adaptations is a curious one. Brontë wrote the book at the end of the Industrial Revolution, a period of significant social and economic transformation. That context sits at the heart of the novel, and defanging it is telling. In 2011, another Englishwoman remade Wuthering Heights, in a film that captures the brutality of that period and the tension at the heart of the novel. In Andrea Arnold’s rendering, Catherine is a brunette, Heathcliff is Black and the Yorkshire moors are anything but sentimental.

Robbie, who is also a producer on the latest incarnation, dismissed the criticism the film received, arguing at a panel event at the Sydney Opera House: “I consider audience always. I’ve never, ever been on set and thought, What are the critics going to think of this? I’m like, what’s an audience going to feel right now? What’s their emotional response going to be? I just believe you should make movies for the people who are buying the tickets to see the movies.”

While I respect her honesty, I do wonder if seduction is what audiences need at this moment in history. Because what the audience is asking for, and what Fennell’s Wuthering Heights delivers with incredible visual precision, is exactly what Sontag identified half a century ago: the eroticisation of domination. The pleasure of surrender to a force larger and more overwhelming than oneself. The landscapes are cinematically breathtaking, Elordi is shirtless, Robbie gorgeous in the costumes. This is a film that is concerned with vibes and wants to seduce its audience with this imagery.

Again, Sontag wrote that fascist aesthetics “flow from (and justify) a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behaviour, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude … Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.”

While people watching films and clips on social media may not be thinking about these things, those creating them understand the power that images have in myth-making, and that they are not neutral. [...]

In Fennell’s adaptation, audiences are given a visually stunning film layered with nostalgia and a sense of collective identity, all centred on a work of major cultural significance. Rather than encourage people to question the very structures Brontë was seeking to analyse in her novel, the movie brings people together to engage in the spectacle of a romance stripped of its politics. Love is an enduring narrative that many can relate to. For the film’s duration, moviegoers are seduced and don’t feel powerless at a time when the world outside is so overwhelming.

Those who enjoy films such as Fennell’s (much like those readers who have made the “romantasy” genre a billion-dollar publishing industry) are not fascists, nor are they passive or unsophisticated. They are largely online, politically aware and living through a moment of profound institutional decline. The old structures of economic security, political legitimacy and faith in the future have all but failed. What capitalism is offering them is what Benjamin diagnosed: aesthetic expression in place of structural change and maintaining the status quo.

Neither Fennell’s Wuthering Heights nor romantasy novels will dismantle racism or classism, or lower the price of petrol. If anything, they reinforce heteronormative gender roles and hierarchies. But they do offer audiences something politicians are incapable of: a temporary reprieve from the madness of the world for two hours or so.

The fantasy of submission, whether to a lover, a racial identity, a landscape, the algorithm or even a political force, is essentially the fantasy of being relieved of one’s responsibility to the world. The audience does not want to be in control; it wants to surrender it completely. And exponents of fascist aesthetics, as Sontag argued, have always understood this with uncomfortable precision.

Viewers whose algorithms are tuned to “tradwife content”, “glow up” trends and “soft life” escapism, or reading romantasy books and watching Wuthering Heights, aren’t being recruited or radicalised. They are being distracted and comforted as they live through these tumultuous times.

This is what art can tell us about something it pretends to be unaware of. It is for future historians to give language to the aesthetics that will come to define the art that speaks to the politics and ideology of these times. But right now, it is worth remembering that good art reflects back our humanity, and shows us the world in its truth. (Santilla Chingaipe)