A Dialogical Study Of Wuthering Heights And Its Cinematic Afterlives

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Acknowledgements
I owe my most heartfelt gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Zhu Jianxin, without
whose suggestions, directions, encouragement and wealth of knowledge throughout,
this thesis would not have been possible. He offered such an insightful and meticulous
feedback on my preliminary drafts. He also gave me the confidence to develop this
project and to pursue further graduate study in film studies. Once again, with deepest
appreciation, I must thank Prof. Zhu for his generous and sensible help.
I am profoundly indebted to my parents for their selfless love and boundless
investment on me. Even though I live thousands kilometres away from home, the
geographical distance can never impede this bond. Every time I felt confused about
my future and was frustrated for being stuck in the writing, I could always feel the
caring, warmth and love from my family that helped me do the right choice.
I am also grateful to the English department in Fudan University, in which my
passion for literary and adaptation studies was kindled and I was able to get in touch
with so many distinguished scholars and intelligent classmates. This place means so
much to me, because it is the fertile ground that nurtures my academic interest and
makes it thrive.
Finally, I must thank my roommates, Vickie Liang, Swan Su and Shirley
Cheng for their precious company and considerable help. We have been living and
supporting each other over the last three years, during which our friendship has been
tremendously consolidated and deepened. I will always cherish the memory of us
doubling our joy and sharing each other’s trouble, and of course, the time when we

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stay up and work hard together like valiant warriors for the same academic goal.
Thank you for letting me be part of your lives.

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Abstract
In this thesis, I explore the dynamic exchanges between film and literature in
adaptation studies. As previous theoretical frameworks, the literature-to-film approach
and film-to-literature approach, both show their inadequacy in accommodating the
rapidly developing adaptation studies, I propose a dialogical process to better
negotiate film with literature in an ongoing back-and-forth movement. This new
model provides a feasible analytical ground for adaptation studies, where film
adaptation as literary criticism enters the adaptor’s personal intent, interpretation and
critique into the prior work, and as palimpsest radiates its own aura and exerts
influence on later texts. To contextualize this paradigm, I examine Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights and its relationship with the 1939 William Wyler’s adaptation as
well as 2011 Andrea Arnold’s adaptation. I argue that Wyler addresses his criticism
on materialistic woman and his observation on masculine crisis in the 1930s America.
Arnold’s film demonstrates her keen concern on the postcolonial discourse in
contemporary Britain. It is believed that a dialogical study of Wuthering Heights
under the framework of dialogical process not only testifies a new matrix for
adaptation studies, but also helps us better comprehend the literary and social values
embedded in the adaptation franchise of this Victorian literary classic.
Keywords: film adaptation Wuthering Heights social context dialogism

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Table of Contents
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Acknowledgements........................................................................................................ i!
Abstract in English....................................................................................................... iii!
Abstract in Chinese...................................................................................................... iv!
Table of Contents......................................................................................................... vi!
Introduction....................................................................................................................1!
Chapter One Negotiating Film with Literature: A Dialogical Process........................10!
Chapter Two Heathcliff and Catherine in the Ethos of 1930s America:
William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights ...........................................................................15!
Chapter Three A Post-Colonial Discourse in 2011:
Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights ...........................................................................25!
Conclusion ...................................................................................................................34!
Works Cited .................................................................................................................36!

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Introduction
Film at its birth was intertwined with literature, and with its rapid development,
the relationship between film and literature is as complicated as ever, becoming an
important subject matter in adaptation studies.
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is an unfathomable and unsettling story
with a reinvigorating afterlife on screen, and adapting Wuthering Heights has been a
daunting task for many directors. Versions of adaptation vary in different ways. For
example, in Hollywood’s Golden Era, William Wyler produced the classic adaptation
of the novel, creating Heathcliff as an endurable and noble figure. However, in 2011,
casting a black ill-experienced actor to be Heathcliff has been the centre of the debate,
for after Laurence Olivier enacted a Byronic handsome white Heathcliff, Arnold’s
attempt or even subversion of the image of Heathcliff seems to unacceptable to some
audience. How are films related to the literary source? What contributes to the
differences among different adaptations? How does one adaptation affect another? It
is believed that the responses to these questions will shed a new light on adaptation
studies.
Review of the Adaptation Theory
Ever since Melville declared the impossibility of complete fidelity in literature
to film adaptation in 1912 (also see in Bluestone Novel into Film: The Metamorphosis
of Fiction into Cinema; Elliott Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate; MacCabe True to
the Spirit; Stam “Beyond Fidelity”), scholarship in adaptation studies has sought a
multitude of other approaches to negotiate film with literature. André Bazin advocates
to seek cinematic “equivalences in meaning” to accomplish the possible
transformation of characters, stories, and meanings of a novel into different media,
albeit with different formal equivalences (57-64). His proposition, on one hand,
debunks the confining issue of fidelity as the predominant criterion for film
adaptation, and on the other hand, draws the academic attention to the transformation
of content from literary form to cinematic form.
As the fidelity discourse remained no longer tenable for adaptation studies,
cinematic adaptation began to claim its territory and demand an equivalent rank with

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literature. Accordingly, the one-way literature–to-film approach gradually reveals its
confine of the literature-above-film hierarchy. Thanks to intertextuality studies
advocated by Roland Barthes and Gérard Genette, scholars address a reverse approach
whereby adaptation is posited as interpretations of or critical commentaries on what
they adapt (Boyum 1985; Elliott Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate; Griffith 1986;
Sinyard 1986; Wagner The Novel and the Cinema). Marsh and Elliott point out that
adaptation is both “a form of reading” that “offers texts the possibility of vivid
incarnation” and a serendipitous adventure that “opens up startling gaps among our
different visions of them” (459). The interplay between literature-to-film approach
and film-to-literature approach has largely deepened and expanded the perceptions of
adaptations studies, as is recapitulated by Robert Stam’s in an array of terms denoting
these adaptation practices: “translation, actualization, reading, critique, dialogization,
cannibalization, transmutation, transfiguration, incarnation, transmogrification,
transcoding, performance, signifying, rewriting, detournement” (24).
The third approach of adaptation studies was introduced by Dudley Andrew’s
seminal project announcing the “sociological turn” (“Adaptation” 70) in adaptation.
His proposal constructively negotiates the dialogue of historicization and
contextualization: firstly, correlating with questions in human and social sciences,
adaptation becomes part of larger philosophical and epistemological projects in
interpretation; secondly, this framework places filmmaker’s interpretive strategy in a
specific social context, and thus helps identify different adaptation practices as a
social response to the contemporary period. With an increasing number of adaptations
produced in 21st
century as well as in different countries, film adaptation begins to
liberate itself from its previous confinement to the literary time and space (also see in
Naremore “Introduction” in Film Adaptation; Cutchins, Raw, and Welsh Redefining
Adaptation Studies).
With the register of the three dimensions in adaptation studies: the literary
source, the cinematic counterpart and the social context, scholars try to construct a
broader network where a bigger dialogue between texts and contexts can be
effectively incorporated. (Post)structuralists first seek to transgress the textual
boundaries between literary, cinematic and social connections. Julia Kristeva
popularizes the intertextuality theory in a broader sense by contesting the received

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notion of close and self-sufficient “work”; In A Theory of Adaptation (2006), Linda
Hutcheon suggests that adaptation can be studied as a creative and interpretative
process through a range of different media, where not only literature, but also its later
incarnations (film, opera, video game, etc.) can be both recognised as various texts
that reject complete repetition of their prior texts, retain their unique aura and leave
impact on forthcoming “adaptations”. Adaptation becomes a simultaneously
consuming and creating process. Following John Bryant’s formulation in The Fluid
Text, Hutcheon further proposes that “no text is a fixed thing” and those later
revisions are “a continuum of fluid relationships between prior works and later” that
will constitute a “system of diffusion” (170-171).
Hutcheon’s theory is a synthetic, yet if anything, imperfect one. Cartmell and
Whelehan find the concept of ambiguous fluidity between texts rather unsatisfying;
they point out that Hutcheon’s study “does not produce the holy grail of the definitive
critical model which helps us further analyze the process of adaptation” (21). In
Thomas Leitch’s assessment of Hutcheon’s work, he concludes that “the question of
how adaptations are related to all these other intertexts – whether they provide a
model, an ideal, a special or extreme case, or an example of business as usual – is one
that Hutcheon, after a rewarding days’ work, prudently leaves to other hands”
(“Review: A Theory of Adaptation” 251). It seems necessary to establish a certain
analytical mode to better explicate the values of the adaptation process. Jørgen Bruhn,
following Kristeva and Hutcheon, suggests a dialogic exchange of film and literature
that accommodates both film and literary contextualization and exposition: “the
systematic and theoretical discussion should […] try to answer questions related to
both methodological debates and cultural and historical discussion” (71). As the
“dialogizing process” is gradually taking shape, more and more film critics invest
their interest in literature that has been adapted more than once as a valuable asset in
cultural studies and interdisciplinary studies.
Review of the Adaptation Studies of Wuthering Heights
The nineteenth-century Victorian English literature and literary culture have
offered a perpetual fascination with cultural capital to heritage film. Thomas Leitch
meditates on early film’s indebtedness to realism and narrative aesthetics rooted in the

