Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

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INTERPRETING PASSION AND VIOLENCE IN
EMILY BRONTE’S WUTHERING HEIGHTS .AND
THE 1939. 1992, .AND 1953 FILM ADAPTATIONS
A THESIS
Presented to the Department of English
California State University, Long Beach
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements of the Degree

Master of Arts
By Stacey L. Rinder
BA. 1983, California State University, Long Beach
August 1997
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WE, THE UNDERSIGNED MEMBERS OF THE COMMITTEE,
HAVE APPROVED THIS THESIS

EMILY BRONTE’S WUTHERING HEIGHTS AND
THE 1939, 1992, AND 1953 FILM ADAPTATIONS
By
Stacey L. Rinder
COMMITTEE MEMBERS
Wilhelmina Hotchkiss, PhD. (Chair) English
Beth Lau, PhD. English
Stephen Cooper, PhD. English
ACCEPTED AND APPROVED ON BEHALF OF THE UNIVERSITY
Frank Fata, PhD.

Associate Dean
College of Liberal Arts
California State University, Long Beach
August 1997
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ABSTRACT

EMILY BRONTE’S WUTHERING HEIGHTS AND
THE 1939, 1992, AND 1953 FILM ADAPTATIONS
By
Stacey L. Rinder
August 1997
This thesis investigated the relationship between a classic text and its film
adaptations in an attempt to uncover the intangible “it” that makes a particular film a good
adaptation o f a literary work.
This study specifically focused on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and William
Wyler’s 1939, Peter Kosminsky’s 1992, and Luis Bunuel’s 1953 film adaptations of the
novel. After gaining a clearer understanding of film adaptation theory and establishing
Bronte’s most strongly supported theme as all people having inherent violent tendencies
and a primitive nature of animal passion which can be exacerbated by poor upbringing and
an abusive living environment, I read the three films against this information noting the
changes from novel to film and their implications.
This investigation found that the intangible “it” needed to make a good film
adaptation is the filmmaker’s capture and conveyance of the novel’s most strongly
supported theme.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my family for providing encouragement, peace and quiet,
sanity, and chocolate when needed throughout the thesis process.
I would also like to thank Dr. Mimi Hotchkiss. Dr. Beth Lau, and Dr. Stephen
Cooper for their patience, constructive criticism, and invaluable support and guidance.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..................................................................................... iii
INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................. 1
CHAPTER
1. ADAPTATION, INTERPRETATION, EXPECTATION, AND

MISCONCEPTION............................................................................... 3
2. PASSION IN THE N O V E L .................................................................. 19
3. THE CLASSIC: WILLIAM WYLER’S 1939 ADAPTATION . . . . 44
4. A BODY WITHOUT A SOUL: PETER KOSMINSKY’S 1992

ADAPTATION..................................................................................... 54
5. BRIEF, YET INTENSE: LUIS BUNUEL’S 1953 ADAPTATION . 64
CONCLUSION........................................................................................................ 78
WORKS C IT E D ..................................................................................................... 81
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INTRODUCTION
In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it is hard to take Mr. Collins seriously when
he tells Elizabeth Bennett during his marriage proposal, “‘now nothing remains for me [to
do] but to assure you . . . of the violence of my affection’” (93). After all, the odious
clergyman seems neither violent nor affectionate. However, if this statement concerning
“the violence of my affection” were to come out of the mouths of Emily Bronte’s
characters in Wuthering Heights, the words would take on a new significance. For the
Eamshaws and Lintons, “violence” does not suggest hyperbole of affection as it does for
Mr. Collins; rather, it suggests a fierce, inextricable connection between love and violence.
In Bronte’s fictional world on the unforgiving Yorkshire moors, humans have by

nature a primitive core of animal passion, which manifests itself as love, violence, or a
perverted combination of both. Bronte saturates the text with this animal passion and its
aspects of love and violence through dialogue, action, and images, as well as characters
who are passionately violent—inflicting pain on another being and relishing it—and
violently passionate—“loving” in order to inflict pain on the “loved one.”
After delving into the depths of passion in Bronte’s text, I turned my attention to
the film adaptations of the novel. I was struck not only by the variety of adaptations, but
also by the extreme differences between the story in the novel and the story on the screen.
How could the films be so different from one another and from the original story when the
films were based on the same text? What is it exactly that makes for a good adaptation of
a classic novel? Is it plot? Is it characters? I set out to find answers to my questions by
studying theories of film adaptation, Bronte’s text, and certain film adaptations of the
novel.
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I decided to focus my critical inquiry on William Wyler’s 1939, Peter Kosminsky’s
1992, and Luis Buiiuel’s 1953 film adaptations of Wuthering Heights: three versions
which show a variety of textual interpretation. Any discussion of Wuthering Heights
adaptations must include William Wyler’s 1939 film. His adaptation is considered to be
not only a good film but a faithful adaptation of Bronte’s complex novel even though only
the first half of the novel makes it into the film. Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 adaptation is
included in this study for the purpose o f questioning whether or not having all the
chapters, moments, and characters translated from the novel to the screen makes for the
best adaptation of Wuthering Heights, or if it is something other than literal translation.
Finally, Surrealist director Luis Bunuel’s 1953 adaptation will be examined to see if a film
which radically departs from the original text in location, scenes, and dialogue can capture
and successfully conveys Bronte’s thematic emphasis of animal passion inherent in all
people.
The purpose here is not simply to point out similarities and differences between a
film’s interpretation and presentation of the novel and the novel itself; it is to asses the
implications of the various changes made when “mutating” a novel into a film.
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CHAPTER 1
ADAPTATION, INTERPRETATION, EXPECTATION, AND MISCONCEPTION
In Double Exposure: Fiction Into Film. Joy Gould Boyum examines the history of
film adaptation. She credits French and Italian filmmakers in approximately 1902 with
being the front-runners of adaptation. In 1908, a company in France calling itself La
Societe Film d’Art was created with the “purpose of translating prestigious literary works
to the screen” (3-4), basing their films on novels and dramas by French, British, and Italian
writers. While these primitive adaptations may not have been considered great works of
art, the films were recognized for their potential to educate those who might not have had
the opportunity or ability to read masterpieces of literature. However, as Boyum points

out, the film industry is not a philanthropic movement dedicated to educating and
increasing literacy of the masses, but a business whose main purpose is to turn a profit.
Boyum asserts that filmmakers past and present have used literature as the foundation for
film; witness the popular Merchant-Ivory theatrical productions and BBC television
productions of adaptations in the 1980s and 1990s. Filmmakers turn to literature for
various reasons; the plots and characters already exist; a classic or popular piece is
considered “proven property” by filmmakers; and basing a film, “that suspect, vulgar
form” (4) on a classic literary work brings a sense of the original text’s prestige to the
film, thereby raising film’s stature as a legitimate art form equal to the novel.
As a classic text, Wuthering Heights has been popular fodder for film adaptation
and has been reincarnated several times since the advent of the moving picture. In
addition to film and TV, Emily Bronte’s novel has been produced once as an opera in
1958, twice as a play in 1934 and 1939, and three times as a radio drama in 1939, 1940
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and 1955 (Hanson 2477). The novel’s auspicious cinematic life began with a silent
version directed by A. V. Bramble in 1920 for Ideal, a British company. According to

Michael B. Druxman in Make it Again. Sam. Bramble’s adaptation included the second
half of the novel (chapters 17-34), though it eliminated the characters of Isabella Linton,
Lockwood, and Linton HeathclifF (211). Hollywood made the first talking adaptation of
the novel in 1939 under William Wyler’s direction. Wyler’s film is the most successful
Wuthering Heights adaptation in history, receiving critical kudos, box-office success, and
eight Academy Award nominations. No one has been able to top its critical and
commercial success or even equal it for that matter, though many have tried.
Wuthering Heights first appeared on television in 1948 as a “Kraft Theatre”
production (Hanson 2477). Part of the novel appeared as a dramatic scene on Ed
Sullivan’s “Toast of the Town” television show in 1949 (Prouty). In 1950, “Studio One”
aired an adaptation starring Charleton Heston (Hanson 2477). Two adaptations of the
novel were produced in 1953: a made-for-TV movie (Hanson 2477) as well as Luis
Bunuel’s film version. Another made-for-TV movie aired in 1954 (Prouty). In 1958,
Wuthering Heights was shown as a tele-play starring Richard Burton, Denholm Elliott,
and Patty Duke on “DuPont’s Show of the Month” (Prouty). After that, Wuthering
Heights lay dormant in Hollywood for eleven years until positive critical and audience
reception to Franco Zefirelli’s Romeo and Juliet in 1969 sparked American International
Pictures’ decision to remake the novel in 1970 with Robert Fuest directing (Druxman 213-
14). Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times reported in 1971 that Fuest’s film was
enough of a hit that a sequel, Return to Wuthering Heights, centering on HeathclifF s son
and Cathy’s daughter, had already been written and was slated to begin production that
fall (D ll), though nothing ever came of it. In 1985, the French released an adaptation of
the novel called Les Hauts de Hurlevent (or simply Hurlevent) based on the first chapter
of the novel and set in the French countryside in the 1930s (Hanson 2477). In 1991,
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weekly Variety reported that there was talk of Zefirelli directing a TV miniseries of the
novel for Britain's Granada TV (np), while the London Observer reported rumors
circulating through Hollywood that another studio was considering making a musical
version of the novel—starring Madonna (3). In 1992, Screen International reported that a
30-minute adaptation of Bronte’s novel was being made “as part of a 12-film series of
'erotic tales’” (2). Also in 1992, Paramount released Emilv Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
in Britain. Despite selling out all 500 theater seats within three hours and receiving a three
minute ovation at its preview in Edinburgh (Brooks np), the film was not the success
Paramount expected it to be and it was never released in the United States.

