Wuthering Heights: 11 Biggest Differences Between The Film And Book

Emerald Fennell has made a lot of changes to Emily Brontë’s novel in her divisive movie.

Emerald Fennell’s film version of Wuthering Heights is, to say the very least, not your grandma’s version of Emily Brontë’s gothic masterpiece.

Although many Brontë purists have been less than pleased with the way the movie has chopped and changed the iconic source novel, Emerald has spoken in defence of her adaptation on several occasions, insisting she was trying to make “something that was my response and interpretation to that book and to the feeling of it”.

In fact, that’s why she made the decision to show the film’s title in quotation marks and other promotional materials, including its title card.

But just how much of the original novel is left in the recent big-screen adaptation of Wuthering Heights?

Here are 11 major differences between the two…

Emerald Fennell’s decision to depict Heathcliff as white faced backlash before filming had even begun

The topic that generated the most discussion long before Wuthering Heights hit cinemas was around Heathcliff’s ethnicity and background.

As soon as Jacob Elordi was cast in the role, people criticised Emerald for “whitewashing” the character, who is described in the novel as a “dark-skinned gypsy” and a “little Lascar”, a term used to refer to sailors from India, South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Mr Earnshaw says he found Heathcliff at Liverpool docks, a location historically associated with the Transatlantic slave trade. Some scholars even believe that the author was using Heathcliff to comment on the Liverpool slave trade.

Academics have long felt that the ambiguity of Heathcliff’s ethnicity and mysterious family background adds to the story, particularly with regard to how he is treated by Cathy’s family.

Elsie Michie, a professor of English at Louisiana State University, told The New York Times that “the dynamics of this novel are about otherness in various ways, and that otherness is in Heathcliff”. By making Healthcliff and Cathy the same ethnicity, Emerald’s film relies on class differences to create a rift between the lovers.

Asked about removing the character’s ethnic background and casting a white actor to play him,

Emerald previously claimed: “Everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only kind of ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.”

She also explained that, when casting Jacob, she was less concerned with the text and more with her own memories of reading the book.

″[He] looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read,” she added during an earlier interview.

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights film only covers the first half of the novel, and misses out on the second generation of the Earnshaws and Lintons

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights very specifically focuses on the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff, but fans of the Gothic novel will know this is only one part of a bigger story.

Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is less a romance and more a supernatural warning about intergenerational trauma. Emerald has chosen not to include these elements, instead turning Cathy and Heathcliff into tragic lovers frolicking on the moors.

This latest adaptation covers only the first half of the book, ending the story just after Cathy’s death. In the latter half of the novel, a bereft Heathcliff dedicates his life to torturing those around him, including Cathy’s daughter, and the son he and Isabella later have.

“The thing for me is that you can’t adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book,” Emerald told Fandango in January regarding the charges.

Emerald’s film is far from the first adaptation of Wuthering Heights to omit the second part of the novel, which scholars believe completely reframes the story’s message.

“You lose that sense of a cycle of violence,” said the curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Murray Tremellen, to Time when explaining why failing to adapt the second part of the book........

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