How Emerald Fennell Recasts Wuthering Heights’ Villain

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a conspicuously loose, maximalist take on Emily Brontë’s novel, one that leans into the primal, sexual response she says she felt when first reading it. The film makes large structural and casting changes—age- and, in Heathcliff’s case, arguably race-inappropriate leads, the removal of the book’s unreliable narrators, and the excision of the novel’s second half—to foreground a raunchy, BDSM-tinged relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff.

In Brontë’s original, Heathcliff is introduced as the dark-skinned, orphaned other who is adopted into the Earnshaw household and later driven to revenge after suffering abuse from Hindley and losing Catherine. He returns with wealth and inflicts calculated cruelty on the Earnshaw and Linton families, manipulating Isabella into a loveless, abusive marriage and tormenting the next generation until near his death.

Those events are conveyed through Nelly, the long-serving handmaid whose partiality colors the narrative.

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