At about the same time Wuthering Heights was first filmed, film theorists began
developing their ideas on adaptation. Bela Balazs, a Russian Formalist who started
writing film criticism in 1920s, stated that an adaptation must depart from an original text
in order to film the text’s true cinematic subject. Similar to the way a formalist contends
the text in question exists independently from an author, Balazs as a formalist film theorist
contends the adaptation exists independently from the original text. Balazs sees nothing
wrong with film adaptation “so long as [the filmmaker] tries to reshape [the original
material] via the form-language of cinema” (Andrew 87). The filmmaker creates a new
piece which may have elements of the original but does not, nor should it, slavishly
replicate the text. For Balazs, film cannot represent reality because film is an art, and “art
always brings to this world its own human patterns and human meanings. Reality, though,
is multifaceted and open to many uses” (Andrew 87). Balazs admitted that his method of
adaptation was not always successful because a classic piece of literature “is a work whose
subject ideally suits its medium. Any transformation of this work will inevitably produce a
less satisfactory result” (Andrew 87). For Balazs, adaptation is only possible if the
filmmaker takes artistic license and changes the material to fit the medium of film. It is
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therefore virtually impossible, according to this theory, to retain the integrity of the
original text.
Realist film theorists think differently about adaptation and artistic license.
Siegfried Kracauer asserts “that of all literary forms the novel is closest to cinema,”
although he recognizes they are “still distinct from” one another (Andrew 121). An
adaptation need not depart from the original work, as the text can successfully be
translated from its original linguistic medium to a visual one. Yet Kracauer recognizes
limitations to his assertion. He believes it is possible to transform a literary work into film
only “when the content of the novel is firmly rooted in objective reality, not in a mental or
spiritual experience” (Andrew 121). An adaptation based on a “realistic” or “naturalistic”
novel, such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, where the action occurs externally
in relation to the characters, will successfully translate to the screen, whereas as a novel
centered on action occurring internally—within a character’s mental or emotional state—

such as Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, will fail due to film’s visual nature; the
filmmaker can render tangible happenings in relation to a character or characters, not the
complexity of visually-defying internal emotions (Andrew 121). Kracauer believes devices
such as voice-over narration used to convey a character’s internal struggle are “an
admission of the failure of the visual imagination or of the impropriety of the subject
matter” (Andrew 121).
Andre Bazin, another realist, also reacted positively to adaptations, claiming they
were not, as “modem critics” believed, “a shameful way out” of film making (56). Unlike
Balazs and Kracauer, Bazin held that adaptations were meant to maintain the integrity of
the original material regardless of material or spiritual action: “cinema must employ none
of its own formative plastic tricks; it must let the original shine through as purely as
possible” (Andrew 151). Bazin devotes a chapter in the first volume of What is Cinema?
to adaptation, which he refers to as “mixed cinema” (53). In 1958 when Bazin published
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his first essays on film, he believed that adaptation of a literary work had changed from
Balazs’s idea in the 1920s—departing from the text to create a film—to depicting literary
works “virtually unaltered” on the screen. Bazin recognizes that it is impossible to retain
every moment, word, and character from the original, particularly when adapting a novel,
which “calls for some measure of creativity, in its transition from page to screen” (54-55).
And yet he declares that too much artistic license is undesirable because “the film-maker
has everything to gain from fidelity” (65) to the original text. Fidelity for Bazin relates
directly to what he considers the “essence” of the novel. A filmmaker can stray from
depicting the novel’s “essence” only if it becomes inevitable for him to do so (65).
Unfortunately, Bazin remains vague as to what he considers the “essence” of a novel to
be, or the inevitable situations where a filmmaker would feel it necessary to depart from
the original text. Bazin argues that the best adaptations will achieve some sort of middle
ground between the original text’s “essence” and literal meaning: “For the same reasons
that render a w'ord-bv-word translation worthless and a too free translation a matter for
condemnation, a good adaptation should result in a restoration of the essence of the letter
and the spirit” (67).
George Bluestone’s 1957 Novels into Film was the first in-depth work devoted to
investigating adaptations. His main purpose is to show the differences between original
texts and their subsequent film adaptations, much as this thesis investigates the same
question in relation to Wuthering Heights. Bluestone recognizes the limitations of both
films and novels, stating that a good novel does not mean a good film will follow: terrible
films have been made from great books while great films have been made from terrible
books (viii). Similarly, Boyum reminds us that “an adaptation can be as original or
unoriginal as any other kind of movie” (17), which accounts for the varying degrees of
success—that is critical acclaim, audience approval, profit, and awards—for each

Wuthering Heights film. Boyum misinterprets Bluestone’s conclusions believing he
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ultimately decides that the original texts are always superior to their film counterparts (9)
Yet at no point does Bluestone argue that one medium is superior to the other; they are
different mediums that cannot be compared. He notes that changing a novel, or
“mutating” it in his words, into a film produces inevitable changes. Bluestone includes
Wyler’s Wuthering Heights in his survey of adaptations “as an example of changes which
the film-maker necessarily adopts in order to make a nineteenth-century British novel

comprehensible to a twentieth-century American audience” (be).
In a May 26, 1997, Counterpunch letter in the Los Angeles Times Calendar
section, freelance writer Alexander Nibley bemoans the fact that adaptations are marketed
to deceive the potential viewer into believing he will indeed be seeing a quality film based
on a quality piece of literature. He is angry about studios using an author’s name in
conjunction with the film title such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, or in this case, Emilv Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Nibley rails, “it is
shameful and revolting to sell lesser efforts to the public under the name of a great
storyteller whose works it appears they [the filmmakers] have never read, much less
followed” (F3). But just how does Nibley expect the text to be “followed”? Bluestone
explains that “there is no necessary correspondence between the excellence of a novel and
the quality of the film in which the novel is recorded” because a filmmaker does not adapt
a novel in its entirety, but rather adapts “a kind of paraphrase” of the novel. The
filmmaker does not even need to read the novel he is adapting because it is possible to
extract “characters and incidents which have .. . achieved a mythic life of their own” (62)
and create a film from that material instead. I remember seeing a trailer for Moll Flanders
starring Robin Wright and Morgan Freeman and thinking to myself that I did not
recognize the situations or characters on the screen. When the credit panel showed, I
searched the fine print to discover, “Based on a character from Daniel Defoe’s Moll
Flanders.”
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Nibley is not concerned about truth in advertising or respect for dead authors and
their work; his greatest concern is the viewer. He believes the viewer who sees a less-
than-stellar adaptation will be so influenced by that bad image of the original work and its
author that when given the opportunity to read the original work, the viewer will pass:
“‘Na,’ I can hear kids saying, ‘saw the movie. Pretty lame’” (F3). Boyum reminds us that
“An adaptation is always . . . an interpretation” (62). However, if the viewer understood
the concept of adaptation as interpretation, then Nibley would have no reason to be
concerned because the viewer would know that a bad film adaptation is not derived from
an inferior or poorly written text.
Nibley’s concern is valid, but there is decidedly less danger than he believes.
Evidence shows that film adaptations inspire viewers to read the original text. Bazin
states that film adaptations “cannot harm the original in the eyes of those who know it,
however little they [the filmmakers] approximate it,” and that the person who has not read
the novel before viewing the film will either enjoy the film for what it is, or become
inspired to read the original work (65). Boyum concurs: “The simple fact is that when a
film is made of a novel, it tends to encourage reading rather than discourage it—just as the
fact that we’ve read the novel encourages us to see the film” (15). Several sources report
that Wyler’s 1939 adaptation sparked amazing interest in the novel. More people bought
the novel at that time than they did since the novel’s publication date in 1847. Bluestone
gives the number o f Pocket Book editions of Bronte’s novel sold in 1939 as 700,000 (4),
although he does not reveal the number of days, weeks, or months required to achieve that
number. Currently, one need only to peruse the New York Times paperback bestseller list
to see the correlation between what is on the list and what is in the theaters. Generally,
film rights are acquired after a novel has been released in hardcover. Later, the paperback
of the same title will often become a bestseller right before the film’s release or shortly
after, and remain one for the film’s run. A common practice for publishers is to release or
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reissue a paperback that has been adapted with a movie still on the front cover to make the
book more readily identifiable and appealing to the purchaser.
I myself am always interested in reading the original text after I have seen a film
adaptation. The attraction for me lies in discovering what the filmmakers have changed,
augmented, and/or omitted. I want to find all changes while reading and discover the
purpose the change served. Conversely, when I have read the original text before seeing
the film, I watch specifically to catch changes, augmentations, and/or omissions, in relation
to the novel. In addition, I try to anticipate how a particular scene, line o f dialogue, or
character will be depicted. I speculate on the filmmaker’s motivation for including certain
situations, characters, and dialogue, and not others. My interest in changes from novel to
film are not to judge whether the filmmaker’s decisions were right or wrong, but to ask
why the changes were made. All of the changes from novel to film are clues to how the
filmmaker interpreted the text.
Adaptations are popular with movie audiences, as evidenced not only by the box-
office return, but also by the number of Academy Award nominations and actual awards
such films receive. Throughout the history of the Oscars several Best Picture Academy
Award winners have been adaptations, including 1996’s Best Picture for The English
Patient, based on Michael Ondaatje’s novel. Boyum considers “the prime reason that
many of us are attracted to adaptations” to be “the promise they carry of allowing us to
relive an experience we have found exciting, moving, absorbing” in the novel as well as
“our desire to see that novel embodied and sometimes, too, our wish to see what someone
else has made of the experience it offers” (44). Using Louise Rosenblatt’s theory of
reader response, Boyum likens the exchange between viewer and film to the exchange
between reader and text in that each individual will interpret a text/film according to
personal beliefs, background, and mindset. The viewer reads and interprets the text and
then subsequently interprets the film based on prior personal interpretation. In other
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words, the viewer judges the film not only on its own merits and flaws, but also on prior
personal interpretation of the original text (Boyum 50). Viewers watch the film in hope of
having it match their personal interpretations of the novel and become either satisfied or
frustrated with the film’s matching, or not matching, their emotional experience with the
text in addition to the pictures in their minds. According to Boyum,
Ultimately we are not comparing book with film, but rather one
resymbolization with another—inevitably expecting the movie projected on
the screen to be a shadow reflection of the movie we ourselves have
imagined. Not only do we come to an adaptation with the hope of reliving
a past experience, but we often tend to come with the hope of having the
same experience. (50)
A closer examination of “sameness” reveals its inadequacy as well as the inherent naivete
on the part of the reader/viewer who expects this sameness between novel and film.
Bluestone also recognizes the difficulty inherent in “sameness,” arguing that we cannot
necessarily judge the film treatment of a novel or endeavor to compare the two because
“the end products of novel and film represent different aesthetic genera, as different from
each other as ballet is from architecture” (5). Bluestone also states that people comparing
book to film and vice versa do so unaware “that mutations are probable . . . the moment
one abandons the linguistic for the visual medium” (5). He asserts that films work in a
different way than novels do; film and literature meet at a certain point, then diverge to
meet their own medium’s criteria. Novels can capture what could never be filmed, while
films can concretize the abstract. Seymour Chatman’s idea from Coming to Terms
summarizes the concept of difference for us; language specifies without determining
whereas film determines without specifying. The written word will be interpreted
according to the individual reader; a concrete visual image interprets the written word for
the viewer, leaving little, if any, room for individual interpretation of the scene.
Bluestone states that “the film-maker merely treats the novel as raw material and
ultimately creates his own unique structure” (vii). This is inevitable in that films and
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novels are different mediums with different liberties and restrictions—there is no way to
exactly reproduce visually what occurs in a novel. As with idioms in a language, some
passages in a novel simply defy translation. Similarly, Boyum likens the film adapter’s
task to that of the language translator’s. Both must concede to the original work while
simultaneously creating another work which can stand on its own. Boyum calls the
adapter a reader who can interpret the text either “naively and superficially, or with insight
and intelligence” (70). And while “[t]he filmmaker may not be able to come up with the
sense of any given work . . . he will, of necessity,. . . come up with some sense” (70) of
the work, again based on his own interpretation. Boyum is vague on the meaning of
“sense.” It is unclear whether she is interpreting “sense” to be theme, characterization,
setting, language, or all or none of the above. Moreover, she has argued that the “sense”
of a given work will change according to the interpreter. Again questions arise. How do
we determine the sense of any work if it changes according to individual interpretation? Is