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Victorian texts. He also credits the latter with a crucial role “in defining the legacy of
Victorian fiction” for cinema, adaptation theory, and wider culture (“Introduction:
Reframing the Victorians” 6). However, to adapt Victorian works on screen is an
“exemplary challenge”, as it is constantly tested by the fidelity criticism that has
dominated the early adaptation studies. Sadoff, citing Robert Stam’s project on
realistic and magical literature, recognizes the “impossibility of faithful remediation,
of recreation or reproduction in a new medium” (Sadoff xix) of the Victorian novels.
The reason behind it, as Leitch points out, is “their (Victorian novels) often
prodigious length, density of incident, accretion of detail, and psychological
penetration” (“Introduction: Reframing the Victorians” 7).
Wuthering Heights is a Victorian literary classic as well as one of the most
adapted Victorian writings; however, none of literary and film critics is able to
ascertain “the best one” among all these adaptations. The fidelity discourse, after all,
is deemed as more of an “analytical” approach than an “evaluative” one (Leitch Film
Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to the Passion of the
Christ 95).
George Bluestone’s project on Wuthering Heights is one of the major works
that resonate with the “theoretical turn” (Elliott “Theorizing Adaptations/ Adapting
Theories” 29), which moves away from exploring the fidelity discourse to reflecting
the values of the adaptation film. His study, based on the presumption that “novel and
film are both organic […] differences in form and theme are inseparable from
difference in media” (“Wuthering Heights” 240), demonstrates how addition, deletion
and alteration in the content of Wyler’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights in 1939 fits
the film form and serve the “unique and specific properties” (“Wuthering Heights”
241), by which he justifies the liberty filmmakers and screenwriters have taken in the
adaptation. Wuthering Heights, he argues, with “an extremely complex set of values”
and mystical insights, should be made more accessible to a mass audience concerning
the property of film. “If nothing else, the impossibility of retaining Emily Brontë’s
tropes would make the shift inevitable” (“Word to Image: The Problem of the Filmed
Novel” 179). However, Bluestone’s efforts to recognize film adaptation as an
autonomous medium do not fully render Wyler’s film as a response to Brontë’s text,
but rather reduce the “passionate love” represented in the film into a mere audio-

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visual subject matter. Brontë’s “peculiar intricacies” are thus transferred to a
passionate romance comprehensible to Hollywood audience (“Word to Image: The
Problem of the Filmed Novel” 178). John Harrington holds an opposing stand against
Bluestone and credits that Wyler is an auteur. He argues that Wyler and Toland’s
skilful camera plays the role of a “participating spirit” (80) in the film so as to render
the two world, “nature and society” (81) on the screen, which accurately captures the
essence of Brontë’s writing.
To decode the “peculiar intricacies” in Brontë’s text is by no means only
director and screenwriter’s work. James H. Kavanagh noted that “the dominant
twentieth-century strategy for interpreting Wuthering Heights has triggered critical
schemes that attempt to mirror, or re-evoke, what is seen as the transcendent mystery
of the text” (3). In particular, the feminist critical body established by The Madwoman
in the Attic (Gilbert and Gubar) and Marxist analysis conducted in Myths of Power
(Eagleton “Wuthering Heights”), both concerning Brontë’s Wuthering Heights,
demystify implicit symbols and ideologies in the text. These analyses are appropriated
as the literary end and transformed on screen in the discourse of fidelity. Applying
literary symbols propounded by literary critics, Kamilla Elliott asked the question
“whether the novel is viewed as a monolithic signified to be faithfully represented by
servile cinematic signifiers, or as an incomplete sign requiring fuller representation by
film signs, or whether novel and film vie to better represent a shared outer signified”
(“Literary Cinema and the Form/ Content Debate” 135). In her study on the
adaptation of Wuthering Heights, she posits six critical approaches to theorize
adaptation based on different ways of conceiving the translation between narrative
form and content in different media: the psychic concept, the ventriloquist concept,
the genetic concept, the de(re)composing concept, the incarnational concept, and the
trumping concept (“Literary Cinema and the Form/ Content Debate” 136-181),
demonstrating how the film text digests and translates literary symbols.
Literary critics acknowledge the fact that “there is an error in the assumption
that there is a single truth about Wuthering Heights […] This is a remnant of opacity
which keeps the interpreter dissatisfied, the novel still open, the process of
interpretation still able to continue” (Miller “Repetition and the ‘Uncanny’” 368-
369).Visualizing and contextualizing Wuthering Heights drives critics and audience to

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reflect on specific transferrable elements in the 19th
-century text represented in
cinematic aesthetic. Edward Chitham rightly points out that many filmmakers see the
story concerning the relationship during and after life between Heathcliff and
Catherine as the vital theme (86), which spotlights these two main characters and their
doomed love. Olga Anissimova examines the content interpretations in three
adaptations (1939, 1970, 1992) and discusses how the film language narrates the first
generation “with very different personality traits and drives” (29), and thus creates
new cinematic contexts in which the protagonists’ relationship acquires unique
nuances and shades of meaning. Liora Brosh’ monograph focuses on Catherine in
Wyler’s 1939 film to critique the female representation in classic Hollywood
production. Saviour Catania analyses how the Japanese adaptation Arashi-ga-Oka
revisions Wuthering Heights in terms of its elemental visions of love as deadly fire
and ice. The study makes the connection between the visual “fire and ice” to the
“fiery/frosty fluidity” (247) characterized in Brontë’s text, which lends some
knowledge to a later literary criticism “Thematic Functions of Fire in Wuthering
Heights” (Tytler), a project concerning fire as a literary symbol. By the same token,
the symbol of “glass” is dissected in a recent article “Adapting Victorian Novels: The
Poetics of Glass in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights” (Pietrzak-Franger). In this
discussion, Pietrzak-Franger suggests that the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights
(2011) employs the innovative auteurist perspective to interpret Brontë’s myth. Shelly
A. Galpin invests more efforts in the latest versions of adaptation and analyses how
the anti-heritage adaptation renders Brontë’s text in the new era.
Since Wuthering Heights is one of the most frequently adapted Victorian
novels, adaptation studies centred on cultural and historical issues have contributed a
lot to the fields of adaptation and literature, or in Hila Shachar’s words, it “is
ultimately a product of its time and culture, and its surplus of meanings elicit
numerous readings” (14). If juxtaposing Patsy Stoneman’s two projects: Brontë’s
Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
(1996) and Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: A Reader’s Guide to Essential
Criticism (2000), one can detect somehow there is a dynamic exchange between
literary and film criticism, mainly represented by the way Heathcliff and Catherine
are depicted in the nineteenth-century text and revoke readers’ and audience’

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identification in the 20th
and 21st
century. Shachar took a further step beyond
Stoneman and connected cultural clues of the novel and its adaptations in her
monograph Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature:
Wuthering Heights and Company. She provides the “historical context” – a film-to-
novel view – and “cultural critique” – a novel-to-film view – in selected adaptation
versions of Wuthering Heights by which exchange networks between literary text and
visual text are well constructed (14). Kimberly Galloway thinks highly of Shachar’s
contribution to the adaptation studies of Wuthering Heights and even adaptation
studies in a wider sense as she “clearly demonstrates the historical and cultural
relationships that develop between Brontë’s text and its subsequent adaptations” (4-
5). In her framework, Shachar winnows out three contextual issues “home, heritage
and gender” in western film culture by revisioning the literary interpretation in
response to Brontë’s intricate Victorian text. She also articulates “the lovers’
‘discourse’ and the sublime” as what the novel “speaks” to its visual afterlives (649).
Both Stoneman’s and Shachar’s analyses demonstrate the inseparable and ongoing
exchange between Wuthering Heights and its transformations in other media.
Dialogizing the Wuthering Heights Adaptations
The three approaches reviewed above are correlative and inextricable: firstly,
the fidelity discourse, centred on the literary text, examines to which degree film
adaptation is able to restore its source literature; secondly, film adaptation, as a
process instead of an end product, also functions as an evolving literary critique that
consistently effects and modifies the audience’s recognition and interpretation of the
novel; finally, from a broader perspective, the threads above can be woven to a matrix
that serves what Thomas Leitch calls a “Textual Studies”: a “larger synthesis” that
“incorporates adaptation study, cinema studies in general, and literary studies, now
housed in departments of English, and much of cultural studies as well.” (“Twelve
Fallacies in Contemporary Adaptation” 168).
From reviewing the critical history of Wuthering Heights, it can be concluded
that most of the research projects concerning Wuthering Heights have tackled the first
two phases of study, including transferrable elements, social and cultural contexts of
the adaptations, providing firm grounding for the exploration of the dynamic matrix in

