Wuthering Heights Literature Analysis

2 .Wuthering Heights and its Place in the English Literary Canon

Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights has held its place in the English literary canon, standing tall as ‘one of the best known and most studied novels in the English language’ (Newman, 9) in the hundred and fifty odd years subsequent to its publication. Despite its atypicality as an English novel (Newman, 9), particularly in that it defies generic classification of the Victorian novel, Wuthering Heights lends itself to the term “classic” as per Kermode’s definition of a “classic” being a text that continually “offer[s] itself to be read under our own particular temporal disposition”(434).

The intrinsic complexity but simultaneous possibility for varied interpretation

Overview of the Art of Film Adaptation

The challenges in adapting a novel, and in particular Wuthering Heights, can be understood with greater clarity when read in conjunction with the general theories of film adaptation.

Adapting a literary text for screen has been studied from increasingly many perspectives over the last couple of decades. From George Bluestone’s seminal 1957 text Novel to Cinema, adaptation studies have come a long way to include diverse views and theories ranging from racism to new historicism. Right into the late 70’s, adaptation studies resonated with [Walter] Benjamin’s argument [in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production’, 1936)] that mechanical reproduction, most pre-eminently film technology, obliterates the ‘aura’- i.e. the authenticity, authority, originality, uniqueness – of the world of art, thus bringing about a ‘liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage (Aragay, 12).’

However the basic and official critical models of literary film adaptation are all formulated on the film’s degree of fidelity to the literary text (Elliott, 220). The attitude towards this issue of textual fidelity has undergone a remarkable transition from the time when Geoffrey Wagner’s three models of adaption valued and ranked adaptations according their degree of infidelity to the original. Narratologist Brian McFarlane critiques this very same ‘fidelity pre-occupation’ as a ‘near-fixation’, ‘unilluminating’ and a ‘doomed enterprise.’

As a novel, the reader response it evokes is intense as it is diverse. Since the early decades of the twentieth century, from when on Wuthering Heights has been a fixture in the literary canon, it has also lent itself to ‘an unusually rich and varied array of adaptations in other media (Newman, 9).’ The novel remains a favourite for screenplay adaptations, as the constant number of screen adaptations over the decades signify. It should however be kept in mind that the fifteen or so screen adaptations, when contrasted against the twenty-seven that Jane Eyre has spawned, is testimony to the fiendish difficulty of adapting this novel to screen. Part of this fascination, despite the challenges, seems to stem from the almost inexplicable power and allure of the novel, which poses a remarkable challenge for any scriptwriter(s) to adapt and for any director to visualize, not to mention the challenge posed to the actors involved in order to portray the multifaceted nature of the main protagonists. Perhaps more than any other nineteenth-century English novel, Wuthering Heights has ‘broken free of its origins and invited new versions of itself in divergent cultural contexts (Newman, 9).’ Kate Bush’s 1978 single Wuthering Heights is perhaps the best example of such an ‘adaptation’, wherein she sings the voice of Catherine’s ghost at the window, begging to be let in. The supernatural elements