this even possible or realistic to attempt let alone achieve? “Yes,” if we consider “sense”
to be theme. A novel might have more than one theme or valid interpretation of that
theme; however, for a theme to successfully translate to the screen, it needs to be strongly
supported by the text.
There is more than one method of adapting a novel, or any work of fiction, to the
screen. In The Novel and the Cinema. Geoffrey Wagner offers “three types of transition
of fiction into film” (222), which he has derived from Balazs; “transposition,”
“commentary,” and “analogy.” Wagner terms an adaptation a transposition when “a novel

is directly given on the screen, with the minimum amount of interference.” He notes that
while transposition “has been the dominant and most pervasive method used by
Hollywood throughout its history . . . it has also been the least satisfactory.” Wagner calls
these adaptations Hollywood’s version of book illustrations (223). Commentary, the
least-used mode of adaptation, “where an original is taken and either purposely or
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inadvertently altered in some respect,” Wagner explains, "could also be a re-emphasis or
restructure” of the original. For Wagner, commentaries can depart from the original text
and at times the artistic license can enhance the film and make it more interesting. A
commentary results “when there has been a different intention on the part of the film
maker, rather than an infidelity or outright violation” of the original text (224). Wagner
considers commentary as “represent[ing] more of an infringement on the work of another
than an analogy,” the third mode of adaptation (223). An analogy takes “the merest hints”
(230) from a story and retells essentially the same story in a contemporary setting and
location (226). Wagner cites Bergman’s Cries and Whispers as an analogy to “the life of
Christ” (226) to illustrate how loose an analogy can be. Analogies depart from the
original text “for the sake of making another work of art” (227). A single analogous scene
or technique will not categorize a film as an analogy.
Even though Wagner gives three distinct modes of adaptation, he admits that the
lines separating the categories can blur and not all films fit neatly and distinctly into one
category. According to Wagner’s terms, Wyler’s Wuthering Heights is a commentary,
not, as he categorizes it, a transposition because half of the novel is not accounted for.
Wagner’s attempt at categorization shows the difficulty of this project; there is no one
hard and fast way to categorize adaptations or define them by type. I would instead offer
a different and slightly more general approach to classifying adaptations. Wagner’s
categories are more useful when positioned within broader categories, such as “loose,”
“faithful,” and “literal” to encompass the various types of adaptation possibilities. A
“loose” adaptation could be one of Wagner’s analogies and would include a film based on
a character or event from a literary work. A “faithful” adaptation would include Wagner’s
transpositions and commentaries along with adaptations where the filmmakers have taken
artistic license with the original text, yet the original is still strongly recognizable as the
film’s basis. “Literal” adaptations would be those films which attempt to include on the
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screen each element, line of dialogue, character, and situation, and where little, if any,
artistic license is taken. The pitfalls of this last approach are evident in Boyum’s term for
them: “dogged translations” (67). Despite their fidelity to the original text they can be
deathly boring and to many viewers familiar with the text they may still completely miss
the mark. This is possible to do because each person’s interpretation of the text will
differ. My three proposed categories would help position a film in relation to the text
more accurately than Wagner’s; however, my categories are still slippery, since ultimately
one person’s interpretation of a film can differ from another person’s.
Boyum contends that when adapting a novel for the screen, the adapter must face
and overcome the difficulties inherent in adaptation such as “rendering and finding
equivalents for a novel’s focus or point of view” or “capturing a novel’s particular tone”
(80). The adapter must also somehow deal with the “metaphor and symbolism” in the
written text and convert these to concrete visual images. However, as previously stated,
since film and novel are two different mediums, one is not always translatable to the other.
Films can do what novels cannot while novels can do what films cannot. Words have
greater suggestion of meaning and interpretation, thus giving each reader a chance to
construct images within the mind and make intangible associations of feelings and
emotions or give greater thrust to a symbol or cluster of symbols which would be rendered
ridiculous if translated literally into an image (Boyum 22). Novels have power of the
written word whereas films have the power of the silent image: a landscape, an actor’s
expression or gesture. Bluestone states that characters in a novel “are inseparable from
the language that forms them” and so trying to recreate a character on screen visually
“often seems dissatisfying” (23). Bluestone declares that “mental states—memory, dream,
imagination— cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language” (47) and that

film can only “lead us to infer thought. . . . it cannot show us thought directly” (48) as a
passage in a novel can. Novels can also play with time, having a passage be present, past,
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and future in a character’s mind, as when a character is in one place, reflecting on a past
event and/or emotion in that place, and perhaps considering future action or
conceptualizing how that place will look or be in the future. It can be suggested by
symbolism, but not directly translated into a visual image.
Like Bluestone, John Harrington in “Wyler as Auteur” agrees that the viewer can
experience sensations unachievable through reading the novel. He cites the impact sound,
in sound effects and especially music, has on the audience. Harrington argues that music
can cause the audience to connect emotionally with a character or characters. He notes
that in the 1939 Wuthering Heights. Catherine has a theme song which is subtly played in
the opening scenes of the film and resurfaces with a crescendo when she returns to the
Heights in Lockwood’s “dream” (74). By inserting music, particularly music associated
with Catherine, "the filmmakers help us share emotionally what Lockwood feels and fears.
We are able to apprehend his point o f view both intellectually and emotionally, something
difficult to accomplish with the written word alone” (74). In addition to the moving
camera, music makes the viewer an actual participant in the scene. Not only does the
viewer/participant see Lockwood’s experience with the ghost-child, “we also hear her
voice and recoil with him at the touch of her hand . . . . we can share that experience with
Lockwood” (74-75). Therefore, through sound and a concrete visual image, a happening
that a reader may question in the novel as being real is made real in the film.
An adaptation of a classic work answers to two interpretive communities—filmic
and literary—whereas a film based on an original screenplay answers only to the filmic
interpretive community. In the case of a film like Wuthering Heights, which is based on a
classic text, the film must somehow maintain an accordance with the interpretation “put
forth by the [literary] interpretive community; with the interpretation (or possible
interpretations) of that classic work, then, that made it a classic in the first place” (Boyum
77). Because it has been adapted several times, Wuthering Heights is more complicated
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than a text with a single film adaptation that must answer to one interpretive community
The adapter of a new Wuthering Heights film must consider the filmic interpretive
community as well as the literary interpretive community. This is where the complications
arise; the literary interpretive community which views the novel as being rife with violence
is in direct conflict with the Hollywood cinematic interpretive community which goes by
the 1939 William Wyler film, and views Wuthering Heights as a romantic love story.
While the adapter and filmmaker must decide how to deal with inherent difficulties
such as tone and symbolism, more often than not they will give greater priority to
decisions regarding the adaptation’s profitability which are based on audience
considerations. Filmmakers want the film to appeal to a wide audience so that it will sell a
large number of tickets, thereby resulting in higher box-office return. Boyum argues,
though, that films and books cater to different audiences: “a work of literature . . . is by
definition a work of complexity and quality which is addressed to an educated elite,”
whereas films “are mere entertainment, directed at anyone and everyone” (8). Bluestone
also speaks of the novel being “supported by a small, literate audience . . . produced by an
individual writer, and . . . relatively free of rigid censorship” whereas the film is
“supported by a mass audience, produced co-operatively . . . and restricted by a self-
imposed Production Code” (vi). Therefore, Boyum says that when adapting a novel to the
screen, the adapter must adjust the material “not so much to its new medium as to its new
audience” (8). Yet while Boyum states that films are marketed to the masses, she does
not take into account that there is some specific demographic the film is marketed to, such
as females 18-30 years-old. Generally the test audience that previews the film will be
made up entirely of the desired target audience.
Adaptations must, like all other films, adjust to their audiences’ taste and
sophistication in order to succeed or merely break even. Boyum believes adaptations
today can take greater risks than they could fifty years ago because viewers today “no
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longer demand the traditional Hollywood sop— among other things, bowdlerizations and
happy endings” (18). Commenting in 1985 on Wuthering Heights. Boyum asserts that “a
modern-day version . . . would clearly have avoided the use of pasteboard sets and most
likely, too, the inclusion of an insistent and saccharine film score,” both of which are found
in the 1939 adaptation (19). However, she admits that where adaptations are concerned,
"what’s new, wide, in color, and sexually explicit is [not] necessarily more effective than
what’s old, black and white, and implicit. There were worthy adaptations around in the
silent days, just as there are totally miscarried adaptations now” (19). To support her
argument, she acknowledges in a brief footnote her personal preference for the 1939
adaptation of Wuthering Heights over the 1970 and 1953 adaptations, though she fails to
explain her preference.
Just as Boyum recognizes that the taste and sophistication level of a film audience
changes through the years, filmmakers choose which parts of the novel to keep and which
parts to eliminate in order to make a film with dramatic and emotional impact that will
reach and satisfy the desired audience. Boyum believes that for the most part, selective
omission is positive if done correctly:
given the sensitive and insightful selection of materials reflecting great

insight into the works themselves, and a truly effective use of the movie
medium’s extraordinary capacity for compression, a film would capture
much more of their [the original work’s] essential vision, obsessions, and
art than one might imagine possible. (Boyum 78)
Applying Boyum’s argument that compression can make for a better adaptation provides
precisely the reason why Bunuel’s 1953 adaptation is superior, contrary to Boyum’s
preference for the 1939 adaptation of the novel. Bunuel centers his film on six of the
novel’s thirty-four chapters, although his reduction of Bronte’s narrative by no means
sacrifices the novel’s “essential vision” or “obsessions.” Rather, by condensing the story,
Bunuel concentrates and intensifies Bronte’s visions and obsessions through disturbing
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images, lines of dialogue, physical and emotional suffering of the human characters, and
animal imagery.
If successful adaptations are a question o f interpretation, with each reader/viewer
interpreting both the novel and film according to personal criteria, Boyum poses important
questions: “[W]hat can the notion o f ‘fidelity’ [to the original text] actually mean? .. .
And faithful to what aspects of any given literary work anyway?” (67). Boyum contends
that instead of focusing discussion on the “fidelity” of an interpretation, we should focus
on the “validity” o f an interpretation. For an adaptation to be deemed valid, Boyum says
it “must be consistent with the facts of any given text . . . it must not break with linguistic
conventions and must take account of the denotations and connotations of words and the
total context that determines them . . . it must be capable of support with evidence from
the text itself’ (72). But what are the “facts” of a text? She seems to be circling back to a
discussion of theme with the “facts,” “sense,” “essence,” and “implied interpretation” as
alternate words for theme. This must be her implied direction, because she lauds Akira
Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, a Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as “one
of the (if not the) greatest Shakespeare adaptations ever” (67). Throne of Blood is far
removed from the original text, changing time frame, location, and language among other
details; however it retains the essential qualities and themes of Shakespeare’s play.
Bunuel’s adaptation of Wutherina Heights is akin to Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth.
in that it, too, radically departs from the original text without radically misreading it.
In order to apply Boyum’s concept of “validity” to Wyler’s 1939, Kosminsky’s
1992, and Bunuel’s 1953 film adaptations, it is necessary to venture into Bronte’s fictional
world of Wutherina Heights, where passion creates violence and violence is a form of
passion. We must establish the novel’s most strongly supported theme in order to analyze
each film’s interpretation and application of it and position each film in relation to the
novel.
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CHAPTER 2
PASSION IN THE NOVEL
Wade Thompson calls “the world of Wutherina Heights . . . a world o f sadism,
violence, and wanton cruelty” (71). He describes the Heights as a place where “[njormal
emotions are almost completely inverted: hate replaces love, cruelty replaces kindness,
and survival depends on one’s ability to be tough, brutal, and rebellious” (70).
Thompson’s choice of the word “world” indicates not only the greater world o f the novel
contained within the thirty-four chapters, but also the world contained within the four
walls of Wuthering Heights, a place where characters are passionately violent—they
willfully hurt each other physically, mentally, and emotionally and enjoy it—and violently
passionate—marrying, “loving,” and reproducing in order to inflict pain upon the “loved
one.” Although violence is pervasive throughout the novel, critics such as Dorothy Van
Ghent note that it manifests itself more dominantly at the Heights, the more primitive
place, representing wildness, nature, and natural impulses—a place capable o f stirring and
eventually bringing out a person’s primitive animal passion. In contrast, she considers the
Grange to represent society, a place where civilized ladies and gentlemen dwell.
However, this is not to say that the Grange inhabitants are completely incapable of or
immune to violence. Isabella and Edgar Linton give a poor first impression to the reader
as they are behaving most uncivilly by physically fighting over their dog. Moreover, the
Grange inhabitants who come to stay or live at the Heights—Lockwood, Cathy,
Isabella—have their passionate impulses activated within a few hours of stepping over the
threshold of the plagued house. (For the purpose of this study, Catherine Eamshaw
Linton will be referred to throughout as Catherine, whereas her daughter, Catherine

