With Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë intertwined the obsessive destinies of Heathcliff and Catherine in the heart of Yorkshire, giving shape to a love that is at once rebellion and ruin. Cinema, the visual language par excellence of grand passions, has turned her novel into one of the most prolific sources of adaptations and reinventions.
Wyler and Arnold: from the American Dream to a new ecological sensibility
The most celebrated adaptation remains William Wyler’s 1939 film, starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. Produced in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the film transforms Heathcliff into a virtuous hero who finds fortune in America, making success the result of hard work and perseverance, pillars of the American Dream. To make the story more appealing to a wide audience, the screenplay simplifies the plot and removes the novel’s second generation, turning an emotional disaster into a romantic and idealized love story.
At the opposite end, Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation embraces an ecological sensibility that focuses on the materiality of mud and wind, elements capable of deeply shaping the protagonists’ psychology. The landscape becomes a character in its own right, while the soundscape – the wind, the barking dogs, the birdsong – does not merely provide background but actively molds states of mind.
Other landscapes: from Brontë’s Yorkshire to Yoshishige’s Japan and Buñuel’s Mexico
Alongside Yoshida Yoshishige, who set Arashi ga oka (1988) in medieval Japan, it is Luis Buñuel who demonstrates how readily the text adapts to radically different cultural contexts. With Abismos de pasión (1954), the Victorian tragedy moves to Catholic Mexico and becomes a surrealist drama steeped in religious symbolism, in which passion sweeps everything away in a pessimistic and fatal spiral, ending in the lovers’ final defeat.
Also worth mentioning, though less incisive, is Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 adaptation, which reunited on screen a golden couple of 1990s cinema, Juliette Binoche and Ralph Fiennes.
After more than a century of reinterpretations not only on screen – one should at least recall Beppe Fenoglio’s stage drama La voce della tempesta – Wuthering Heights continues to prove itself a text capable of reflecting the aesthetic and cultural obsessions of different eras. It remains to be seen what form the new adaptation directed by Emerald Fennell, starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, will take. Clues may already lie in the director’s earlier films, Saltburn and Promising Young Woman, both available on Prime Video: two dark fairy tales about power and desire, where revenge dresses elegantly and smiles before striking.
Wuthering Heights, the novel that defied Victorian morality
When Wuthering Heights was published in 1847, the young Emily Brontë delivered to literature a novel that resembled a scream more than a narrative: fierce, untamed, swept by the wind of the moors and driven by passions that transcend all Victorian morality. In an England tightly laced into its moral corset, the story of Catherine and Heathcliff did not slip in quietly but flung open the windows, bringing with it mud, desire, resentment, and a love stripped of hypocrisy. Published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, Wuthering Heights is Emily’s only novel and, paradoxically, one of the most radical works in English literature. It was initially met with suspicion: too violent, too bleak, morally disturbing. Many struggled to accept a love that does not redeem but consumes, and a protagonist like Heathcliff, devoid of any edifying vocation. Emily Brontë did not live long enough to witness the reassessment of her work. She died of tuberculosis a year after its publication, unaware that her irregular and untamed book would become one of the most adapted and reinterpreted texts of modernity, capable of crossing centuries, languages, and imaginaries without losing its unsettling force.
Kate Bush and Cathy’s “spirit”
The song that marked Kate Bush’s recording debut was born from a lightning encounter with Emily Brontë’s novel. At just eighteen, the singer-songwriter found a decisive interpretative key: to tell the story from the point of view of Catherine’s ghost, knocking at Heathcliff’s window and begging to be let in. A narrative choice perfectly attuned to the obsessive and passionate dimension of the original text.
The song translates the novel’s atmosphere into sound, with the wind of the moors seeming to blow from the driving piano and Bush’s soaring, piercing voice capturing Cathy’s spectral otherness, suspended between love and revenge, desire and annihilation: Out on the wily, windy moors / We’d roll and fall in green / You had a temper like my jealousy / Too hot, too greedy / How could you leave me / When I needed to possess you? / I hated you, I loved you, too / Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy…