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the third phase that awaits more investment. There are also some academic attempts
of placing Wuthering Heights in the dynamic matrix with a particular focus on the
cultural elements, implying that more attempts in this regard are on the agenda. After
the release of the 2011 adaptation Wuthering Heights directed by female auteur
Andrea Arnold, many adaptation scholars and film critics find their interests in
critiquing this offbeat and controversial version. However, the 2011 adaptation is not
yet included in any recent dialogical adaptation study. Therefore, it opens up a
possible space for research to incorporate the latest version of adaptation, to juxtapose
traditional heritage adaptations and innovational anti-heritage adaptation in the matrix
of communicating and transporting literary criticism and adaptation process.
The thesis attempts to examine Wuthering Heights adaptation under the
theoretical model that negotiates film with literature in a dialogical process dealing
with literary text, cinematic text and social contexts. The crux of this thesis is that
only two films are engaged in the conversation, as there have been so many
adaptations produced concerning Wuthering Heights. However, the selected films,
William Wyler’s classic heritage film and Andrea Arnold’s unconventional rewriting,
coherent yet contrasting as they are, will shed some new light on both literary studies
and adaptation studies. It also avoids demarcating mis-adpatation from re-adaptation,
for the definition of “mis-adaptation” remains vague and difficult to be identified. The
interpretation of cinematic rhetorics is mainly demonstrated through the analysis of
the major characters in films, while other many aspects of film studies are excluded
for the sake of consistency and clearness. Chapter one is aimed to expound the
theoretical ground of dialogizing adaptation studies by examining the horizontal and
vertical perspectives involved respectively. This theoretical frame is testified in the
following chapters. Chapter two provides an analysis of William Wyler’s 1939
adaptation Wuthering Heights, placing its focus on the different portrayals of the
reeled Catherine and Heathcliff from their literary counterparts. By repackaging the
original text to a “stable boy and lady” love story, Wyler addresses his criticism on
materialistic woman and observance on masculine crisis in the 1930s America in the
film, as if he carried out a reflective communication between Brontë and himself. As
Wyler’s classic film adaptation successfully established a cinematic archetype and
exerted great impact on later adaptations, the visual convention stemmed on his film

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is then explored as well as challenged in chapter three. In chapter three, Andrea
Arnold’s 2011 auteurist version of adaptation is under scrutiny. The emphasis of
Arnold’s film falls on her keen concern on the postcolonial discourse in contemporary
Britain. It is believed that a dialogical study of Wuthering Heights under the
framework of dialogical process not only testifies a new matrix for adaptation studies,
but also helps us better comprehend the literary and social values embedded in the
adaptation franchise of this Victorian literary classic.

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Chapter One
Negotiating Film with Literature: A Dialogical Process
Drawing on the approach of regarding film adaptation as a process instead of a
mere end product (Hutcheon), this chapter examines how film adaptation and its prior
literature correlate, dialogize and are received on theoretical ground, which will be
concretized and contextualized in the case study of Wuthering Heights and its two
film adaptations. This chapter aims to establish a new model in the discourse of
dialogical analysis in adaptation studies, emphasizing that film adaptation as literary
criticism enters the adaptor’s personal intent, interpretation and critique into the prior
work, and as palimpsest radiates its own aura and exerts influence on later texts.
During this process, a dialogical pattern between literature and film can be seen as an
ongoing back-and-forth movement.
The dialogical process is a trans-media matrix with both synchronic and
diachronic concerns. As the “dialogue” takes place between different media (novel
and film), it appeals for a systematic investigation into the contemporaneous context
that contributes to the dialogue in a certain period of time. At the same time, it is a
procedural revitalization of the dialogue driven by social force over time, and hence
an invisible grid of dialogical process is mapped out. Revising Dudley Andrew’s
concept of horizontal network of involving “contemporaneous values” (mainly in the
field of cultural studies) in a certain film adaptation and vertical line of arraying film
adaptations chronologically (“The Economies of Adaptation” 32), I attempt to give
my own response to the dialogical model concerning how the horizontal and vertical
dimensions are configurized in the novel-and-film (not novel-to-film) dialogism:
Horizontally, recognizing the intention of the literary author and the personal
comprehension of the filmmakers, the adaptor is allowed to register his/her
interpretation and re-imagination in the film which can be inferred on the original text
as literary criticism and thus produce noticeable effects on the reception of the literary
source in the audience;
Vertically, in the film franchise (as a representative form of cultural afterlives
in the thesis) of one novel, when one prior cinematic text has achieved a revisionary

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result, its palimpsetstic quality to some extent invites further challenge or
endorsement from later cinematic texts.
In this process, literature and film adaptation are constantly invested with
intellectual force. Accordingly, the interpretation of literature and film adaptation are
perennially revitalized and contextualized for different audience as well as for
heterogeneous social or cultural ends.
Horizontal Network
The premise of this dialogical matrix is rooted in Keith Cohen’s recognition of
semiotics system in both visual and verbal texts. He maintains that there exists a
“dynamic exchange” between novel and film, as both literary language and cinematic
element bearing certain resemblances to one another, can be regarded as signs
endowed with implicative power. These two sign systems, though separated, are not
absolutely isolated, as they together are interlocking mechanisms where the verbal
system functions to “name the units segmented by vision (but also to help segment
them)”, and the visual system functions to “inspire semantic configurations (but also
to be inspired by them)” (qtd in Cohen 4). M. M. Bakhtin also substantiates a similar
theory to facilitate the understanding. “Dialogical relationship” exists, he suggests,
“between intelligible phenomena of unlike types, if those phenomena are expressed in
some sort of symbolic material”(184-185).
While Cohen and Bakhtin introduced the semiotics system into the
transformation of novel and film as well as the concept concerning how the
transformation performs adhering to the protocols of distinct media, they focused on
propounding the possibility of the implicative transition between two specific media,
and left unsolved the problem regarding critical consequences, the major proposition
in the dynamic exchange and dialogue. As Bruhn rightly points out, while traditional
adaptation studies have paid much attention on how much transferrable quality is
transmitted or translated from the literary source to its cinematic end, what has been
slipped away from most of the research lenses is the conscious alteration and
imagination in the film text that functions more than as audio-visual reflections of the
literary text, but as underlying observations and personal intents conferred on by
filmmakers.

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Contextualizing film and literature in the semiotics system subverts the
hierarchy that has long been imposed on literature and film adaptation, which
rationalizes Roland Barthes’s suggestion of situating film adaptation “as a form of
criticism or ‘reading’ or the novel” (qtd. in Stam 8). By the same token, according to
Gérard Genette’s “metatextuality”, the adaptations that may be shadowed by the
observations and ideologies of the adaptors, can be assessed as a critical rewriting of
the literary text, by which the adaptors are acknowledged by their criticisms toward
the source novel or toward other adaptors (qtd. in Stam 28). English literature scholar
Neil Sinyard extends Genette’s concept of “metatextuality” specific to the transfer
between film and literature. He deems cinematic adaptation as “an activity of literary
criticism”, which “selects some episodes, excludes other, offers preferred
alternatives”, therefore “focuses on specific areas of novel, expands or contrasts detail,
and has imaginative flights about some characters” (117). The focal point selected and
presented in film adaptation will eventually, more or less, provide new angle of
perspectives and values undiscovered before and ergo launch more advanced inquiries
that entail further exploration in later literary or film adaptations.
Vertical Line
A rather new dimension introduced into this dialogism approach is the vertical
perspective that considers adaptation franchise as a significant thread throughout
history of adaptation industry and literature criticisms. Different from the concept of
the “vertical” put forward by Dudley Andrew referring to the connection between
contemporary adaptation and the bedrock of its source, the “vertical” line here is
particularly applied to the specific phenomenon in which a certain literary text is
revisited and reinvented by ambitious adaptors as response to different historical
times. To juxtapose adaptations of the same literary source in a vertical timeline
allows us to have a bigger picture of the mutation of cinematic and literary interests
along with social changes.
There are debates concerning the reasons why filmmakers tend to be appealed
to some novels repeatedly: Does the literary work itself provide a readily potential
niche market due to the existing fandom of the author, genre or story plot? Is it an
aesthetic practice performed by later film artists who attempt to challenge or triumph