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Linton Heathcliff, will be referred to as Cathy.) For Bronte, all people harbor violent
tendencies. Moreover, these tendencies can be exacerbated by negligent or abusive
parental treatment, and/or by an abusive or negative home environment, such as the one at
the Heights which is made up of deprivation of love; physical, mental, and emotional
violence; sadism; and revenge.
The violence in the novel is not gender or age specific: women abuse women; men
abuse men; adults abuse children, and vice-versa; siblings and lovers destroy one another,
parents pit children against one another. Thompson points out Bronte’s various
representations of violence, suffering, and pain in the novel: “Pinching, slapping, and hair
pulling occur constantly . . . . Pain, inflicted by cutting or stabbing, forms the crux of
numerous metaphors . . . . [P]ain is frequently suggested by threats o f choking, throttling,

suffocating, or strangling” (70), and connects this destructive pattern of behavior
particularly in Catherine and Heathcliff directly to the way they were treated by their
parents. J. Hillis Miller aligns himself with other literary critics who “have commented on
the prevalence of verbs o f violent action” in the novel (167), reprinting Mark Schorer’s list
of verbs from the introduction to the 1950 Rhinehart edition of the novel: “writhe, drag,
crush, grind, struggle, yield, sink, recoil, outstrip, tear, drive asunder” (Schorer qtd. in
Miller 167). Miller also cites a paragraph from Isabella’s description of her running away
from the Heights as an example of Bronte’s use of verbs to denote terror, physical
exertion, and desperation. Some examples from the paragraph are “knocked,” “escaped,”
“bounded,” “leaped,” “flew,” and “shot.” Miller declares of Wutherina Heights. “No
other Victorian novel contains such scenes of inhuman brutality. No other novel so
completely defines its characters in terms of the violence of their wills. In Wuthering
Heights people go on living only if their wills remain powerful and direct. . . . for in this
world destruction is the law of life” (167).
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At the Heights, even the foppish gentleman Lockwood’s passion is animated,
thereby telling us that humans, however civil and genteel on the surface, harbor a violent,
primitive core. Lockwood’s violent impulse at the Heights results from the violent,
abusive environment he has entered into there. He has been met with violence from dogs
who bare their teeth at him and leap at his throat (14), and violent indifference from the
Heights’ human inmates—Heathcliff, Hareton, Joseph and Cathy. He has heard cruel
invectives spoken with passionate malice between family members and has seen physical
death at the Heights in Cathy’s lapful of dead rabbits. Lockwood is forced to stay at the
Heights for one night since he cannot get home in the death-bringing, freezing snow. He
is directed by a servant to a little-used bed-chamber where he falls asleep after perusing
Catherine Eamshaw’s old diary. His first dream o f Jabes Branderham involves violence
against Lockwood himself. He is physically attacked by the congregation, resulting in a

near-riot in the chapel: “In the confluence of the multitude, several clubs crossed . . . .
Presently the whole chapel resounded with rappings and counter-rappings. Every man’s
hand was against his neighbour” (19). The fact that each person is fighting with another
reinforces Bronte’s theme that each person has violent tendencies, for even in a church, a
sacred, quiet place, the devoted display their inherent viciousness by easily turning against
one another.
Lockwood rouses himself out of the dream just long enough to realize it was a
dream, that the rapping sound he heard was “[mjerely the branch o f a fir tree that touched
[his] lattice” (19), and then falls into another dream, one which mimics his waking
consciousness. The scraping sound annoys him greatly and he rises from his bed to
“silence it, if possible” (20). He is so disturbed by the persistent noise that, discovering he
cannot unlatch the window in order to remedy the situation, he resorts to physical
violence, “knocking [his] knuckles through the glass and stretching an arm out to seize the
importunate branch” (20). At that moment, the ghost-child Catherine grabs his hands and
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pleads for admittance to the Heights. Lockwood describes his reaction to encountering
her: “Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I
pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and
soaked the bed-clothes” (20). He justifies his extremely violent behavior by saying it
stemmed from his “terror” upon encountering the ghost-child. When he recounts his story
to Heathcliff, who has come into the room after hearing Lockwood scream, Lockwood
shows no remorse for his brutal action and places all blame on Catherine, calling her “a
changeling—wicked little soul!” (21). He claims he had to keep her from entering through
the window because ‘“ she probably would have strangled me!’” (21).
The importance of this scene lies not in justifying Lockwood’s dream action or in
reasoning why he violently lashes out at the ghost-child; the importance is in the action
itself and the subsequent reaction it generates. Here we see both aspects o f passion: love
and violence. Lockwood’s dream reflects the violent impulse or violent nature lingering
inside him even if his action is against an imaginary creature. Bronte at no time indicates
that Lockwood exits his dream state and enters consciousness during the ghost-child’s
appearance outside his window. Lockwood himself dismisses the encounter as imaginary,
but we tend to not question the reality of the situation due to Lockwood’s and
Heathcliff’s separate but equally convincing reactions. Lockwood screams, is paralyzed

