In this column distributed through the Elon University Writers Syndicate, Professor of English Rosemary Haskell explores the enduring power of Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," as a new adaptation of the classic hits theaters. This column was published in the Greensboro News & Record and the Winston-Salem Journal.
“Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bed-clothes; still it wailed ‘Let me in!’”
Thus speaks Mr. Lockwood, a clueless townie and milksop, narrator of Emily Bronte’s 1848 novel Wuthering Heights, about to appear – again! – on screen in a Valentine’s Day release.
This production generates a new burst of interest in a novel that’s never lost its coolness-cachet. Romance – doomed, of course – and the lure of Gothic darkness are bestsellers, particularly with a young audience.
Unsuspecting Lockwood, forced by bad weather to stay at remote and rural Wuthering Heights, the house now under the seriously unpleasant domination of brutal Byronic anti-hero Heathcliff, dreams that a child scratches at the window, begging to get in: “I’m come home! I’d lost my way on the moor!” she moans. Overcome with inexplicable cruelty, the otherwise normal Lockwood drags ghostly Catherine’s wrist across the jagged window glass.
Catherine, Heathcliff’s long-dead childhood and eternal love, is back.
Emily Brontë’s novel also is a bit of a cine-revenant: a silent film version in 1920 was followed by five English-language screen adaptations, including 1939’s version starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. Foreign directors are not immune, with Indian, Spanish and Filipino films attesting to the pull of Brontë’s fiction.
It certainly channels the Gothic horror we all seem to crave. What fictional mode was ever more resilient than the Gothic? Born in eighteenth-century England with Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” (1764), the Gothic mode powered on, past Mary Shelley’s 1820 classic “Frankenstein,” through Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” up to the very recent “Mexican Gothic” by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.
The Gothic closet is stuffed with ghosts, dead bodies, graves, vampires, the living dead, corrupt sexuality, damsels in distress, powerful and dangerous attractive men, gargoyled architecture and locked doors. The list is long.
But Gothic is a fragile literary mode, lurching sometimes into farce: Brontë piles it on, ad absurdum: a kitchen with a row of hanged puppies, dead rabbits mistaken for kittens, a knife thrust casually into a servant’s teeth, and Heathcliff’s late penchant for grave-digging.
Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s declarations of eternal love indeed caught the irreverent eye of satirists in “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” a seventies UK television series: “Semaphor Wuthering Heights” depicts the supposedly desperate lovers complacently signaling in neat flag formation across the desolate moorland.
But let’s get serious again. The novel is genuinely disturbing in its depiction of childhood love turned into adult obsession: “I am Heathcliff!” declares Catherine. “He’s always, always in my mind not as a pleasure . . . but, as my own being.” And we believe her. Their individual identities are merged forever, even after death, when Heathcliff begs dead Catherine to haunt him: “Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! . . . I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”
Heathcliff – brought as a nameless street urchin into the Wuthering Heights household, mistreated in childhood, and bereft of Catherine – takes revenge on everyone implicated in his misery. Vampire-like, he sucks the free will, money and property from his victims, turning the landowning gentry system on its head.
The young novelist herself spent most of her life in her clergyman father’s northern England vicarage and was an unlikely author of such a startling fiction.
“Wuthering Heights,” originally published under the man-sounding pseudonym Ellis Bell, was slammed by reviewers, who denounced it as coarse, brutal, and irreligious. After her death at 30, Emily was “defended” by her older sister Charlotte, who resorted to claiming that her sister was just a child of nature, living secluded in rural Yorkshire. She really “didn’t get” polite society.
But Emily has had historical payback after those disapproving reviews. “Wuthering Heights” stays reliably in print, thanks to people like me, who teach it, and thanks to the film makers, who periodically boost it lucratively into the headlines.
The new film beckons. But I hope that moviegoers will turn again to the book: a real Gothic shocker, which entertains while inviting us to ponder the dangerous and wonderful strength of human feeling, to consider the possibility that individual human identity is permeable, and that we may really be able to live in each other’s hearts and minds – perhaps forever.