Three Wuthering Heights: Brontë, Fennell, and XCX
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By Quinn Kinsella, Max Pearson, and Arlen Fox-Helbig
Revisiting Emily Brontë’s Seminal Gothic Love Story, Wuthering Heights
By Quinn Kinsella
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is one of the most important novels of the 19th century. Scholarship and discourse has never ceased to find new layers to the gothic romance. The book has found an influx in readership with its 2026’s adaptation starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, and helmed by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell. The most recent adaptation of this novel is Fennell’s third feature film, but she has already established a distinct and recognizable style. She won the best original screenplay Academy Award for her debut, Promising Young Woman and her aforementioned sophomore feature garnering cultural and monetary success.
Fennel’s adaptation of Brontë’s novel has been surrounded by controversy, primarily centering the issue of casting. Over 177 years after its first publication, Wuthering Heights is as relevant today as it was when it was written. Emily Brontë is the middle sibling of the literary greats, the Brontë Sisters. Her elder sister, Charlotte, is the most celebrated of the trio, authoring numerous books including Jane Eyre, Villette and Shirley. The youngest sister, Anne, penned two books, Anges Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The sisters are known for their forward-thinking ideas and early feminist heroines.
Wuthering Heights is the most brooding novel of the bunch. Its desolate setting of the Yorkshire moors (where the sisters were reared) mirrors the internal conflicts of the characters. The novel follows Catherine Earnshaw, the daughter of a once-great landowning family. When her father returns from a business trip with an orphaned young boy, Cathy names him Heathcliff, and they are soon as thick as thieves. What follows is a cataclysmic relationship that results in a conclusion on par with the Greek tragedies the Brontës grew up reading by candlelight. Cathy marries her wealthy neighbor, Edgar Linton, denying her Heathcliff flees Wuthering Heights after overhearing Cathy tell their housemaid “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff.” He recedes from Cathy’s life, but he haunts her every thought as she begins her married life with Edgar.
When Heathcliff returns a changed man, he buys Wuthering Heights from Cathy’s destitute brother. What follows is a serious psychological warfare between the two, until tragedy strikes and one of them is taken away from the other. Wuthering Heights is, in effect, a ghost story. Even when Cathy and Heathcliff are both alive, their presence haunts the other. They are never at peace unless they are together, and even the peace they find when they are together is debatable.
Just a quarter of a century shy of being a two-hundred year-old novel, Wuthering Heights continues to capture the imagination of readers around the world. Translated into 61 languages, Brontë’s gothic tale of love lives on long after her pen graced the last page, like the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliff wandering the moors.
"Wuthering Heights": An Oversexualized Mess
By Max Pearson
When "Wuthering Heights" began its marketing run with the tagline "the greatest love story of all time," more than a few eyebrows were raised. Glittering costumes, romantic caresses, chiseled jawlines — surely, this wasn't the Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë intended. How could a book with such essential themes of racism, classism, and intergenerational abuse possibly be spun into a romance?
Director Emerald Fennell will be the first to tell you her film is unfaithful to its source. As she told the BBC in 2025, "I wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14." Fennell's teenage blind spots are painfully apparent. Catherine (Margot Robbie) and Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) have had their characters' edges whittled clean. Traits such as selfishness, cruelty, and propensity for violence have been cut down or disposed of entirely in favor of creating an archetypal leading lady and an offensively sanitized leading man — neither unique enough to capture a viewer's attention.
Characterization isn't the only change Fennell made. In the novel, Heathcliff is described as a "dirty, ragged, black-haired child," "dark almost as if [he] came from the devil." The character of Heathcliff as a vengeful victim of racist, classist abuse has been thrown out in the casting of Jacob Elordi, a White Australian actor. Elordi's casting not only further alienates the film from its source material, but also takes away the opportunity for a non-White actor to play a hugely publicized, esteemed role. Fennell defends her choice, saying that she forewent the novel's racial and class-based themes for the "sadomasochistic elements" of the storyline. From the opening credits (set to the sound of wood squeaking and breathy moans — later, revealed to be a hanged man) the intention is clear: Fennell's directorial goal was not to adapt, but to shock, excite, and merge subversiveness with sexuality.
She was unsuccessful. "Wuthering Heights" commits a film's one unforgivable sin: it's boring. It's true, reminiscent of Fennell's 2023 film Saltburn, "Wuthering Heights" has a defined, interesting aesthetic. The lighting is dynamic, the costuming is exciting (despite its period inaccuracies), and the set design goes in bold directions. But, much like its characters, while "Wuthering Heights" is visually flashy, there's no substance underneath. The imagery often crosses the line between "subversive" and "comically unsubtle" — for example, a shot in which Catherine's drunken father lies dead, surrounded by two suggestively-stacked piles of empty green bottles.