with fear, and perspires profusely (20-21). Heathcliff, after ordering Lockwood to sleep
in another room for the remainder of the night, rushes into the bed-chamber, “wrench[es]
open the lattice” and passionately beseeches, “Come in! come in! . . . . Cathy, do come.
Oh do—once more! Oh! My heart’s darling, hear me this time—Catherine, at last!” (23).
Both men believe the experience to be real, and therefore so do we. Thus in a single
scene, Bronte shows us that the passionate core of human nature, evident as both
Lockwood’s passionate violence against the ghost-child, and Heathcliff s violent passion
for his lost love, is activated at the Heights.
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Isabella Linton gives us a stronger example than Lockwood of a civilized person's
inherent violent nature erupting at the Heights. Despite Nelly’s description of Isabella as
“a charming young lady of eighteen; infantile in manners, though possessed o f keen wit,
[and] keen feelings” (78), Bronte plants subtle suggestions that Isabella has the potential
to be as animalistic and fierce as the other violent characters. In her description of
Isabella, Nelly tells us that Isabella has, among other characteristics, “a keen temper, too,
if irritated” (78). Her potential to be passionately violent manifests itself against Catherine
when she is restraining Isabella from leaving the room while humiliating her in front of
Heathcliff. When caught in Catherine’s vice-like grip, Isabella “began to make use of her
nails, and their sharpness presently ornamented the detainer’s [fingers] with crescents of
red” (82). Catherine, amazed at and proud of her sister-in-law’s ability to be physically
forceful and inflict pain exclaims, ‘“ There’s a tigress!”’ (82). Catherine’s choice of a
large, predatory animal instead of the plain descriptor “cat” subtly suggests Isabella’s
animalistic passionate nature.
Isabella’s fiery spirit resurfaces with a vengeance after she elopes with Heathcliff.
Isabella’s letter to Nelly written two months after her elopement describing her arrival and
life at the Heights illustrates the Heights’s ability to rapidly animate Isabella’s violent
nature. During her first moments in her new “home,” Isabella is passive, unwilling to
disturb anyone or to speak up for herself. Later, however, she snatches a basin out of
Joseph’s hands and declares, “‘Mr. Eamshaw [Hindley]. .. directs me to wait on myself:
I will. I’m not going to act the lady among you, for fear I should starve’” (109).
Furthermore, she writes, “I insisted on being provided instantly with a place of refuge, and
a means of repose” (111-12). Miller argues that Isabella survives only “by precipitating
herself into the realm of violence inhabited by the other characters who survive” (167).
But this realm is not entirely foreign to her as she progressively proves herself familiar
with it.
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When allowed the opportunity to visit the Heights, Nelly is thunderstruck by the
negative change in Isabella’s physical appearance, which she attributes to the Heights’s
environment: “she already partook of the pervading spirit of neglect which encompassed
her. Her pretty face was wan and listless; her hair uncurled, some locks hanging lankly
down, and some carelessly twisted around her head. Probably she had not touched her
dress since yester evening” (114). Nelly comments to Heathcliff that Isabella’s
“appearance is changed greatly, her character much more so” (115). Heathcliff tells Nelly
that Isabella’s own desire to “degenerate into a mere slut” has caused the changes.
Moreover, he prefers her this way because “‘she’ll suit this house so much the better for
not being over nice’” (116). Heathcliff and Isabella do not hide their mutual acrimony.
Although Heathcliff tells Nelly that Isabella can leave of her own free will because “‘the
nuisance of her presence outweighs the gratification to be derived from tormenting her’”
(117), Isabella refuses. She tells Nelly she tried once before “‘but I dare not repeat it!
(118). Isabella does not elaborate on her punishment, although one can infer from her
present treatment that it was painful. She wants to stay at the Heights to prevent
Heathcliff s plan “‘to provoke Edgar to desperation’” and “‘to obtain power over him”’
(118). Isabella asserts, “‘he shan’t obtain it—I’ll die first! . . . . The single pleasure I can
imagine is to die, or to see him dead!”’ (118). Her exclamations show her passionate
nature in wanting to protect her brother, and in wishing violence on Heathcliff, her “loved
one.”
One month after Nelly’s visit to Mr. and Mrs. Heathcliff, Isabella escapes from the
Heights and arrives at the Grange. During her short stay, Isabella’s verbal narrative details
her violent nature becoming more dominant at the Heights as a result of her abusive home
environment. She boasts to Nelly of her extreme “‘pleasure in being able to exasperate’”
Heathcliff (133). She calls Heathcliff s vulnerable moments when he is pining for
Catherine her most gratifying times at the Heights. During his times of tormented grief,
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Isabella strikes verbally, '“ the only time’” she tells Nelly '“when I could taste the delight of
paying wrong for wrong’” (138). She tells Hindley in front of Heathcliff that Catherine
was happier before Heathcliff returned to the Heights, and that he is to blame for her
premature death (139). Nelly berates Isabella for her cruel behavior. Isabella responds,
“But what misery laid on Heathcliff could content me, unless I had a hand
in it? I’d rather he suffered less, if I might cause his sufferings and he
might know that I was the cause.. . . On only one condition can I hope to
forgive him. It is, if I may take an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; for
every wrench of agony, return a wrench, reduce him to my level. . . . But it
is utterly impossible I can ever be revenged, and therefore I cannot forgive
him.” (139)
Isabella’s verbal violence toward Heathcliff eventually becomes physical violence. During
an argument, Heathcliff “‘snatched the dinner knife from the table and flung it at [her]
head”' striking her under her ear and drawing blood (140). Isabella recounts to Nelly that
she replied by “‘pulling it out’” of her neck and in turn throwing the knife back at
Heathcliff “‘which I hope went a little deeper than his missile’” (140), thereby actualizing
her desire to repay a blow with a blow. After this repartee, Isabella flees the Heights
forever. On her way out the door, she says she “‘knocked over Hareton, who was
hanging a litter of puppies from a chair-back in the doorway’” (140) and proceeds on her
crazed flight home to the Grange. Isabella does not comment on Hareton’s most violent
act, which shows that her violent nature has overcome her ability to be sensitive or
compassionate to innocent creatures.
As we have seen, Isabella’s and Lockwood’s violent natures and ability to be
passionately violent have been triggered by their contact with the Heights. The Heights
has such a dramatic influence on these civilized, genteel characters because it is the core of
primitive passion in the novel. Due to the Eamshaws’ cruelty to one another, one can
conceive that the foundation of the Heights is more than the plaster and mortar holding the
walls together, it is a mixture of blood, hatred, and jealousy. The Eamshaws pass on a
heritage of violence and cruelty to their children, which is then passed down to the next
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generation like a valuable heirloom. Mary Burgan believes “Eamshaw establishes a mode
of fatherhood that will be repeated in the generation to follow” (398), in which he favors
the adopted child over his own offspring, a behavior that pits the natural and adopted
children against each other. Burgan calls Catherine and Heathcliff “victims” of the abuse
by their parents and who in turn become “victimizers” of their own children (395).
Thompson, on the other hand, blames the way the children turn out on a lack of sufficient
mothering, not fathering as suggested by Burgan. Thompson believes the children would
have turned out better if their mothers had remained alive. He notes that all of the
mothers die, leaving their children “to fend for themselves early in life without the love or
protection of their mothers” (69). And yet, it is not clear that a maternal presence would
have helped: Bronte does not depict mothers as offering love, protection, or having any
“motherly” qualities.
Hindley loses his father’s favor once Heathcliff is introduced into the Eamshaw
family. Due to Eamshaw’s desire to bring Heathcliff home from Liverpool, Hindley’s gift
of a fiddle is smashed to bits. Eamshaw sends Hindley away to college but does not
believe his son has any intelligence or worth: “‘Hindley was naught, and would never
thrive as where he wandered’” (32). According to Burgan, the passing on of an abusive
parenting style is evident in that Hindley treats his son, Hareton, “with the same willful
abuse he suffered from old Eamshaw” and exhibits “the extremes of doting fondness and
brutal manhandling that characterize clinical accounts of child batterers” (403). In one
later scene, Hindley threatens to cut off Hareton’s ears using scissors, claiming that it
“‘makes a dog fiercer, and I love something fierce’” (57). Seeing he has frightened
Hareton and made him cry, Hindley momentarily tries to comfort the boy: “‘Hush, child,
hush! well, then, it is my darling! Wisht, dry thy eyes—there’s a joy; kiss me.”’ When
Hareton refuses, Hindley becomes enraged, calls him a ‘“ monster,”’ and threatens to
“‘break the brat’s neck’” (57).
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Like Hindley, Catherine is constantly rebuffed by her father and deprived of his
love. Eamshaw tells Catherine, “‘I cannot love thee; thou’rt worse than thy brother . . . . I
doubt thy mother and I must rue that we ever reared thee!’” (33). Nelly says that
Eamshaw’s comments to Catherine about her behavior coupled with his obvious
disapproval progressively hardened Catherine, so that she later became immune to them.
Eamshaw physically punishes Catherine as well. He strikes her for “grinning and spitting”
at Heathcliff when he is brought home in place of her present of choice—a whip (29).
Right before her father dies, Catherine sits at his feet in front of the fireplace like a loyal
dog. Eamshaw looks down at her and asks, ‘“Why canst thou not always be a good lass,
Cathy?”’ She laughs as if this is a normal question, and asks him why he cannot be a better
man (34). This exchange indicates the strange dynamic between parent and child at the
Heights, in which it is perfectly acceptable to be both physically and verbally abusive to a
loved one.
Undeniably, Heathcliff is the locus of the passion and violence at the Heights with
revenge being his motive, beginning against Hindley after Catherine has returned home
from her extended stay at the Grange and is being courted by Edgar Linton. At a
Christmas celebration, Hindley locks Heathcliff in his room and beats him for throwing a
dish of hot applesauce in Edgar’s face. Later that night, Heathcliff escapes his prison with
Catherine’s assistance and comes down to the kitchen for food. Instead of eating, he sits
at the table in contemplation. When Nelly asks what he is thinking about, he replies, ‘“ I’m
trying to settle how I should pay Hindley back. I don’t care how long I wait, if I can only
do it, at last. . . . I only wish I knew the best way! .. . I’ll plan it out: while I’m thinking of
that, I don’t feel pain’” (47). As Heathcliff grows older, his plan of revenge grows to
encompass the other people who he perceives have hurt him physically or otherwise.
Due to their callous upbringing, neither Catherine nor Heathcliff know how to love
tenderly. Thompson points out that Catherine’s “‘love’ is expressed through pain, hate,
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and relentless recrimination. Hair-pulling and pinching are her modes of physical
expression” (73); she shakes Hareton, pinches and slaps Nelly, and boxes Edgar’s ears.
Interestingly though, for all her physical cruelty, Catherine never raises a hand against
Heathcliff, nor he against her. Rather than physical pain, they inflict mental and emotional
pain upon one another. One of the great complexities of Bronte’s novel is the fact that its
two main characters simultaneously adore and hate one another, and seem to be the more
attached to the other for this cruel treatment. And yet it is unclear whether they have such
a strong passionate bond in spite of the pain they cause one another or because of it.
Inseparable as children, they form an unusually strong attachment to one another running
deeper than any brother and sister relationship. After Eamshaw’s death, the two bond due
to their shared outcast status; both are treated cruelly by Hindley when he returns from his
three-year school sojourn. Thompson describes Heathcliff and Catherine’s bond as a
“mystic” one, “forged in pain, and expressed in rebellion” (71).

Catherine’s passion for Heathcliff vacillates between love and violence after her
convalescence at the Grange. When she greets Heathcliff upon her arrival back at the
Heights, she is sincerely happy to see him and at the same time she laughs at his
appearance, cruelly mocking him for being dirty and unkempt. Nelly tells us that
“Heathcliff kept his hold on [Catherine’s] affections unalterably” (51), and insists they
“were constant companions still” (53). Nonetheless, the little time Catherine has in fact
spent with him is revealed when Heathcliff shows her an almanac in which he has kept
track of the days she has spent with him or with the Lintons, proving that she has been
with the Lintons substantially more. Catherine reacts peevishly to his revelation, calling it
“very foolish,” and implying that she does not spend time with him because he is too
stupid to be worthwhile company (54). Later that same evening, Catherine confesses to
Nelly that Edgar has asked her to marry him. Although she has accepted his proposal, she
tells Nelly, “'in my soul, and in my heart, I’m convinced I’m wrong!”’ (61). She
£
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reconfirms her deep love for Heathcliff. saying it ‘“ resembles the eternal rocks beneath . . .
. Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind—not as a pleasure,. . . but as
my own being’” (64). And yet, instead of being steadfast to her love, she confesses, ‘“ It
would degrade me to marry Heathcliff” (62). Then the morning after Heathcliff
disappears into the rainy night, Catherine tells Hindley that if he returns and Hindley forces
him to leave, “‘I’ll go with him’” (68). Though Catherine’s passion is strong, it is
immature. She is psychologically dependent on a male figure to make her feel loved. This
need relates back to her childhood where her father was the dominant presence in her life,
and her mother all but absent. Catherine’s need to feel loved, then, explains why within a
year of Heathcliff s disappearance, she becomes Mrs. Edgar Linton.
Heathcliff in turn vacillates between love and violence in his treatment of Catherine
upon reappearing after his mysterious three-year absence. He returns rich and bent on
revenge against Hindley for dispossessing him of legal status, and against Edgar for
dispossessing him of Catherine. We start to get a sense of the degree of atrocity
Heathcliff is capable of. Catherine straightforwardly tells Heathcliff, ‘“ Your bliss lies . . .
in inflicting misery’” (87), thereby recognizing his deriving pleasure from the pain of
others. She warns Isabella of Heathcliff s primitive animal nature, calling him
“an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid

