Wuthering Heights was a colossal and furious, frowning epic—so why does Hollywood reduce it to romantic pulp?

In her preface for Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Bronte writes for her sister Emily’s work, “Wuthering Heights was hewn in a wild workshop with simple tools, out of homely materials.” She goes on to describe how the ‘statuary’ found a granite block on a solitary moor, and ‘wrought’ with a ‘rude chisel’ from no model but a ‘vision of his meditations’. And slowly, the ‘crag’ took human shape. It’s colossal, dark frowning, terrible and goblin-like, and still beautiful.

Her sister wrote that, dear ones. That was the power, terror and grip that Emily Bronte’s novel had on people in a time gone by.

And now, what would the Brontes say, if they saw the trailer for the Hollywood adaptation? How would Emily feel about her ‘colossal, frowning monster’ that she created, turned into a steamy Mils-and-Boon forbidden romance with a Charli XCX playing in the background?

At best, she might just say that they’ve read two very different books. Hers, is about self-destruction, hatred that burn the embers of a person’s very being, and the other story is about two very-good looking actors in a time that knows the lexicon of ‘green flag, red flag’ and the price of labubus.

It’s jarring, and deeply disorienting, almost akin to the same feeling of fifth-hand embarrassment that Netflix’s Persuasion attempted---the film tried to ‘Fleabag’ its way through, completely ignoring the poignance of Jane Austen’s book that wasn’t just some by-the-way tale of star-crossed lovers, erasing the class distinctions completely.

Nevertheless, there will be those who will say,  but ‘wait for the film’. True, but after watching classics turn into Hollywood mulch, it’s a bit difficult to feel otherwise. Barring Far From The Madding Crowd, which starred fantastic Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts., the recent spate of classic adaptations seem to be missing finer points of the classics.

They weren’t always just ‘love stories’ and cannot be narrowed down to ‘toxicity’—another word that is brandished in today’s world to the point that it’s losing the pungency. Books like Wuthering Heights, especially need to be treated with respect, rather than skimmed through and superficially understood as some tale about how two lovers couldn’t find their way to each other. It cannot be brought down to ‘toxic soulmates’, which TikTok will invariably do, completely flattening it’s terrifying power.

It's a brutal tale. The story is pulsing with hurt, seething rage on every page. The characters are cruel, too, to those they love and to themselves. Catherine is selfish, unbearably so, and that’s why the book is so vivid and raw. Heathcliff’s revenge isn’t some ‘bad-boy’ broody fellow that you see in a regular streaming series.

 To turn Wuthering Heights into just a love story is to tame a storm; Emily Brontë’s frowning monster deserves nothing less than the full force of its haunting, terrible beauty.