Imagining "Wuthering Heights" (2026) as an Adaptation
Article by staff writer Ellison Martin can be found here.
Six months ago, I watched the teaser for Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” (2026). Before my eyes, a stream of carefully crafted compositions interspersed with snippets of freakiness rushed past—each no longer than a moment, all moving to the rhythm of the audio. I wondered, could the book possibly be this provocative? (spoiler: no).
Victorian literature has never really had a hold on me, but the teaser had caught my attention. Since “Wuthering Heights” was seventeen weeks away and the novel had exactly twice as many chapters, I resolved to read a bit every week.
In 1847, shortly before her death, the young Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights. To determine whether it is appropriate to call Fennell’s 2026 film an adaptation of the novel, one must first understand: what does it really mean to adapt a book, and how can one succeed or fail in doing so?
This is a question that has predated film, and there is a whole field of study devoted to the concept. The word “adaptation” is French and stems from the Latin “adaptare,” which means “to adjust.” It was popularized in the mid-1800s (note: after Wuthering Heights) by Charles Darwin, in reference to the process by which organisms become better suited to their environment (Oxford Dictionary). In the context of media, to adapt means to alter the text to make it suitable for its environment, i.e. film.
While modification to the source material is necessary when switching formats, it is difficult to determine the correct extent and form for it. Some judge a film based on its faithfulness to the source (fidelity criticism), others on the depth of the interpretation of the source (adaptation as interpretation), and even on how the source is placed in conversation with related works (intertextuality). There will always be disagreements about the best way to adapt a piece—indeed, many pieces have several adaptations, and Wuthering Heights has as many as twenty.
Charlie Kaufman’s award-winning Adaptation (2002) explores this theme literally, depicting his own experience as he tries to adapt Susan Orlean’s written account The Orchid Thief. Fictional Kaufman’s personal life interweaves with the scenes of his screenplay as he struggles with writing a true adaptation “simply about flowers,” instead of succumbing to a fake, Hollywood-esque story. The real Kaufman, a legendary filmmaker, had set out to adapt a book but ended up creating his own story. Was the result still an adaptation, or just a failed attempt?
It all depends on how one defines an adaptation. According to the literary theory that spawned from Roland Barthes’s 1967 “The Death of the Author,” a given piece is always inviting new interpretations. Rather than submit blindly to the author’s authority or focus on their intentions, “The Death of the Author” creates possibility for a wide variety of readings, as long as they are based on textual evidence. Applying this idea to adaptation theory leaves a lot of room for interpretation as long as the adaptation is rooted in the source. For this essay, I will adopt the definition that an adaptation should somehow explore the essence of the source—that is, at least a subset of its themes.
Fennell herself seems to understand the unstable position of the adaptation. In a January interview, she explained why the film’s title was stylized in quotation marks.
The thing for me is that you can't adapt a book as dense and complicated and difficult as this book. I can't say I'm making Wuthering Heights. It's not possible. What I can say is I'm making a version of it. There's a version that I remembered reading that isn't quite real. And there's a version where I wanted stuff to happen that never happened. And so it is 'Wuthering Heights,' and it isn't. But really, I'd say that an adaptation of a novel, especially a novel like this, should have quotation marks around it.
In fact, Fennell successfully began to explore the themes of the “dense and complicated and difficult” novel, but didn’t follow through. Each of the following attempts could have led to “making a version of” Wuthering Heights, but none of them did.
The film opens with a blank screen while explicitly sexual sounds play in the background. After an uncomfortably long amount of time, it is revealed that the source of these sounds is the struggling victim of a public hanging. As he is killed, the crowd has a visibly orgiastic reaction. To be clear, this scene comes straight out of Fennell’s imagination, but also serves as a brilliant introduction to the world the story takes place in. It’s one in which society views violence and sex as intertwined, so much so that at times they may not be distinguishable from one another.