wilderness of furze and whinstone . . . . Pray don’t imagine that he conceals
depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stem exterior! He’s not a
rough diamond~a pearl-containing oyster o f a rustic; he’s a fierce, pitiless,
wolfish man .. . and he’d crush you, like a sparrow’s egg, Isabella, if he
found you a troublesome charge” (79-80)
Neither Isabella nor the reader at that point truly believes her. Like Isabella, we believe
Catherine to be jealous and petty, possessive even. Nelly, however, concurs with
Catherine's warning and tells Isabella, “She is better acquainted with his heart. . . and she
never would represent him as worse than he is” (80). Isabella realizes the truth about
Heathcliff after being married to him, as evidenced by her telling comment, “Catherine had
30
an awfully perverted taste to esteem him so dearly, knowing him so well’” (133). Moving
into the second half of the novel with the action centering on the second generation of
characters, we realize how well Catherine knew him as we learn the true extent of his
cruelty and darkness, and we are equally horrified that she could so uniquely, devotedly
love such a creature.
Further evidence of the Catherine-Heathcliff dynamic based on passion is apparent
in the scene where they argue after Heathcliff has been discovered kissing Isabella in the
garden. Heathcliff tells Catherine, ‘“ I know you have treated me infernally,’” presumably
by marrying Edgar, and says that he plans to take revenge (87), but not on her. He
continues, “‘You are welcome to torture me to death for your amusement, only allow me
to amuse myself a little in the same style’” (87). And yet, while he claims not to want
revenge on Catherine, his plans for revenge against the Lintons—marrying Isabella,
quarreling with Edgar—will be, as Catherine tells him, “‘exactly the most efficient method
of revenging yourself on me’” (88). When Catherine discovers that Edgar has been
eavesdropping on their conversation, she forces a confrontation between the men. She is
particularly cruel to her husband by mocking his courage and masculinity and telling him
he must either attack Heathcliff, apologize to him, or allow Heathcliff to beat him, clearly
wishing to see the latter. Later in the privacy of her bed-chamber, Catherine tells Nelly
that since both men are behaving abominably towards each other and towards her she
resolves, “‘to break their hearts by breaking my own’” (91). Thus Catherine chooses self-
destruction as her method of inflicting pain on the two men she loves, confident that her
suffering will cause them to suffer.
When Edgar confronts Catherine and gives her the ultimatum of choosing either
Heathcliff or himself, Catherine reacts with self-inflicted physical violence meant to make
Edgar suffer. Nelly is called to the scene where Catherine “lay dashing her head against
the arm of the sofa, and grinding her teeth, so that you might fancy she would crash them
to splinters!” (92). Afterwards, she runs around wildly, then barricades herself in her
room refusing food for two days. On the third day, she confides to Nelly, ‘“ If I were only
sure it would kill [Edgar] . . . I’d kill myself directly!’” (94). Catherine’s next statement
makes clear her perverted concept of love: “‘I thought, though everybody hated and
despised each other, they could not avoid loving me’” (94). By having Catherine believe
that people will continue to love her in spite of her poor treatment of them, Bronte shows
the reader what Catherine has learned from her parents: in a love relationship, abuse
rather than tenderness is the appropriate behavior to adopt. Catherine opens her window
and entreats Heathcliff to return to her, saying that even when she is dead and buried ‘“ I
won’t rest till you are with me. I never will!”’ (98). Her exclamation serves to
foreshadow her haunting the Heights later in the story and further supports her inability to
exist independently of a male presence. Catherine wants Heathcliff to come to her; she
will not go to him. Finally, she threatens to jump out the window to her death if Edgar
says Heathcliff s name (99). Edgar and Nelly manage to calm Catherine and bring the
situation under control.
Two months later, another disturbing scene plays itself out which Nelly describes
as “a strange and fearful picture” (123) reinforcing the idea that Catherine and Heathcliff
love passionately but not tenderly, for their displays of affection are not soft and gentle,
but rough and painful. Heathcliff, who wants to see Catherine one last time before she
dies, dashes into her bedroom and grasps her tightly “for some five minutes” (122). She
says to Heathcliff, ‘“ You have killed me—and thriven on it, I think’” (122). At that
moment, Heathcliff kneels down in front of her “to embrace her,” though when he tries to
stand, “she seized his hair, and kept him down” (123). Catherine tells him, ‘“I wish I
could hold you . . . till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care
nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do!”’ (123). While grinding his
teeth, Heathcliff begs her not to torture him. Catherine holds a clump of Heathcliff s hair
32
in her hand while Heathcliff grips Catherine’s arm so tightly that he leaves blue
indentations where his fingers have been. In this scene, Bronte blurs the line between love
and violence. As passionate creatures, Catherine and Heathcliff equate brutal treatment
with love which they learned from their upbringing and from the brutal environment of the
Heights where the young must fend for themselves.
Before Catherine’s death, Heathcliff asks her about her ability to love him and
betray him and in so doing, betray herself:
“You teach me now how cruel you’ve been—cruel and false. .. . Whv did
you betray your own heart, Cathy0 . . . You deserve this. You have killed
yourself. . . . You loved me~then what right had you to leave me? . . .
misery, and degradation and death, and nothing that God or Satan could
inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will did it. I have not
broken your heart—y o u have broken it—and in breaking it, you have broken
mine.” (124-25)
Unfortunately, neither Heathcliff nor the reader receives answers to these pointed
questions. Instead, before fainting in Heathcliff s arms, Catherine implores him not to
leave her even though Edgar is returning to the Grange and will discover their meeting.
Catherine is hoping for another confrontation between the two men. She has previously
declared that she wants to break their hearts, and she has locked them in a room and bated
them to fight each other. By having both men present at her deathbed, Catherine feels
doubly loved through the double male presence, and she wants to witness the pain and
suffering she is causing them.
Miller asserts that “Cathy’s death is caused by their embrace” (204) in that
Heathcliff crushes her to death. Although Miller’s statement seems unfounded since
Heathcliff has no desire to hasten her death which would leave him alone, it is not unlikely
that Heathcliff could have unwittingly crushed her. As stated earlier, Heathcliff and
Catherine do not know how to love tenderly due to their upbringing; holding Catherine as
tight as he possibly can is an expression of the depth of Heathcliff s passion for her. After
delivering Catherine into her husband’s arms, Heathcliff then waits in the garden,
33
bloodying his head by basing it against a tree until receiving news of her. Heathcliff reacts
to the news of Catherine’s death by wishing for her to ’“ wake in torment,’” not peace, for
the pain she has caused him by dying, and begging her ghost to haunt him: “Be with me
always—take any form—drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I
cannot find you! Oh, God! It is unutterable!” (129). After his passionate exclamation,
Heathcliff continues to bash his head against the tree then lets out a howl “not like a man,
but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears” (129). Bronte
uses Heathcliff s savage action to reiterate her theme that animal passion is the true
primitive core of human nature.
Up until Catherine’s death at the novel’s midpoint, Bronte has saturated her text
with evidence that all people, superficially genteel and civil, or harsh and ill-mannered,
harbor violent tendencies and that these tendencies will be triggered by abusive parents
and/or by a brutal living environment. Catherine’s, Heathcliff s, and Hindley’s destructive

behavior is the result of their upbringing and environment at the Heights, whereas
Isabella’s and Lockwood’s violent behavior is exacerbated by merely being in the
barbarous environment of the Heights. But Bronte’s pervading theme does not die with
Catherine, for her death serves to set the second half of the novel in motion and continue
to illustrate the theme Bronte has already established.
Due to the centrality of the Catherine-Heathcliff relationship in the novel, many
critics wonder why Bronte created a second generation of characters to continue the story.
In contrast to the majority of literary critics, Thomas Moser believes the entire second half
of Bronte’s novel “suffers seriously” (2), that she “loses control. . . and writes
insincerely” (13) as compared to the first half. In his opinion, Bronte’s “careful
arrangement of symmetrical sets of characters, rather than signifying her continued
involvement with her subject, denotes simply that she has abandoned it” (15). He calls
Cathy and Hareton “illusory figures” (19) and their love “a superficial stereotyped tale of
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission of th e copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout p erm ission .
34
feminine longings” (15) one cannot take seriously. On the whole, though, most literary
critics consider the second generation to be important to the novel as a whole.
Burgan asserts that “Bronte designed the ending . . . to answer the problems posed
by the beginning” and that Linton, Cathy and Hareton “enact a release from the agonies o f
negations suffered by Heathcliff and Cathy” (404-05). Miller reminds us that “the violence
and suffering of the first lovers,” is necessary to ensure “the goodness and happiness of the
next generation,” particularly for the second Cathy who is responsible for “initiating the
reconstruction of civilization” through her relationship with Hareton (210). At first
glance, Miller appears to prefer the first generation lovers to the second: “The love of the
second Cathy pales beside the intensity of the first story, and the novel, in the very space
and emphasis it gives to the first Cathy, seems to indicate that her kind of love is more
valuable, more heroic” (206). However, Miller further describes this “heroic” love as “a
destructive holocaust” (205), suggesting that he does not prefer one generation of lovers
over another; the love relationships are different and equally important to the novel’s
outcome. Without Catherine and Heathcliff in the first generation, there would be no need
for a second generation (Hareton and Cathy) to amend their predecessors’ mistakes.
William Madden also supports the significance of the second generation but believes the
“restorative action . . . begins with the birth o f the second generation” (139) instead of
later with the Cathy-Hareton relationship as suggested by Miller.
In his discussion of Bunuel, Michael Popkin interprets Bronte’s novel as a fairytale
similar to Beauty and the Beast, turning to Bruno Bettelheim’s reading of the fairytale
“which helps explain why the action of the novel must cover two generations” (118).
Popkin states that there must be a second generation of characters in Wutherina Heights
to bring about redemption, a full-circle effect, a fairytale ending the first generation could
not achieve. He argues that while Catherine cannot return to her childhood state where
she was able to keep Heathcliff and Edgar as separate components in her life, she “does
35
the next best thing . . . [she] dies and in the process gives birth to herself, or at least to
another little girl named Cathy who will relive her mother’s life but choose, when the time
comes, to grow up—to love a monster [Hareton] for his inner qualities” (118), thus
changing the frog into a prince and giving the novel a fairytale happy ending.
But the purpose of the second generation is not to provide the novel with a happy
ending. Although Juliet McMaster agrees with other critics that the second generation,
particularly “the Catherine U-Linton match has its own intense interest, and carries its
share of the force of the meaning of the novel” (1), she argues convincingly that the
importance o f the second generation lies not with its restorative/corrective powers as most
critics believe, but with its dual purpose of extending and escalating the violence begun in
the first half o f the novel. In addition, Bronte uses the second generation to show that the
animal nature o f the first generation is not an aberration; the second generation characters
also have intrinsically passionate natures. McMaster concludes, “In this book of love and
hatred, terror and violence . . . the horror arises from the sense of the children’s becoming
mere instruments of more powerful agents” (2). Her statement is significant—the
“horror” comes from watching Heathcliff gleefully destroy the children, including his own
son. Heathcliff s destruction o f his son Linton repeats the pattern of destructive parenting
which he learned from the Eamshaws. Not only does Bronte present a continuation of
child abuse in the second generation of characters and the heightening of Heathcliff s
violent nature, she also shows how the violent tendencies of Hareton, Cathy, and Linton
are brought out by Hindley and Heathcliff s brutal parenting style, as well as the pervasive
violent environment of the Heights.
Hareton becomes the outcast child favored by Heathcliff over his own son Linton.
After Eamshaw’s death, Heathcliff was denied education and legitimate status at the
Heights, and thus identity. Burgan notes that even though Heathcliff denies Hareton these
same advantages, “Heathcliff will nevertheless have a tenderness for the boy who shares
36
the greatest moral resemblance to himself as a child—and the greatest physical
resemblance to Cathy” (403). Therefore, even though Hareton is raised in the violent
environment of the Heights, Heathcliff s love, or at least what could be considered esteem
or regard if not love, for him prevents Hareton from turning out to be as fierce and
malicious as others though these qualities are not absent in him. Hareton will always have
his inherent violent nature. Love with Cathy at the end of the novel does not mean he, or
she, dispenses with it. The proclivity towards violence lingers within; it can erupt at any
time.
The violent nature of the child bom Catherine Linton is aroused by living at the
Heights as well as by her birthright as the daughter of Catherine Eamshaw Linton,
HeathclifFs “Cathy,” who was bom and raised at the Heights. Nelly describes Cathy as
being different from her mother: “she could be soft and mild as a dove, and she had a
gentle voice, and pensive expression: her anger was never furious; her love never fierce; it
was deep and tender” (145). Nelly remarks that Cathy was always referred to as “Move,’
and ‘darling,' and ‘queen,’ and ‘angel’” (152) at the Grange, with Nelly herself even
calling her “a sweet little girl” (153). As docile and perfect as she may sound, however,
Cathy does have faults, namely “[a] propensity to be saucy” and “a perverse will” (145).
Nelly speculates that Cathy’s bad behavior is not inherited from her mother; rather it stems
from Cathy’s being a spoiled child. According to Nelly, Cathy has inherited from her
mother a “capacity for intense attachments” (145). Cathy says to Nelly regarding her
father, ‘“ I care for nothing in comparison with papa. . . . I love him better than myself. . .
I pray every night that I may live after him, because I would rather be miserable than that
he should be’” (177). Her statement echoes her mother’s earlier statement to Nelly
regarding Heathcliff, ‘“ If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be;
and, if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the Universe would turn to a mighty
stranger . . . . Nelly, I am Heathcliff” (64). The significance difference between the two
37
characters’ sentiments is that Cathy wants to spare her father from suffering, whereas
Catherine wants to cause Heathcliff s suffering. Nonetheless, Cathy’s sauciness and
temper remind one distinctly of Catherine.
Cathy has no doubt inherited her mother’s passionate nature. Nelly admits that
Cathy becomes disobedient “in justice and passion, rising from hot temper and
thoughtlessness”; however, Cathy repents her deeds and behavior “on the day they were
committed” (171). Cathy’s temper gets the best of her when her cousin Linton tells her
her mother hated her father and loved Heathcliff. She knocks Linton against a chair arm,
after which “she wept with all her might, aghast at the mischief she had done” (182). Her
own passionate nature shocks her. Here, using the second generation of characters,
Bronte shows that a person’s passionate nature is exacerbated by being in an abusive
environment. Cathy’s abusive outburst at the Heights reminds the reader of Isabella and
Lockwood earlier in the novel who also had their violent tendencies triggered by entering
the Heights’s environment. Cathy’s visits to the Heights are sporadic for approximately
four years after this incident with Linton. It is not until Heathcliff locks her in the Heights
and forces her to marry Linton when she is seventeen that Cathy’s passion is again
aroused to such a degree.
Cathy’s five-day imprisonment in the Heights truly awakens her own violent
nature; her father’s death signals its permanent residence. She returns to the Heights after
her father’s funeral not as a young, naive, petulant girl, but rather as a married woman
bent on more serious matters—her own mental and physical survival. Heathcliff predicts
that she will come to hate Linton as much as he claims Linton already hates her. Cathy
quickly retorts with her own ill-wish for Heathcliff:
“Mr. Heathcliff, you have nobody to love you; and, however miserable you
make us, we shall still have the revenge of thinking that your cruelty rises
from your greater misery! You are miserable, are you not? Lonely, like
the devil, and envious like him? Nobody loves you—nobody will cry for
you, when you die! I wouldn’t be you!” (218)
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Nelly’s silent reflection on Cathy’s outburst speaks volumes: “Catherine spoke with a
kind of dreary triumph: she seemed to have made up her mind to enter into the spirit of
her future family, and draw pleasure from the griefs o f her enemies” (218). Nelly’s
statement not only reiterates Bronte’s theme regarding animal passion, it also recognizes
the fact that the second generation continues this theme begun with the first generation.
Cathy’s violent nature is evident in the beginning chapters of the book through
Lockwood’s keen observations of her and through Zillah’s conversation with Nelly later in
the novel. Cathy is neither the “‘beneficent fairy’” (11) nor the “‘amiable lady’” (10)
Lockwood initially calls her. She is openly rude to him by refusing him both tea and
conversation. Cathy also denies that she would feel guilty should he die in the snow trying
to return to the Grange. She threatens Joseph with two things: asking the devil to kidnap
him and killing him herself using witchcraft. She is particularly savage to Hareton,
singling him out for physical as well as verbal abuse. She misses no opportunity to remind
him of his low status and lack of education, and she thinks nothing of slapping him about
the head or pulling his hair for minor infractions as he tries to do kind things for her, such
as retrieve books from a high library shelf. Zillah divulges to Nelly Cathy’s rudeness to
everyone at the Heights and says that she is neither loved nor even liked. As for Cathy’s
behavior toward Heathcliff, Zillah says, “‘She’ll snap at the master himself, and as good as
dares him to thrash her; and the more hurt she gets, the more venomous she grows’”
(226). Witnesses Lockwood and Zillah attest to Cathy’s vigorous participation in some
perverted clique whose members must continually prove themselves to be passionately