In addition, Fennell's take is unbearably erotic in tone, a 14-year-old's fanfiction in Moorish set dressing. The film is gratuitous in its attempts to excite the audience — upon Heathcliff's midpoint return from his self-imposed exile, the film drags into what can only be described as a constant montage of sex scenes. When the characters aren't having sex, they're alluding to it, thinking about it, or seeking it. While there's nothing wrong with a bit of bodice ripping, the characters are far too underdeveloped for their physical intimacy to carry emotional weight, and the over-prevalence of these shallow scenes quickly bores the viewer.
Things go from dull to distasteful when Heathcliff marries Catherine's sister-in-law, the kind and naïve Isabella (Alison Oliver). Brontë's Heathcliff is an incredibly abusive husband. In one scene, he is found to have hanged Isabella's beloved dog. The film sees fit to reference this moment with a scene of Heathcliff treating Isabella like a dog, complete with a chain around her neck. When housemaid Nelly (Hong Chau) attempts to rescue her, Isabella joyfully refuses help and dutifully crawls to Heathcliff's side. Fennell depicts a victim of abuse as consentingly and enthusiastically masochistic in an incredibly offensive departure from the text.
Brontë's Wuthering Heights is not a love story. With unflinching depictions of a family torn apart by abuse, her brutal novel will knock at the reader's window long after its final chapter. Unfortunately, Emerald Fennell's "Wuthering Heights" fails to draw out "the greatest love story ever told" from its source material. At its best, it's a frustratingly typical, somewhat aesthetic romance. At its worst, it's an offensively mishandled adaptation. And at its most, it's entirely forgettable.
Deep on the Wily, Windy Moor - Charli XCX’s Pop History of Wuthering Heights
By Arlen Fox-Helbig
At the start of Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête — “Beauty and the Beast” — there is a text scroll imploring the viewer to, for the duration of the film, let go of their adult cynicism and preconceptions, and adopt the worldview of youth — accessed with “once upon a time.” It seems as though the age of “coming of age” skews later and later as time passes, but that’s only because adulthood is a nonstop process instead of a single bar one clears. For instance, I learned about the Charli XCX Wuthering Heights album — and by association “Wuthering Heights” the Emerald Fennell film — through an email from the 21+ Bushwick clubs whose mailing lists I'm on.
The perspective of the “Wuthering Heights” (quotes important!) multimedia project takes is not the one of Emily Brontë, or that of the original Catherine or Heathcliff themselves. It is the perspective of every girl who ever grew up with the story, who used it to channel their adolescent rage, lovesickness, big emotions.
In 2026, the act of being a pop star has a lot in common with being an actor. The differentiating factor is, of course, that an actor has set boundaries for where the character ends and the actor begins. Pop stars rarely do. Perhaps in that regard it's closer to wrestling kayfabe. If the camera is on, you’re in character. In whatever way, the performance of an actor or pop star is holistic. It's not just about music as much as an actor isn't just reading lines from a script. In 2024, Charli XCX embodied the album Brat. She played a character, Brat Charli, stoic, aloof, hornily disaffected, "cigarette (and) sunglasses” life, as she herself describes in a 2025 Substack piece. The source material here taps into something older. The album has travelled back in time, to the days of violin orchestras and emotions unburdened by irony. Of course, this could be the Brontës' time, or the 1980s’ Kate Bush, or even the perfectly sticky girl-pop of Cascada in the 2000s. Pop culture is recently embracing a tradition of pastiche and synthesis, albeit mostly toward Ready Player One-type ends ("remember Ghostbusters?")
My favorite thing about Wuthering Heights the album is that the point is sort of that the emotions stay the same no matter the period. "Everyone sleeps and everyone wakes up." It is a conceptual collage of every young woman’s anguished coming of age. Not only from Brontë and the teen-girl-pop canon, but also from Charli’s post-pop contemporaries: lead single “House” resembles Devi McCallion’s moody industrial textures, and “Always Everywhere” sounds a bit like SOPHIE with a string ensemble. The suffering of Charli’s Wuthering Heights is operatic, all-inclusive. How else is it meant to affect you? This is everybody’s favorite trick of both Gothic fiction and pop music: the way it applies to anybody, anywhere, grand and small, universal and deeply personal at once.
Quinn Kinsella is a film major in his senior year at The City College of New York. He is the Managing Editor at The Paper and covers pop culture and on-campus arts and culture. In his free time, he enjoys watching movies, reading books, and writing poetry.
Max Pearson is a City College transfer student majoring in education. Her dream is to be an elementary school teacher and a published novelist. When not writing, she can be found embroidering flowers on her sweaters, exploring NYC, or nerding out about historical medicine to anyone who will listen.
Arlen Fox-Helbig is currently in her senior year of Anthropology at City College. She believes strongly in the importance of disseminating knowledge and critique for the benefit of society. When not studying she draws, writes, produces music, and performs in several bands in the New York City area as a songwriter, vocalist, and bassist.
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