Fennell continues this theme of violence through her visceral yet subtle portrayal of the abusive nature of Catherine’s father, Mr. Earnshaw. She relies again on the strength of audio when he beats young Heathcliff; the only visual is a closed door with Catherine and Nelly cowering in front of it. With this established, there are a couple topics Fennell could have explored.
Firstly, intergenerational trauma. The book portrays three generations of the Earnshaw family, depicting the abuse that began with Mr. Earnshaw and his eldest son, Hindley; ruined the lives of the following generation, Catherine and Heathcliff; and was, in a way, overcome by the final one, Catherine (II) and Hareton. Unfortunately, much of this is missed as the film cuts out a lot of characters, but these changes are understandable due to the time constraints.
Secondly, incest. The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff in Brontë’s version starts off more like that of siblings than of anything else. After all, Heathcliff is named after Catherine’s brother, who died young. The two meet in the book at the incredibly young age of six, further cementing the nature of the relationship. Thus, their obsession with one another for most of the book can be seen less as a fiery romance and more as a reaction to the toxic family dynamics they grew up in. In the novel, Catherine’s parents both pass by the time she and Heathcliff turn twelve; in the movie, Catherine’s father is still alive but doesn’t do much parenting. Forced to raise themselves and unable to mature—all while hiding from the wrath of Catherine’s father (or her brother, in the book)—Catherine and Heathcliff end up developing codependency. When Catherine says (in the book), “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same” (81), she could be alluding to the fact that they need one another to survive, and feel incomplete when apart—a product of the conditions for survival in the Earnshaw household. This theme of violence begetting sexual passion was beautifully set up with the opening scene. However, Fennell decides to rewrite the story into that of a romance, in which the souls quote is only exemplary of the theme. In the film, the two meet as teenagers, close to an age at which, in contemporary society, it is acceptable for them to form a romantic or sexual relationship. Even further, the only references to the opening scene are depictions of BDSM, rather than any intentional allusions to the society in which the story takes place.
Finally, Fennell takes an interesting approach to the character of Nelly, a servant of the Earnshaw household. She portrays Nelly as the villain, one who determinedly keeps Catherine and Heathcliff apart throughout the movie. If it weren’t for her, it seems, the star-crossed lovers would have ended up together. Nelly chooses to keep from Catherine that Heathcliff is listening to their conversation about marriage, leading him to mistakenly believe that Catherine does not love him. Then, when Catherine is seriously ill, Nelly hides her condition from Catherine’s husband, Edgar Linton, later claiming she thought Catherine was faking. Meanwhile, the book is more complex in that there are no explicit villains, but Nelly may certainly be more responsible than it seems. The novel is told almost entirely through the unreliable narration of Nelly’s perspective. Reading closely between the lines reveals how she may be covering up her responsibility for the aforementioned events, or rather inaccurately painting herself as the victim in other scenes.
However, there are some problems that arise from the film’s oversimplification of some characters. Edgar Linton, Catherine’s husband, is deemed an antagonist, hindering Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship. Even further, Nelly and Edgar share another similarity: they are the only two characters of color in the film. Of course, the concept of race is nothing new to Wuthering Heights. In the book, Heathcliff is explicitly not white. The terms “black” and “dark” are used throughout, and he even wishes out loud that he had “light hair and fair skin” (57). In response, Nelly encourages him to imagine exciting backstories for his birth parents, “Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?” (58).
In Fennell’s version, Heathcliff is portrayed by Jacob Elordi. She defended this decision by saying, “you can only ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” Fennell read it at age fourteen and perhaps that childlike innocence excuses stripping most of the nuance of the book. It could be true that, at such an age, one may not have picked up on these details and imagined the two main characters of the book to be white. But did Fennell imagine Nelly as someone of Vietnamese descent and Linton of Pakistani descent? When she said, “there's a version where I wanted stuff to happen that never happened,” did she mean that the only characters she saw as villains were also the only ones she perceived as being ones of color? Most importantly, should she have maintained this idea when casting for her $80 million production?