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over the former or to add new cultural and social values? The justifications behind
such a practice may be varying, yet it is affirmed in adaptation scholars that
“repetition is an illusion” (qtd in Bruhn 70): the literary source should not be treated
as a fixed dot repeatedly revisited by later filmmakers, as it always welcomes new
interpretations in whatever forms, and more importantly, every adaptation can be seen
as a starting point of a new critique worthy of delving and expanding. These texts,
observed by Hutcheon, are “deliberate, announced, and extended revisitations of a
particular work of art”(xiv). Christine Geraghty in her Now A Major Picture: Film
Adaptation of Literature and Drama also suggests considering adaptations of one
novel as “layering” so as to allow for “the possibility of seeing through one film (in
both sense) to another”, the result of which is to build up the audience’s
understanding and knowledge regarding both film and literature. It is noted that in this
layering process, “a recognition of ghostly presences, and a shadowing or doubling of
what is on the surface by what is glimpsed behind” are always traceable (195).
Geraghty’s extrapolation illuminates that present adaptations are not only
“haunted” by the original literary text, but also “haunted” by their previous
adaptations: a similar structure, an unresolved question or even imaginations from a
contrasted point of view (qtd in Hutcheon 6). A haunting voice, a little glimpsed
episode or a door ajar in the previous text will morph into an intriguing myth that may
get its response from a specific time period pertaining to its own social and cultural
values. Thus, the vertical dimension demonstrates a film cluster where each other
interlocks backward and forward, meanwhile engaging the ongoing historical
contexts. The approach of examining the cinematic relaying to some extent facilitates
our vision of mapping out historical contexts over time and the textual network that
enriches our interpretation of the literary convention.
The study of adaptation history of the novel Wuthering Heights exemplifies
such a theoretical framework. As film critics have acknowledged the impossibility of
fully duplicating Brontë’s texts and themes on screen, the cinematic counterpart is
rather a “pastiche” of the original text. Many (but not all) directors from the 20th
century onward, pioneered by William Wyler in 1939, tend to boil the complicated
plots down to a tragic love story and modify the characters compatible to cinematic
narratives. Firstly, the horizontal perspective enables us to access directors’ critiques

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on the novel as well as social contexts. It draws our attention to several propositions
that are vital to our understanding of the literary criticisms delivered by the directors:
how do the metamorphoses of the major characters affect the trajectory of their
relationship (What causes the tragic ending of the love story)? How do these
metamorphoses related to the literary bedrock as well as the social course? The
responses to these questions lead us to the contemporaneous ideologies and the
concomitant interpretive approaches. Secondly, the imbrication of diachronic
adaptations exhibits a panorama where consistent, contrasting and complementary
elements are intertwined, contouring an interpretive trend and opening up
interpretative possibilities of Wuthering Heights. Wyler’s 1939 melodramatic
rendering and Arnold’s 2011 social realistic rewriting, though of disparate styles, are
actually interconnected and resonant with their respective social ethos and the
director’s ideology.

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Chapter Two
Heathcliff and Catherine in the Ethos of 1930s America:
William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights
This chapter will centre on William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation of Wuthering
Heights. Different from the pre-1930s literary criticism, Wyler transposes the literary
text of Gothic Romance into a melodramatic love story on screen as his own reading
of the novel. Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff and Merle Oberon’s Catherine will be the
linchpin of understanding Wyler’s reflections on 1930s-American social climate and
the its impact left on its social members. I will first briefly introduce some major
critical responses from the literary community before 1939, followed by a deliberate
analysis on Wyler’s appropriation of the novel. The focus of this section will be
placed on Wyler’s critique in his adaptation on materialist women and the masculine
crisis, the repercussion of the Depression Era where anxiety grew. Finally, in order to
pronounce the particular standing of this adaptation in the vertical timeline, the
literary as well as cinematic influence hailed from this film will be discussed.
Critical Response of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights before 1939
The publication of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights in 1847 failed to win
favour from the critics for its unacceptable violence and overwhelming hate. The
earliest review showed unabated hostility against Emily Brontë’s narrative and
imaginary world that was condemned to be “too coarse and disagreeable to be
attractive” (Spectator, 18 December 1847) and “so gloomy as the one here elaborated
with such dismal minuteness” (Athenaeum, 25 December). Among all those criticisms,
the central character Heathcliff concentrates most of the dislike as this “unredeemed”
demonic figure incarnates “implacable hate, ingratitude, cruelty, falsehood,
selfishness, and revenge” (Examiner, January 1848). G. H. Lewes called Heathcliff “a
perfect monster, more demon than human” and the lack of verisimilitude in the novel
simply failed to evoke readers’ sympathies to any character (Leader, December 1850).
An American reviewers describes Brontë’s novel is “a compound of vulgar depravity
and unnatural horrors” (qtd in Steere 42). Even Emily Brontë’s sister Charlotte Brontë,

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after publishing her successful novel Jane Eyre, gave an apologia for the “wrought
creations” in her sister’s book, claiming that it was owed to her long seclusion from
society and constantly disturbed mind (Brinton 101-107).
It was not until the end of the 19th
century and the beginning of the 20th
century that peoples started to view Wuthering Heights with new eyes by reassessing
the “aesthetic view” over “moral issues” that had been so severely assaulted by early
critics (Ingham 220). Virginia Woolf saw Wuthering Heights a greater achievement
than Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, for the former articulates the eternal power
“underlying the apparitions of human nature” and “transcends reality” (12-13). David
Cecil also shared Woolf’s modernist perspective in his noteworthy criticism,
acknowledging Wuthering Heights as a novel that anticipated the forthcoming era,
was overwhelmed with transcendent forces, and crediting that the image of Catherine
and Heathcliff together “looms before us in the simple epic outline which is all that
we can see of man revealed against the huge landscape of the cosmic scheme” (150-
151). Woolf and Cecil’s appreciation of the mythmaking constructed by Emily Brontë
ushered in the revival of Wuthering Heights in the following decades.
William Wyler’s 1939 Wuthering Heights
The convention of adapting Wuthering Heights inaugurated in the age of silent
film, with the first documented film produced in 1920. Patricia Ingham observes that,
aligned with the early critics, early filmmakers also emphasized the tremendous
hatred embodied by Heathcliff (225). However, it is the 1939 Wuthering Heights
directed by William Wyler that first established Emily Brontë’s narrative as a classic
screenplay. When transposing the myth, the film adaptation considerably tuned down
the harshness and cruelty in Brontë’s text and was exemplified as the romantic
archetype by sublimating the lovers’ image in Wyler’s camera (Stoneman “The
Brontë Legacy: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights as Romance Archetypes”). One of
the major alterations in the adaptation is that Wyler boils the story down to a prince-
and-princess or lady-and-stable-boy Hollywood Romance and cuts out the second
generation in the original novel; whereas it is in the second generation that Brontë
highly complicates the relationship between characters and characterizes Heathcliff as
an utter demon by which many intricate subplots and themes are unveiled. Scott Berg

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comments that the MacArthur and Hecht’s screenplay is a critique of Wuthering
Heights that “neatly extracted the dark romance. Stripping away characters and
telescoping the passage of time” and “preserved the intensity of the lovers at
Wuthering Heights in all their twisted passion” (47). Wyler reimagines their
childhood and foregrounds the lovers’ image that is mainly expanded from Chapter
VI in Brontë’s text. Some adaptation critics criticize that Wyler took too much liberty
in adaptation, omitted the essence of and severely violates the fidelity protocol in
adaptation (see Popkin “Wutheirng Heights and its ‘spirit’”; Martin “A Battle on Two
Fronts: Wuthering Heights and Adapting the Adaptation”), others see it as a
successful transformation that brings out the core spirits of Brontë’s text considering
the specificity of two different media (see George Bluestone Novels into Film; John
Harrington “Wyler as Auteur”; Kamilla Elliott Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate).
For example, Bluestone celebrates that the film is “an autonomous work of art”,
through which the filmmaker has “respected his model” as well as “respected his own
vision” (“Wuthering Heights” 110).
The narrative frame in Brontë’s novel is granted to be one of the conundrums
in interpreting this story, appealing readers and critics to approach the reliability of
the narrators and Brontë’s intention of setting up “outsiders” (Lockwood and Nelly)
and “insiders” (two generations in the Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange) in
the story. Lockwood’s adventure-like account of his experience in and Nelly’s
narrative of domestic saga contrive multi-focalizations on the story. Wyler’s treatment
of this narrative frame reveals that whose information he truly conveys to the
audience. Appropriating Brontë’s narrative structure, Wyler restores the stormy night
when Lockwood stumbles into Wuthering Heights owned by Heathcliff. Different
from the first-person point of view projected by Lockwood in Brontë’s text, the
cinematic narrative starts with a passage written by an omnipresent author on the
screen, backgrounded by the furious blizzard night on the moor with disturbing string
quartet,
On the barren Yorkshire moors in England, a hundred
years ago, stood a house as bleak and desolate as the wastes
around it. Only a stranger lost in a storm would have dared to
knock at the door of Wuthering Heights.

