"Combine this narrative density with the fact that every major character seems to share either a first or last name, making it necessary to maintain a mental org chart of all the Catherines, Heathcliffs, Earnshaws, and Lintons, and Wuthering Heights may be too much book to fit into a single movie."
"Heathcliff and Cathy's fierce attachment to one another goes beyond romantic love: at different points in the novel, it could be described as incestuous, adulterous, necrophiliac, and an act of defiance against the very notion of a cosmic order that separates the earthly from the divine. "I am Heathcliff," Catherine avers in one of the book's most famous passages, before making clear that, when she dies, she would prefer to spend eternity in neither heaven nor hell, but on the windswept moors that give the hilltop house of the title its name."
Wuthering Heights comprises two halves: an initial generation of violent attachments and a later section showing the consequences across families. The plot uses nested points of view and many characters with overlapping names, requiring careful attention to relationships. Filmmakers commonly truncate the work to the first half, emphasizing the destructive bond between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. Their attachment transcends conventional romance and adopts incestuous, adulterous, necrophiliac, and rebellious dimensions. Omitting later scenes erases key outcomes of intergenerational trauma, including acts of grief and haunting that complete the narrative arc.
Read at Slate Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]