violent in order to remain in good standing.
Perversions of passion appear at the Heights in the violent consummation of the

marriage between Heathcliff and Isabella. McMaster questions how and when “parents as
alien to one another as Heathcliff and Isabella” ever managed to conceive Linton (3).
Moreover, she declares that “rather than the elopement together,” the moment when
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Heathcliff throws the knife at Isabella cutting her under the ear and drawing blood is
surely the true consummation of their marriage,” for in that instance, “She and Heathcliff
have most completely become man and wife by a bloody act o f violence” and “are united
in hatred as they were never united in love” (3). Just as Heathcliff consummates his
marriage to Isabella by a violent act, so he joins his son in the bloody consummation of
Linton’s marriage to Cathy. Again it is a “symbolic rape” in that “Heathcliff s
appropriation of the property and physical abuse of the bride leaves her in effect
deflowered. His brutal blow that makes the blood flow recalls his symbolic defloration of
Isabella” (10). McMaster further develops her connection between love and violence by
categorizing Cathy’s experience as both “gang rape,” because Linton acts as his father’s
cohort by starting the argument that leads up to the blow, and “sexual abuse by the father-
in-law” (10).
McMaster’s argument invalidates Moser’s assertion that “Although Emily Bronte
refers frequently to Heathcliff s violent treatment of the children in the second half of the
novel, she dramatizes it only once” (12). The text clearly contains numerous occasions in
which the children are victims of Heathcliff s violent passion. Burgan and Thompson state
that Heathcliff murders Linton, yet Thompson refers to Linton’s death as slow torture
(69). This captures the essence of the matter in that murder is usually associated with a
swift outburst of violence resulting in death, whereas with torture, the journey to death is
excruciatingly slow and painful. Heathcliff kills his son the way he tells Nelly that
Catherine has been slowly murdering him for eighteen years, “not by inches, but by
fractions of hair-breadths” (220). Often, the violence against Linton is implied, and we see
its result in Linton’s reactions to his father and others. He obviously fears Heathcliff
because he panics when he thinks he hears his father’s voice and impending approach
(200). A mere glance from Heathcliff renders Linton “prostrate . . . in a paroxysm of

helpless fear” (204). The final time he meets Cathy on the moor, Linton gasps, ‘“my
40
father threatened me. . . and I dread him—I dread him!’” (203). Heathcliff overtly hints
of violence when he tells Nelly, ‘“ you’ll force me to pinch the baby [Linton], and make it
scream’” to move her to comply with his wishes (204). Another hint that Linton is
physically abused is that when Heathcliff slaps Cathy for the first time, Nelly notices
Linton sitting quietly in a comer “congratulating himself... that the correction had
lighted on another than him,” thereby escaping his father’s brutal punishment (206).
Linton does not care that his “loved one” is physically abused, as long as he is not the
victim of it. Heathcliff claims to hate both Linton and Cathy equally, commenting that if
the law allowed it, “‘I would treat myself to a slow vivisection of those two, as an
evening’s amusement’” (205).
Burgan argues that for Heathcliff, “Linton is only an instrument of revenge” to get
to Cathy, the true target of his cruelty and revenge, because she is the result o f Edgar’s
“maturity in fatherhood” (406). However, neither maturity nor male fertility is the issue at
hand. Heathcliff s anger stems from Edgar’s legally possessing Catherine as his wife—
something Heathcliff would never be able to do. Possessing Catherine’s heart is not
enough for Heathcliff. The legality of marriage is the harder blow for Heathcliff than
sexual possession. The matrimonial bond is legitimate in society. Heathcliff has

constantly been denied legal status by the Eamshaws and Lintons, causing his hunger for
legal possession of the Heights, the Grange, and all of the Linton and Eamshaw land; the
properties afford him the legal status he has heretofore been denied. But possessing the
material gains of his enemies truly does not satisfy him, for what he really wants is
Catherine. McMaster, on the other hand, believes Heathcliff hates and relentlessly pursues
Cathy because he blames her for her mother’s death (5), asserting that Heathcliff is talking
about the baby Cathy when he says he loves his murderer but not Catherine’s. As a result,
McMaster claims he differentiates “the two Catherines, continuing to love the first with his
41
fierce and deathless passion, while he vindictively pursues her daughter as murderer and
death-dealer” (5).
Although Burgan and McMaster interpret Heathcliff s motivation for revenge