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The words on screen, resembling the written words on paper, create an
allusion that transports the viewers to the “real historical scene” a hundred years ago
seemingly “documented” by Emily Brontë. It not only persuades the realness of the
literary world where the words like “barren”, “bleak”, “desolate” and “wastes” are
well substantiated by the equivalent motion pictures behind, but also forebodes the
uncanny incident that Lockwood, who leads the viewers into the mansion, is
embarking on the most unsettling story in his life. The howling snowstorm outside the
estate is followed by a series of short cuts of wooden close-ups in the poorly lit house,
signalling an even much drearier snowstorm is brewing in this very house. Omitting
the first visit to Heathcliff, the film demonstrates Lockwood, a new tenant, requires a
temporary accommodation in this apparently hostile family and accidently lifts up the
gloomy secret. While in the novel, Lockwood, the outer narrator, is characterized as a
“piggish, sentimental, effete London dandy” who is incapable of love, diametrically
opposed to Heathcliff who is devoured by passionate love and hate (Berlinger 185),
Lockwood in the film is deprived of any noticeable characteristics and plays the role
of an agent communicating between the viewers and other characters in the film, so as
to invoke the ghost of Catherine and opens up Nelly Dean’s memory. As Mills notes,
Lockwood is the “objective observer” whose “curiosity” about the story in the house
was transferred by Wyler’s “subjective view of the camera” (416). By this treatment,
Lockwood is perching upon the fulcrum where director, audience and story narrator
encounter: he carries the director’s critical vision and projects it on the story told by
Nelly, negotiating the audience with Wuthering Heights that is reimagined by a 1930s
American director.
“1930s” and “American” are emphasized here, for, as a critical reader and
conscious adaptor, Wyler disassociates the film from the 19th
century Yorkshire
written by Brontë but accommodates it to the cinematic social context. The late 1920s
and early 1930s had witnessed a series of drastic social changes economically and
politically. According to Warren Susman’s research on the 20th
-century American
society and Jennifer Solmes’s survey on American history, among all the social
factors, the materialistic desire of women as escapism from the Great Depression
(Susman 165) and the threat of rising working women (Solmes 106) account for the
widespread anxiety at that time. These social changes and reverberations led people to

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reflect on the unstable material and domestic life. This is where 19th
-century domestic
fictions came to fit the cultural resonance delivered by classic Hollywood production,
and marriage became one of the major issues dealt with by cultural works.
Though Hollywood production in the 1930s appropriate 19th
-century fictions
to address the domestic issue, especially the marriage plot, they serve different
purposes in the essence (Brosh 3). Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Wyler’s
adaptation make an exceptional example. In the novel, marriage does “not lead to
permanent domestic happiness” (Meyer 178). The civilized marriage is fraught with
social confinement and oppression, “a tool of self-diminishment” as Boone suggests
(137). The transcendent and passionate love between Heathcliff and Catherine can
never be consummated in marriage but only resort to their phantasmagorical union
after death. In this sense, Wuthering Heights carries Brontë’s criticism on the civilized
society and marriage that confine women in their domestic roles and lead to their final
destruction, both mentally and physically. However, in the context of the 1930s
America, Wyler provides a different reading. For him, Catherine stands for the kind of
women who utilizes marriage as a tool for materialist pursuit and fulfilment at the cost
of her genuine self; Heathcliff falls victim, not as much to the class conflict as to the
materialistic Catherine.
Literary critics pronounce that the tragedy stems from society instead of from
Heathcliff or Catherine’s fault. Eagleton postulates the romantic love between
Heathcliff and Catherine as freedom, and the dialectical interrelation between
freedom and society is that “romantic intensity is locked in combat with society, but
cannot wholly transcend it” (Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës 102).
Similarly, Rod Mengham also comments that the novel defines the loving bonding
between Catherine and Heathcliff with reference to nature, for “the restrictive codes
of the family, society and religion do not allow it any other sphere in which to operate”
(47). Wyler’s film also demonstrates the antithesis between transcendent love/nature
and pragmatic marriage/society, but he mainly puts his critical camera on the
transmutation of Catherine who is poisoned by her own vanity and materialistic
pursuit.
Notwithstanding the fact that economic motive only accounts for a small
fraction in Brontë’s text, Wyler stresses his critique on materialism at risk of faulting

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Cathy alone for the destruction of herself and the other characters’ lives. Wyler
contextualizes and reprogrammes Brontë’s Catherine and fits her in the stereotype of
the 20th
century materialistic and undesirable woman, valorizing the anxieties
anticipating Depression-era where feminine desire for money threatened society.
The relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine is put in jeopardy from the
end of the first third of the film when Catherine is attracted to Linton’s house by
music. They rush down to the Thrushcross Grange from the window of which they
steal a glance at the glamorous ball gathering the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen.
After the window shot subject to the peeper’s perspective, the camera shifts to a
looker-on position framing Catherine and Heathcliff’s face. However, Wyler lights up
and focuses on Catherine’s face while Heathcliff’s face is in the out-of-focus shadow,
a subtle treatment that foregrounds Catherine’s desire to singing and dancing in pretty
dress as those people do.
It is by focalizing the beautiful dress that Wyler advances his observations and
critiques on the destructive impact induced by female aggrandizement. In Brontë’s
narrative, dress is by no means the fetish that traps and frustrates Catherine, for when
she meets Heathcliff after her sojourn in the Linton’s, she runs to embrace Heathcliff
regardless of his dirty outfit that would contaminate her glossy dress. In contrast,
Wyler appropriates the scene but shows that Catherine/Oberon refuses to hug
Heathcliff/Olivier in case that he would dirty her dress, an act demonstrating that she
chooses beautiful dress over Heathcliff’ s love.
Not only Wyler consciously leads the audience to focalize on the dress,
Catherine/Oberon also sees herself in the mirror, a “reflective gaze”, as Brosh puts it
(39), so as to imply his own critique on this character. In Sandra Gilbert and Susan
Gubar’s famous feminist writing, The Madwoman in the Attic, they conclude that,
contrary to the “triumphant self-discovery” in the male Bildungsroman, Brontë
delineates an “anxious” and “self-denial” process of self-discovery as “the ultimate
product of a female education” (276). In the film, Wyler replaces the “female
education” by female’s fetish on glamor and wealth, as a synthetic result caused by
both innate drive and exterior temptation, leading to the equally “anxious and self-
denial process of self-discovery. Coming back from the Linton’s in her beautiful dress,
she catches the sight of herself in the mirror. All of a sudden, she feels something

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strange of herself, something that does not belong to her, so she crazily strips herself
of the fancy dress and lets the inner plain dress she used to wear surface. This frantic
moment elucidates her miserable struggle as the mirror reflects back “a mutated Other”
that rots her inner self in some way. Followed by her reconciliation with Heathcliff on
the Crag, Wyler portrays that in the first phase, Catherine chooses spiritual love over
material wealth. However, this is not yet the end of her self-discovery. Nelly’s
commentary voice-over intrudes, asserting that “Cathy is again torn between how
wildly and uncontrollably passionate Heathcliff and the new life she have found in the
Grange that she could not forget”. That day afternoon, to welcome Linton to
Wuthering Heights, Catherine is dressed in glamorous white dress and has her hair
curled; this time, she enjoys looking her beautiful reflection in the mirror, proud of
her beauty and brilliance. In order to show off how beautiful Oberon is in costume,
the film producer Goldwyn even changed the historical period of the novel from
Regency to Georgian period where there were fancier dresses for women (419).
Heathcliff, who Catherine professes that she has the same soul with, enters her room,
but only to be slighted by her as she says, “since when I have you enter my room,
Heathcliff?” This is a rather disparate statement against Brontë’s Catherine. For in the
novel, Nelly mentions that Catherine shares her room with Heathcliff. Wyler’s
modification underlines the separation of Heathcliff and Catherine, with the latter one
leaning herself to the materialistic possessions drawing them apart. Heathcliff
requests a talk with Catherine and his gaze is still fixed on Catherine, yet she turns her
back on him and continues to indulge herself in herself in the mirror. Her volatile
attitudes toward herself and Heathcliff denote her changeable and moody personality,
as well as her self-discovery by purging out the soul that once she shares with
Heathcliff and establishing the materialistic one.
The second half of the story testifies the self-destructive effect brought by
Catherine’s pragmatic and materialistic marriage to Linton. In the scene where
Heathcliff, already a rich gentleman back from America, comes to Linton’s ball and
gazes statically at Catherine, who is sitting in her chair with her glossy shining dress
and jewelry. Their eyes meet, and Catherine acts anxiously, torn in her heart, not
because she feels regretful, but because she realizes that Heathcliff’s coming back
will definitely destroy the peaceful life she now has. Things turn in the opposite

