What Would Brontë Think: The Controversies of the 2026 Adaptation of “Wuthering Heights”
Written by Laura Sands. Graphic by Kashvi Pallapotu.
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” Catherine Earnshaw remarks about her beloved in Emerald Fennell’s new feature film “Wuthering Heights.” While Cathy and Heathcliff’s souls might be the same, this new adaptation could not have a more different soul from its source materials, Emily Brontë’s book of the same name. Before the movie even hit the big screen, it stirred up huge amounts of controversy, and for good reason – overly explicit content, blatant whitewashing, carelessness with the source material, and incorrectness with costuming.
Heathcliff, an orphaned boy, is brought home to the Wuthering Heights estate by Mr. Earnshaw in the late 18th century. Hindley, Mr. Earnshaw’s son, immediately hates him, and ends up forcing him into servitude when Mr. Earnshaw passes. On the other hand Catherine, the daughter, becomes close friends with Heathcliff, until it blooms into a forbidden romance because of their differing classes and race. So begins the dramatic tale forcing Catherine and Heathcliff apart because of the world’s expectations, causing Heathcliff to lose his morals by the tragic end.
The opening scene in the movie immediately sets up the extreme context of physical romance, in a scene where a man is being hanged (it’s important to note this is not how the book began). These themes carry on throughout the movie, and although the amount of sexual content in a movie can be debated, what isn’t up for questioning is how different this is from the non-explicit book. When a movie is heavily saturated with scenes like this, with actors (Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi) whose appearance is popular, it dilutes the themes of violence, class and race.
Race is obviously a huge part of the book – it’s what strains Catherine and Heathcliff’s relationship, and what makes it so easy for Hindley to force him into servitude. Heathcliff’s ethnicity is never disclosed in the book. However it often describes his dark skin, eyes, and hair, in addition to mentioning his mother as an “Indian Queen.” Yet in Fennell’s movie adaptation she casts Jacob Elordi, a white man, in this role. Especially in this day and age, whitewashing is a disgusting thing to be promoting with a huge theatrical release. There are plenty of talented actors who are people of color that could have played Heathcliff. Even if his ethnicity is ambiguous, there is little to debate: in the book, he is a person of color, which plays a vital role in how the entire story plays out.
Overall, the movie is sounding nowhere close to what Emily Brontë was going for when she wrote the classic novel, and that’s because the department leads for this movie didn’t really care about the book. Rumors started way before the movie was released, suggesting that the director was going for an almost fanfiction retelling of the book, and the answer wasn’t far off. In interviews Fennell reveals that it’s what she imagined the first time she read “Wuthering Heights” as a teenager, saying “It’s […]what it would feel like to fulfil my 14-year-old wish, which is both good and bad […] I wanted to make something that made me feel like I felt when I first read it, which means that it’s an emotional response to something. It’s, like, primal, sexual.”
The director mentions nothing about the revolutionary conversation of abuse, class and race, or even a more innocent romance, as Catherine is around 18 in the book. She simply focuses on physical romance. Yet she is not alone, as the creative director is also quoted saying “you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.”
To diminish work that mirrors real life experiences in this way completely erases the international heaviness of the topics of the book. This was someone’s real life. There were, and are, hundreds of thousands of people being abused and hurt by class and racism. Especially during the time period when Bronte released Wuthering Heights, those topics were unusual for an author to write about it. She was revolutionary for telling this story and including racism and classism in a negative light. This movie is simply erasing that, all the while the creative leads are admitting to it.
The “Wuthering Heights” adaptation appears aesthetically pleasing and somewhat interesting, but as a separate entity from the book. It’s erasing the main themes, replacing them with explicit scenes and inaccurate costuming (mesh in the 18th Century?) with an entirely, and wrongly, white cast. Wuthering Heights is a literary classic, revolutionary for its time and somehow Emerald Fennell has managed to turn it into a spicy whitewashed romance, marketed in the trailer as “the greatest love story ever told.”