Racial awareness is so central to the plot of Wuthering Heights that its absence leads to a vapid imitation. Heathcliff is constantly othered due to his race. His violent character development can be seen as a reaction to the violent system of racial hierarchy he grew up in. Additionally, Catherine expresses throughout the book that she feels she cannot marry Heathcliff, likely due to his race. A proposed alternative motivation is money, and Heathcliff’s lack thereof, but, realistically, Catherine and Heathcliff would be in the same economic class, especially since they grew up in the same household. Thus, when the idea of race is taken out, there is nothing holding Catherine and Heathcliff apart; in other words, there is nothing perpetuating the story’s central conflict.
Heathcliff’s violent edge is represented in the novel through his relationship with Edgar’s sister Isabella and the lack of this in the movie required a transformation of the relationship. The domestic abuse presented in the book is haunting. Isabella and Heathcliff get married and then immediately return to his childhood home, Wuthering Heights. On their first night, he adopts a countenance that is more terrifying than “a tiger, or a venomous serpent,” in Isabella’s own words, upon the suggestion that they share a bedroom. He proceeds to tell his wife that as revenge for Catherine’s illness, she would serve as her brother’s “proxy in suffering” (144). In their final interaction, Heathcliff throws a dinner knife at Isabella, hitting her ear. At this point, she escapes the marriage, and consequently births and raises their son on her own—something unheard of in Brontë’s time. Of course, there’s the implication that the abuse was not limited to these incidents; when Isabella writes to Nelly, “Is Mr Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” (136), she is serious. In the movie, Isabella and Heathcliff assert dominance consensually over one another, and the devil line is said as a joke. Isabella’s interest in BDSM could be seen as sexual liberation—a rewrite of her domestic victim identity. But there is also no longer any purpose to her relationship with Heathcliff, beyond that of sex scenes.
The film supposedly aims to depict a romance, yet even that isn’t fully present. The relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff jumps from that of teenage friends straight to sexual partners. There is no romantic development between the two, only lust at most. The film’s overt sexuality is nearly pornographic, not liberating; it tells us to feel emotions it does not naturally provoke. So, what elements of the original Wuthering Heights does the movie retain?
It’s not easy to judge whether a piece truly adapts another or not. It does seem clear here, however, that Fennell took inspiration from, rather than adapted, Wuthering Heights. The book’s themes are either missing or rewritten, with the similarities mostly consisting of the book’s setting and the characters’ names. There are several adaptations that deviate from the source to the extent that they do not share the title, such as Clueless (Emma), 10 Things I Hate About You (The Taming of the Shrew), and The Lion King (Hamlet). This would have been a wise decision for Fennell. “Wuthering Heights” (2026) could be a decent watch on its own, though all potential nuance is so flattened that the film doesn’t seem to say anything new anyway.
Perhaps Fennell is right: it’s not possible to remake a book exactly as a movie. Perhaps, as fictional Kaufman in Adaptation discovers, it’s not possible to make an adaptation without selling out. Fennel wasn’t wrong when she said “adaptations” should have quotation marks around them—it’s always true that, in the process of adaptation, material from the source is lost or changed. However, an adaptation can also add to the source, to society, and to art as a whole. There is still hope beyond Fennell’s movie.
Despite its shortcomings, without “Wuthering Heights,” I’m unsure if I would have read the novel so closely, or even at all. The latter’s thematic value is highlighted by the former’s lack thereof…and perhaps that’s just enough to qualify the film as an adaptation.
Sita Vemuri is a sophomore at Columbia Engineering studying computer science and manifesting a film studies minor. She can be found delivering unprompted monologues on the death of cinema and championing “classic” movies that have 23% on Rotten Tomatoes. If she ever made a movie, it would probably be a cinéma vérité documentary about the small things she encounters in everyday life—shot entirely on actual film, of course.