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direction, to the point where every character’ life is changed and devastated. Finally,
on Catherine’s deathbed, Heathcliff says in misery that he is strong enough to bring
them both back to life “if you[she] want to live”, yet Catherine answers, “no, I want to
die”. Heathcliff straightforwardly points out that it is Cathy’s desire for “fancier
things” that break both of their hearts, and at hearing this, Catherine asks for
Heathcliff’s forgiveness. Through this conversation, Wyler is able to lodge in his
critical reflection on Catherine and her betrayal driven by economic hunger that leads
to the ultimate self-destruction.
As the film contextualizes a modern Catherine with economic craving, it also
marks a turn in the literary criticism on the novel, especially on the sadist character
Heathcliff. In the communication between Brontë’s literary art and the film aesthetics,
Wyler highlights the emotions withheld in Heathcliff/Olivier who endures suffering
from lover’s betrayal and represses passion to balance off his fiendish nature, which
accomplishes two paradoxical interpretations so as to direct the audience and reader to
the diametrical natures in Heathcliff’s human situation (Haire-Sargeant).
Literary criticisms rationalized Wyler’s choice of presenting Heathcliff as a
softened hero instead of devilish anti-hero. It is noted that, in the eyes of the 20th
-and-
21st
-century critics, Nelly is regarded as an “unreliable narrator with murky motives”
(Steere 42). One of the advocators of this theory is John Mathison, who critiques in
1956 that Nelly’s narrative directs the reader “toward feeling the inadequacy of the
wholesome, and toward sympathy with genuine passions, no matter how destructive
or violent” (129). As Leitch acknowledges that film adaptation “can pose as a
liberation of material the original text had to suppress or repress” “ (Film Adaptation
and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to the Passion of the Christ 98),
Wyler’s film is justifiable to unearth the characters, especially, to give Heathcliff a
more sympathetic light.
At the beginning of the film, Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier), instead of
determinedly rejecting to put up Lockwood (in Brontë’s text), says a few words with
Lockwood and then sends Joseph to show him the room upstairs, which indicates the
good nature in the seemingly indifferent Heathcliff. The image of Heathcliff/Olivier is
evinced as “an erect and handsome” figure (Brontë “Wuthering Heights” 5)
preoccupied by morose thoughts, yet his indifference to Lockwood or other people is

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not as much from his misanthropy articulated by Brontë as from the self-regulated
stoicism exuded from Olivier’s soldier-like body. Shachar suggests that analogizing
Heathcliff to a soldier’s body turns him into “a prototype of the ideal soldier who
must endure commands, humiliation, physical and psychological deprivation, pain
and separation from … the female body, emotions and the domestic sphere” (57),
which is constantly cemented by later camerawork that self-consciously fixates on
Heathcliff/Olivier’s suffering body. In this sense, Wyler successfully brings out the
suffering and stoic side of Heathcliff that Nelly has intentionally smoothed out in her
narrative, in the effect that Heathcliff on screen, less savage but more noble, will
evoke more favour and sympathy from the audience (especially female audience),
addressing the masculinity crisis. The cinematic presentation of Heathcliff by the
subjective eyes of Wyler demonstrates his personal criticism of the rather unreliable
narrator Nelly Dean in the novel and addresses the less hinted side of Heathcliff.
The brutal physical violence wielded by Brontë’s Heathcliff is largely omitted
in Wyler’s film. Violence only takes its part when Heathcliff slaps Catherine on the
face when she reckons Heathcliff is dirty. However, unlike Brontë’s Heathcliff who is
indifferent to any violent act, an immediate remorse is generated in Heathcliff, as he
realizes that it is futile to coerce Catherine’s will by physical violence and only an
upward social climbing can win back Catherine’s love. In the next scene, he tramps
back to the stable and thrusts his fist on the window glass. These two particular scenes,
seen by Bluestone, are the “symbol of his guilt, despair, and suffering” (108), driven
by the passion of love instead of the brutality of hate. Heathcliff’s obnoxious revenge
in the literary text is omitted in the film. What audience see and favorably accept is
Heathcliff as a loyal, endurable and noble figure who suffers from Catherine’s
materialistic pursuit and arouses sympathy among audience.
It seems that “hero of the hard time” embodied by Heathcliff/Olivier became a
leitmotif in 1930s and 1940s classic Hollywood production. The masculine suffering,
pain and stoicism is the exact portrayal of men at that time. Men were characterized
by depression from the rising women and terror of the looming war. More examples
can be found from other film adaptation in the Hollywood Golden Era, including
Laurence Olivier’s Maxim de Winter in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Rebecca as well as

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Mr. Darcy in Robert Leonard’s 1940 Pride and Prejudice, and Orson Welle’s Edward
Rochester in Robert Stevenson’s 1943 Jane Eyre.
Ingrained Impact of the 1939 Wuthering Heights
Wyler’s adaptation was a tremendous success. It is estimated that by 1948, 22
million people had seen Wyler’s Wuthering Heights (Ingham 228). A romantic
rendering of Brontë’s difficult text allows the ordinary audience to get access to the
difficult Victorian classic. Stoneman’s statement reveals the powerful influence of
Wyler’s adaptation on people’s recognition of Wuthering Heights in later decades,
“[p]eople who have never read the novel feel they know its central theme, epitomized
by the famous still from William Wyler’s 1939 film showing Laurence Olivier and
Merle Oberon as Heathcliff and Catherine, silhouetted against the sky”
(“Introduction” xiv). Their love was so well responded, for, to some extent, it
accurately addresses the psyche and ethos of the 1930s American society.
As the release of Wyler’s adaptation shortly built up a colossal consumer
foundation, it is fair to say that his cinematic practice not only revitalizes the
Victorian canon in its afterlife, but also, equally remarkably, offers a possible version
of interpretation of this enigmatic novel in its literary as well as cinematic legacy.

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Chapter Three
A Post-Colonial Discourse in 2011:
Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, enigmatic yet magnetic, appeals to many
adaptors attempting to interpret its thematic concerns and accommodate it in their
own times. In 2010, UK film council appointed female director Andrea Arnold to
revision the novel in British contemporary perspective. This chapter will begin with
examining the inherited elements in the vertical line. Then it will go on to analyse the
latest version of the Wuthering Heights adaptation with a particular focus on the
Otherness and the post-colonial discourse. Though the unconventional casting,
filming technique and perspective of this new film invite criticism of the film,
unarguably one of the greatest achievements of Arnold is that she extracts the hidden
post-colonial discourse from Brontë’s text and thematizes it in her film. As a result,
Arnold’s adaptation is a valuable literary criticism as well as a social one.
The Wuthering Heights Franchise
Adaptations create allusion, oscillating the boundary between the reader’s and
viewer’s recognition of the written text and the cinematic text. The model promoted
by Elliott’s “de(re)composing concept” illustrates the possible rationale behind this
confusion, stating that,
Film and novel decompose, merge, and form a new
composition at ‘underground’ levels of reading. The adaptation is
a composite of textual and cinematic signs merging an audience
consciousness together with other cultural narratives and often
leads to confusions as to which is novel and which is film.
(“Literary Cinema and the Form/ Content Debate” 157)
One of the centred issues in recomposition of Wuthering Heights is the representation
of the Yorkshire moor. Breathtakingly beautiful as it is, the brooding moor embraces
the “Burkean Sublime” that “induce awe, fear and transcendence” (Shachar 11) in
Brontë’s text. Her overwhelming obsession with and celebration of the English

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moorland can be well demonstrated from a section one of her early poems, “A little
while, a little while”, written on December 4th
1838,
A little and a lone green lane,
That opened on a common wide.
A distant, dreamy, dim blue chain
Of mountains circling every side ---
A heaven so clear, an earth so calm,
So sweet, so soft, so hushed an air.
And, deepening still the dreamlike charm,
Wild moor sheep feeding every where ---
That was the scene --- I knew it well.
I knew the pathways far and near,
Than winding o’er each billowy swell,
Marked out the tracks of wandering deer.
(Brontë “Emily Brontë's Poems for the 1850 Wuthering Heights” 321)
The screened moor has been invested with generations of imaginations
resonant with Brontë’s mythical and mystical moor as well as configurized by the
urge of time. In the cultural legacy of Wuthering Heights, Wyler’s well-established
reimaging and representing the moor scene mainly engage the destructive
recomposition by demystifying the moor in his own vision, a place that witnesses the
formation, destruction and ghostly reunion of the lovers.
Though Wyler’s interpretation and criticism of the mystical Yorkshire moor
has determined the powerful impact for later adaptations (Ingham 234), Wuthering
Heights remains to be a unfathomable myth awaiting further probing, as these
“enigmatic signs” (Miller “Wuthering Heights and the Ellipses of Interpretation” 86)
in the novel may loom unfilmably for the ambitious adaptors. Like the Jane Austin
franchise, Brontë’s Wuthering Heights has received considerable attention from
filmmakers as well as film critics --- from 1939 to 2012, it has been adapted into 27
films or TV dramas in different countries in various manners, let alone its abundant
derivatives in music, opera and video games. Tyler’s statement possibly addresses the
rationale behind the undiminished appetite for transmitting the literary classic to film,
“the true field of the movies is not art but myth… A myth is a specifically free,
unharnessed fiction” (748).

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Hutcheon considers the adaptation franchise not as tasteless repetition but as a
network that generates “the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise”
(4). The “surprise” here can be pointed to new meanings brought about by a
dimensional dialogue among the original text, the former text and the context;
correspondingly, every version of Wuthering Heights can be deemed as such a
historical dialogue striving to answer the following questions: What has been
revisited? What has been freshly activated? What has been altered? To answers these
questions, we should first bear in mind that “the revisited”, or in Casetti’s words, “the
reappearance” “carries the memory of an earlier discursive event” along with the new
“communicative situation”, thus film generates new meanings in its new context (81).
In 2011, this daunting task fell upon Andrea Arnold who set a bald venture into this
practice in the new era.
Andrea Arnold’s Rewriting
The latest film adaptation of Wuthering Heights is a 2011 naturalistic
rendering directed by British female director Andrea Arnold. As a rising star in
contemporary British filmmaking, Arnold, well-known for her award-winning films
Wasp (2003), Red Road (2007), and Fish Tank (2009), is reputed as a British social
realist filmmakers conforming to the distinctive style in social realistic films: voice of
the “underclass” cultures, untrained actor uttering in their regional voice, loosely
structured plot, delineation of the topography of domestic and rural spaces, quasi-
documentary depictions and naturalistic-orientation (Bell and Mitchell; Tyler 748).
These features determine that Arnold’s film, by no means repetitious, repackages and
recontextualizes the oft-adapted Wuthering Heights with her specific critique on the
novel in light of her own interpretation.
Arnold’s film is labeled as an “art-house film” pointed to a niche market, yet it
fails to utterly divorce from Wyler’s overarching impact. Martin rightly points out
that Arnold’s selection of cutting off half of the plot and concentrating intently on the
scenery and passion that locates her characters bears noticeable trace of Wyler’s
version (Martin 68). Wyler invents a crag “castle” high up Yorkshire moor often
dominating the scene whereby the bare rock symbolizes the inseparable bond between
the lovers and the nature. Arnold’s sometimes out-of-focus long shot of the muddy

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grassy moor integrating two children contrives an even more strong-felt connection
between the wild children and the misty moor.
In Arnold’s transposition, the childhood period of Heathcliff and Catherine
takes up the most of the whole film, in which Heathcliff’s perspective controls the
flow and pace of the movie. The childhood period is also filmed by Wyler, but only
takes up a small fraction of time. It is rightly pointed out by Jacques Rivette, the
director of the 1985 adaptation of Wuthering Heights (Hurlevent), that the major
disparity between Brontë’s novel and its screened afterlife lies on the age of the main
characters (Murray). For Arnold, childhood is pivotal to the foundation of the love
between the two. It is in this innocent period that they are able to develop the loving
sentiment through unself-conscious physical contact (for example, they roll together
on the muddy moor; Catherine licks the blood on Heathcliff’s back), by which the
flames of love are developed. The intimacy between Heathcliff and Catherine is best
represented in the horse-riding scene, where the cinematographer closely shots from
the back of Heathcliff and captures his move of sniffing Catherine’s hair. The camera
is turned to be an active participant engaged in this haptic moment to evoke visceral
identification with Heathcliff in audience. Arnold’s cinematic rhetorics of young
Heathcliff accentuate his living situation: he spends most of his time roaming on the
moor with Catherine. It is the nature (represented by Yorkshire moor) instead of the
civilized society (represented by two households) that nurtures him. By the same
token, he is only accepted as a complete person on the moor, but rejected by domestic
households dominated by white men.
The Otherness and the Post-colonial Discourse
Unlike the subjective camera employed in Wyler’s film to vision the passion-
driven oneness between Heathcliff and Catherine, Arnold demonstrates a rather
inventive yet logical perspective, Heathcliff’s perspective, that prevails the whole
film.
It seems more appropriate to evaluate Arnold’s rewriting of the Brontë’s
narrative as her personal response to the mystifying world blending romantic and
realistic thrusts. In the film, she discards the conventions of British costume film and
instead injects into the contemporary revision with her acute observations of British

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29!
social deprivation which had already been prefigured in her first two lauded films,
Red Road (2006) and Fish Tank (2009). Wuthering Heights on screen is traditionally
defined as a historical romantic drama, whereas Arnold employs her social realistic
camera to strip off all the historical sense but refills it with her social concern.
Arnold’s innovative re-characterization of Heathcliff has drawn people’s
attention on his possible origin of the “gypsy” in Brontë’s text. Casting a black ill-
experienced actor to be Heathcliff has been the centre of the debate, for after
Laurence Olivier enacted a Byronic handsome white Heathcliff, Arnold’s attempt or
even subversion of the image of Heathcliff seems to unacceptable to some audience.
In the release press of 2011 Wuthering Heights, Arnold highlights her aim of situating
Heathcliff as the “ultimate outsider” and a vital key to untangle the lurid motif in
Brontë’s text (McCarthy) as well as to re-imagine the crucial character within a
contemporary British context (Kuhn and Westwell). Though the cinematic tradition
has endorsed a white-skin and Byronic Heathcliff, the ethnic origin of Heathcliff has
become one of the issues concerned by the literary critics. Christopher Heywood
discovers that colonies of black slaves did exist in the 18th
century Yorkshire farms, so
it is reasonable to believe that Heathcliff might be an escaped slave (qtd in Fegan 72);
Susan Meyer’s historical research also evinces that in 1769 (the year in which Mr.
Earnshaw found Heathcliff in Liverpool), Liverpool had become the largest slave-
trading port in England (Meyer 481). As an auteur who has paid much attention to her
pain-ridden protagonists, social class divides and racial problem (Bowler and Cox),
Arnold’s casting choice is aligned with the critical research on Heathcliff’s ethnic
origin, resurfacing a nuanced sign in the paratext so as to rewrite the story and
spotlight the contemporary concerns among the general public.
Albeit the fact that in her last few awarded films, Arnold is used to delineating
the metamorphosis of her lower-middle class strong female protagonists who struggle
yet finally accomplish their self-discovery in contemporary British society, this
overwhelming feminist ideology continues itself to her interpretation of Wuthering
Heights. However paradoxically, the feminist ideology is more projected on
Heathcliff instead of the female characters. The rationale behind it is that the existing
conditions of Heathcliff share a crucial similarity with those of the female characters -
-- they are repressed, restricted, unacknowledged, alienated and helpless. In this sense,

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30!
Arnold’s consistent pivot on the marginalized and much neglected community can be
associated as a post-colonial projection in the case of Wuthering Heights, considering
her accentuation on the black slave foundling living in the Eurocentred and white-
supremacist society, as women living in a Phallocentred society.
The concept of otherness and post-colonialism is alluded to in Brontë’s novel.
Nelly’s narrative of the newly-arrived Heathcliff is permeated immediately with
“Otherness”: “a dirty, ragged, black-haired child”, “repeated over and over again
some gibberish that nobody could understand” (“Wuthering Heights” 29). His racial
background seems to build up an invisible obstacle between him and the polite society.
Mr. Linton’s impression on him is “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish
castaway”, “an out-and-outer” who is assumed to be villainous (“Wuthering Heights”
40). Eagleton’s early study reifies Heathcliff as “an alien”, the “outsider” to the close-
knit Earnshaw family and the domestic system in Victorian England. The presence of
Heathcliff is a rather “arbitrary, unmotivated event” deemed as an enforcement of the
self-enclosed social structure imposed relentlessly on the nature-born gypsy boy
(Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës 102). Accordingly, Von Sneidern
views that the novel problematizes the socially constructed racial system and
identifies Heathcliff as the maligned Other, by which she argues that Heathcliff’s
personality traits encompass contemporary comprehension of black stereotypes (172).
As a social being, Heathcliff is defined as “the racial Other” and “exists separately
from the social constructs of the Earnshaw and Linton families”. Loding-Chaffey
draws on Julia Kristeva’s theories of “abjection” to evince the characterization of
Heathcliff and elucidate his fiendish action. As an abused child enduring Hindley’s
physical and psychological torture, he presents rather animalistic nature that defines
his “abjection”, is shoved out to the liminal “other” whereby the “borderline
personality traits” take shape (207-208).
These literary observations, stemmed from Brontë’s text, anchor even firmer
in Arnold’s visual imagination and expansion. The most noticeable clue is Heathcliff
being a literal African slave, which is denoted not only from his skin-color, but also
from an indistinct skin brand on his back that might evince his slave background.
Besides, the film also employs symbols to serve its atmospheric narrative, and the
dead bodies of animals in the household imply cruelty and brutality. The constant

!
31!
juxtaposition of Heathcliff and wounded or dead animals is a recurrent metaphor of
Heathcliff’s animalistic and fiendish state: on the one hand, just like the innocent
animals, Heathcliff in his nature is deprived of the basic human culture and excluded
from the human society. Heathcliff is not inhuman in nature, but is dehumanized and
relegated to a subhuman social status by his surroundings; on the other hand,
Heathcliff’s maltreatment to the animals, including stabbing the lamb, strangling the
hare and hanging the dog, all exemplifies his violent and vicious emotional burst as
defiance against the misery and trial he has to tolerate. Heathcliff is not born demonic;
he is traumatized by the spiritual and physical abuse in the white man society.
The “Other”, especially the “racial Other” is frequently engaged in the post-
colonial discourse and functions as a keynote to understand cultural identity. Khair
extrapolates that as the 19th
century had witnessed the slave trade in England, it is thus
reasonable to perceive Brontë’s narrative in a colonial context (9), where Heathcliff’s
“foreignness” is placed against the British setting. None of the adaptations that were
made before Arnold touched upon this issue. Arnold’s postcolonial rewriting is more
invested in her reflections on the cultural identity in contemporary British society by
perplexing Heathcliff’s identity.
Both the Earnshaw’s and the Linton’s treatment to Heathcliff represents the
white culture as the dominant power that “colonizes” Heathcliff, the Other, but in
various way. Mr. Earnshaw, the devoted Christian, brings the gypsy foundling home.
As Eagleton suggests that this action is an “arbitrary event” which is rather suspicious
and to some extent determines the malign transformation of the boy, his argument is
testified in the christening scene in the film where Mr. Earnshaw forces him to
convert and christens him the elder deceased son’s name, Heathcliff. Heathcliff’s
violent defiance manifests his rejection of an altered soul and assimilation to the
Western Christian society, yet his resistance proves to be invalid as his head is, even
more violently, pressed into the Sacred Water. In this sense, Mr. Earnshaw may well
testify the “civilizing or evangelizing” (Khair 4) approach to the savage. While Mr.
Earnshaw accounts for the coercing Christian culture in the western society, Hindley
and Linton are responsible for other two cultural divisions in the power center: in the
film, the former, enacted by a Caucasian man with a buzz cut and a foul mouth,
incarnates the fascistic Eurocentred culture that imposes relentless abuse on the

!
32!
colonized; and the latter, fine-boned in physique yet controlling and commanding in
mind, exemplifies the arrogant “civilized gentleman” that excludes the colonized from
the self-acclaimed “democratic” society and foists spiritual torture on them.
Although Heathcliff, the colonized, is characterized as a boy of few words
who seems to be deprived of functional speech in the film, the director gives him the
power of narrative through his voyeuristic interest. Often sitting by the window
looking out, or standing behind the door ajar, the young Heathcliff, the reticent and
lost soul, seeks his own way to survive and define himself by spying on other’s life. In
this process, his strive to contrive his own identity is fraught with misperceptions. For
example, peeping at Hindley and his wife’s sexual intercourse on the moor, young
Heathcliff also imitates their posture on Catherine, yet he can do nothing more but put
mud on her face. It should be noted that the violence of domestic colonization exerted
by Hindley on him, conversely, coaxes Heathcliff’s crave for tyrannical power; and
the Linton’s spiritual pressure triggers his desire for higher social rank by whatever
means to win back Catherine. Therefore, the struggle of establishing his own identity
under such a society only leads to an inadequate “decolonizing” practice, a demonic
sadist that Heathcliff later turns into.
If we say Arnold’s cinematic presentation foregrounds and intensifies the post-
colonial discourse underlying in Brontë’s text, then Arnold’s treatment of the story
ending is rather utopian. At the end of the film, after Heathcliff becomes the new
owner of the Wuthering Heights, he catches sight of a floating lapwing feather, smiles
and walks away. It is mentioned in one of the conversation between Heathcliff and
Catherine previously that lapwing feather is Catherine’s favorite. Thus, the feather
here reminds audience of Catherine and implicitly directs to Catherine’s haunting soul.
Arnold’s replacing a gothic phantom with a feather wipes out the lingering horror
delivered from Brontë’s or Wyler’s narrative and brings out the sense of an ordinary
real world. The feather rests itself on the moor with an elegant manner. This scene is
tranquil, cathartic, peaceful and metaphorical as always, suggesting the completion of
his decolonization ends with the power and economic property gained by the his
colonized past and the identity he finally embraces by negotiating between love and
hate, between nature and culture. It is noted that the serene ending is a stark contrast
with the beginning of the film, where the furious and desperate Heathcliff bashes

!
33!
himself against the wall in a frenzy manner. The passionate love fades and his life
seems to return to peace. The ending is a prominent alteration tailored by Arnold for
her Heathcliff. Heathcliff in Brontë’s novel and previous film adaptations unites with
Catherine and embraces death on the moor, while Arnold’s Heathcliff chooses to
embrace a promising life with his newly found identity, the owner of Wuthering
Heights. Arnold’s revision of the ending gives a fresh light to Brontë’s self-
destructive Heathcliff: instead of living in animosity and uniting with Catherine in
death, he can actually achieves his own decolonization and expects a new life ahead
of him. If we say that the destructive ending in Brontë’s novel is a strongly critical
voice, like a furious storm, resonant to the 19th
-century British society, then the
peaceful and silent ending in Arnold’s film presents the director’s vision of the
triumph of decolonization of the suffering “Other” in society.

!
34!
Conclusion
It should be noted that the examination of two film versions of Wuthering
Heights is not on an evaluative ground but an analytical one. Neither Wyler’s nor
Arnold’s film adaptations can be assessed as a “faithful” version of the literary source
which fully reproduces Brontë’s observations of the Yorkshire story; however, they
do, in their own ways, engage their adaptations in the synchronic and diachronic
dialogue between texts (both literary and cinematic) and contexts, constructing a
broad network that accommodates literary and cinematic criticisms, thus eventually
developing their unique perception of literature and enriching the adaptation industry
in terms of cultural and textual studies.
The passionate yet tragic love between Heathcliff and Catherine connects
Brontë’s text, Wyler and Arnold’s film. In Brontë’s text, Heathcliff and Catherine’s
love is a transcendent love ridden of the boundaries and confines of society. It can
only be built up in the Sublime nature and is doomed to be a failure once “culture”
intrudes. While celebrating nature and love, she also condemns social codes that cause
the ultimate tragic of the whole story: hate, violence and destruction. Both Wyler and
Arnold choose to limit their film contents to the first generation, the romance between
Heathcliff and Catherine, and cut off the second generation overwhelmed with
violence and hate. This treatment, though seen by some critics as a violation to the
literary source, serves to condense their renderings in a particular critical discourse
and consolidate the respective links between the story and the contemporary contexts.
Wyler tampers with both Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s characterization and directs his
criticism on the 1930 materialistic woman that may further lead to the masculine
crisis and threaten the society. Arnold’s adaptation is a bald auteurist film, as she
rewrites the story largely through the point of view of Heathcliff, reflecting her own
interest in the post-colonial discourse and the living conditions of “the colonized” in
contemporary Britain. Although it seems that the critical discourses employed by
Wyler and Arnold are different, they both center their discourses in response to one
particular question, who is responsible for the tragic romance. Their respective

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35!
answers share some knowledge with Brontë, but align more with the different social
contexts.
By examining the inheritance and contextualization of Wuthering Heights, the
thesis sets up a paradigm for adaptation studies that put different versions of
adaptation in a dialogizing process. This paradigm, on the one hand, puts literary
source and its film adaptation on a horizontal scale, foregrounding the literary
criticism conducted by film when director uses their camera as critical eyes; on the
other hand, adaptations are also interrelated vertically, as the former one haunted the
later one, and the later one adds meaning to the former one or expands the discussion.
Thus, this theoretical framework will help rid of the traditional hierarchy imposed on
literature and film, and also facilitate our understanding of the values of film
adaptation in its dynamic development. The legacy of Wuthering Heights may
continue itself in its cinematic afterlives in the future, for it is acknowledged that
Brontë’s novel remains a myth for both literary and adaptation scholars, for its rich
meanings and connotations are yet to be unearthed.

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36!
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