differently, they both, along with Miller, persuasively argue that Heathcliff s revenge and
the pleasure he derives from destruction mask the severe pain he feels from not having
Catherine. Miller states that “Heathcliff s cruelty toward others is a mode of relation to
Cath[erine],” noting that Heathcliff s “sadistic treatment of others is the only kind of
revenge against Cath[erine] he can take. It is also a strange and paradoxical attempt to
regain his lost intimacy with her” (195). Since Heathcliff cannot revenge himself on one
who is dead, he must take out his anger on those who live. Ultimately, he derives no
pleasure from his cruel actions because, in effect, they do not bring him closer to
Catherine or in any way replace her presence in his life, and he is continually reminded of
her absence. He mournfully tells Nelly,
“for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I
cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In
every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses
in every object by day, I am surrounded with her image! . . . . The entire
world is a dreadfiil collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I
have lost her!” (245)
Therefore, Heathcliff s passionate violence towards Cathy can be interpreted as his
attempt to relate to her dead mother by proxy through violence substituting for love. In
one telling instance, Heathcliff threatens Cathy with daily beatings “if I catch such a devil
of a temper in your eyes again!” (206). Cathy’s eyes are extremely important because, as
Nelly remarks, “they are those of Catherine Eamshaw” (244). Looking at Cathy,
Heathcliff sees his beloved Catherine in her eyes along with her fiery spirit. Heathcliff tells
Nelly that Hareton and Cathy’s “‘appearance causes me pain, amounting to agony,”’ and
says of Cathy particularly, ‘“ I earnestly wish she were invisible—her presence only
invokes maddening sensations’” (245). On a different occasion, Heathcliff “threaten[s] to
ii
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strangle her” (213), thus recalling his passionate embrace of Catherine in a final desperate
attempt to be close to her which may have caused her death. Another time, because Cathy
refuses to hand over half o f a locket with Edgar’s picture in it, Heathcliff “‘struck her
down’” (213) causing her teeth to cut the inside of her cheek and fill her mouth with
blood. Linton tells Nelly that when Heathcliff struck Cathy, “I winked . . . . I wink to see
my father strike a dog or a horse, he does it so hard” (213). Thus Linton likens Cathy to
an abused animal when it is actually Heathcliff who exhibits animal behavior.
To further develop the theme that the primitive animal passion inherent in humans
is exacerbated by an abusive upbringing and/or living in a brutal environment, Bronte
imbues the text with animal imagery denoting violence in relation to all generations of
characters. Miller interprets the animals as metaphors for the primitive, human inhabitants
of the Heights. For Miller, “[t]he nature of human life” at the Heights “is precisely defined
by the animals” found within and without (166). He points out the human-animal
connection when he quotes one of Heathcliff s earliest comments to Lockwood that he is
like his dogs and unaccustomed to company. Miller states that not only is the nature of
humans defined by the animals, “[t]he animal imagery. . . is one of the chief ways in which
the spiritual strength of the characters is measured” (166). Heathcliff is likened to strong,
fierce creatures such as a “mad dog” (124), and a “savage beast” (129); Edgar Linton is
likened to weak, immature animals such as a “Iamb” (89) and a “sucking leveret” (90); and
Linton Heathcliff, most unlike his father, is likened to weak, pathetic animals such as a
“puling chicken” (159). Miller only recognizes animal references to male characters, yet
animal epithets apply to the female characters as well: Catherine calls Isabella a
“monkey”(79) and a “tigress”(82), while Isabella calls Catherine “a dog in the manger”
(79).
While Miller focuses on the importance of adult animals to the novel’s theme,
Thompson sees the killing, death, and suffering of small animals as a metaphor for
43
infanticide, which is to him a major theme in the novel. Thompson asserts that “[t]he
infanticide theme is amplified symbolically throughout the novel in the lolling of helpless
and delicate animals” (70), namely the puppies which are hanged, Linton’s cat (he pulls
the claws out), and the baby lapwings starved to death by Heathcliff. He claims the
defenseless, abused small animals represent “the children [in the novel who] . . . have to
fight for their very lives against adults who show almost no tenderness, love, or mercy”
(71). The actions and subsequent pain and suffering of the animals in the novel reflect and
reinforce the pain and suffering of the humans. Living up to their foreboding names—
Throttler, Gnasher, Wolf, Skulker—the fierce adult dogs attack, maim, and sometimes kill
adult and young animals, echoing Heathcliff s savage treatment of both adults and
children. It is important to note that while the Heights and its inhabitants—Heathcliff,
Hareton, Linton—are equated with animal cruelty, the Grange inhabitants are also not
above being physically cruel to animals. Showing animals as both victims— Edgar and
Isabella’s injured puppy at the Grange, Hareton hanging puppies at the Heights—and
victimizers—Skulker biting Catherine’s ankle at the Grange (38), Gnasher and Wolf flying
at Lockwood’s throat at the Heights (14)—recalls Burgan’s statement that the human
characters are victims of older generations and in turn victimize the younger. Also, this
suggests that violence occurs in all places and in all families regardless of class standing.
Despite the substantial evidence throughout the novel that Bronte is indeed making
the statement that humans have a core of primitive animal passion, filmmakers have
seldom fully acknowledged this when adapting Wuthering Heights to the screen. While
recognizing the passion inherent in the text, they choose to focus on the love or romantic
aspect of passion, rather than its violent aspect. In the novel, Bronte shows that passion
and malice are not mutually exclusive. Filmmakers, though, seem to believe that they are,
or at least that Bronte did not intend for love to be so violent.
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CHAPTER 3
THE CLASSIC: WILLIAM WYLER’S 1939 ADAPTATION
William Wyler’s film is by far the best known of all the Wuthering Heights
adaptations. Its little known rocky beginnings rival Bronte’s rugged, perilous moor. The
American Film Institute Catalog reports that in 1936 producer Walter Wanger owned the
film rights to Wuthering Heights and the Charles MacArthur-Ben Hecht script which had
originally been written with Charles Boyer and Sylvia Sidney in mind. Wanger decided to
sell the rights, script, and some finished sets in 1937. MGM bid on the package, but
Samuel Goldwyn, who originally passed on it because he didn’t like the unhappy ending,
eventually acquired the property. Goldwyn wanted James Mason to play Heathcliff
although Tyrone Powers, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Ronald Colman, and Robert Newton
were also considered for the role (2477). Finally Hecht suggested Laurence Olivier who
agreed to play the role opposite Merle Oberon as Catherine, called Cathy in the film
(Magill 493-94). Released in March 1939, Wuthering Heights won rave reviews from
critics and audiences, and garnered eight Academy Award nominations—Best Picture,
Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Screenplay (there was no separate
category for best screenplay from previously published material), Black and White
Cinematography, Interior Decoration, and Original Score (AFI Catalog 2477)—though it
collected only the statuette for cinematography (Steinberg 205).
Wyler’s Wuthering Heights is indeed a great film, considered a classic today, but is
it an equally great adaptation? John Harrington in “Wyler as Auteur” thinks so.
Harrington believes Wyler grasped the theme of Bronte’s novel correctly as the “struggle
between nature and what society can provide” (70) and was able successfully to visualize
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that conflict on screen using the mise-en-scene and camera movement. Bluestone. on the
other hand, believes the film “force[s] Emily Bronte's story into a conventional Hollywood
mold, the story of the stable boy and the lady,” in which a respectable lady must choose
between love with a gentleman of her standing or a forbidden, lower-class outsider (99).
Even though Wyler’s film stays grounded in textual events and plot order, changes have
been made which ultimately disassociate it from Bronte’s novel. Focusing the film on the
Heathcliff-Catherine relationship changes the story thematically, centering on class issues
and greed instead of retaining the novel’s thematic insistence that all people are inherently
violent and that animal passion is at the core of human nature. While Wyler’ film shows
passion between Heathcliff and Catherine, it significantly reduces the amount of physical
violence, changes the characterizations of Catherine, Heathcliff, Hindley and Isabella, and
omits the human-animal connection as well as the concept of a person’s violent tendencies
being exacerbated by a brutal upbringing and abusive living environment.
Bluestone notes that changing a novel, or “mutating” it in his words, into a film
produces inevitable changes; Wyler’s changes are not minor. Wagner categorizes Wyler’s
Wuthering Heights as a transposition, meaning that the novel is transposed from one
medium into another without change. But there are significant changes which depan from
the original text. Boyum states that an adaptation can depart from the original as long as
it retains the theme. (Boyum believes it was both inevitable and correct to omit the
second generation of characters and Heathcliff s revenge from the 1939 film [78].)
Alexander Nibley would consider Wyler’s film to be a deception in that the film has the
novel’s title, and yet the novel is not literally shown on the screen. The film’s production
attracted the attention of Bronte societies from around the world. Each one urged
Goldwyn to remain “true” and “faithful” to Bronte’s novel and to keep the novel’s title for
the film’s title. Apparently rumors were circulating that the Goldwyn marketing office
was considering alternate titles for the film, each one as misleading as the next. Gvpsv
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Love brings to mind an exotic love story. Fun on the Farm sounds more like a title for a
musical than a dramatic film. He Died for Her is perhaps the best alternate title of the
three conveying passion, drama, and seriousness, although it is misleading because
Heathcliff does not die for Catherine (API Catalog 2477).
The most obvious change from novel to film is the omission of chapters seventeen
through thirty-four, the entire second half of the novel which further illustrates Bronte’s
central theme of the novel and gives us three more characters whose violent natures are
exacerbated by their poor upbringing and the brutal living environment of the Heights.
Neither Bluestone nor Harrington dwell on the novel’s missing second half. Bluestone
briefly mentions that by cutting out the second half, the film loses scenes “devoted to the
suffering and redemption of the third generation” as well as “the total working out of
Heathcliff s revenge” (92). Harrington mentions the second half in a short footnote where
he simply acknowledges that the film focuses on the first half of the novel (70). Bluestone
argues that the truncation of the novel in addition to extra scenes created and inserted
serves “to shift the meaning and emphasis of the novel” (92). Scenes and dialogue in the
film “attribute . . . motives to Catherine] which do not exist in the novel (96), namely her
zest for “romanticism” and “aggrandizement” (99). Bluestone feels it is these changes
which reduce the novel to a story between the stable boy and the lady.
Catherine’s character is dramatically different in the film than it is in the novel.

Wyler’s Catherine is more concerned with class standing and material gain than love.
.Although Catherine tells Nelly in the novel that one of the reasons she loves Edgar is
because “‘he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighbourhood’”
(60), Nelly and the reader know Catherine’s declaration of desiring class standing is
incomplete. Wyler’s Catherine tells Heathcliff several times to “bring me back the world,”
a statement which has a definite materialistic tone to it. Catherine goes so far as to tell
Heathcliff to “rescue” her. He suggests they run away together right then, but she refuses
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because she does not want to “sleep in haystacks and steal food from the market.” This is
much more involved of a sentiment than in the novel where Catherine tells Nelly, “Tt
would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now”’ (62). Heathcliff tells Catherine what he has
endured because he loves her: “I’ve stayed here and been beaten like a dog, abused and
cursed and driven mad. But I stayed—-just to be near you . . . And I’ll stay till the end!”
Catherine ignores him because she is entirely distracted by the sound of music wafting on
the wind from the Grange. While spying on the Linton’s ball, Catherine tells Heathcliff,
“That’s what I want. Dancing and singing in a pretty world! And I’m going to have it!”
Catherine’s materialism is not lost on Heathcliff who, while scolding her on her death bed,
claims she is “Greedy for the trifles of living,” and that she broke her bond with him and
“wandered off like a wanton greedy child” in favor of the materialism and wealth of the
Lintons. Wyler’s Catherine does seem conflicted in her desire for status in one scene after
she has returned to the Heights from her extended stay at the Grange. Catherine, visibly
upset, runs up to her bedroom. In a surprise action, she literally rips her fine silk dress off
her body and proceeds to rip it to shreds after seeing her reflection in her full-length
mirror. When we see her next, she is in her country clothes running to the Crag to be with
Heathcliff. However, it is not much later that Catherine adopts the superficial gentility of
the gentry in order to be courted by Edgar Linton and become his wife. Catherine’s
vacillation between what she wants and what she already has reflects the characterization
in the novel where Catherine goes back and forth in loyalty between Edgar and Heathcliff
but finally marries Edgar after Heathcliff has run away and not returned but simplifies the
motives for her behavior.
To solidify Catherine’s materialistic wants, the Hecht-MacArthur script includes
the concept of Catherine’s being a queen. The “queen” concept begins with Heathcliff
when as children they make Peniston Crag their castle and Heathcliff declares to
Catherine, “You’re my queen,” and tells her she will always be his queen there. But the
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kingdom Heathcliff offers Catherine is not acceptable to her; she much prefers Edgar
Linton’s castle and kingdom. Thus Catherine becomes queen for the first man who can
outfit her like one. Catherine’s queen status is evident in her appearance at a ball some
time after she has married Edgar. Not only is Catherine wearing a beautiful ballgown and
dazzling jewelry, she also has the equivalent of a queen’s crown on her head—a diamond
tiara. But in the end, material gain does not satisfy her. Before her death she wants to
return where she was originally Heathcliff s queen, and she tells Edgar to gather heather
from the Crag, because “I was a queen there once.”
Wyler’s film changes the character of Isabella Linton depicting her as a sexual
aggressor. Once she meets Heathcliff she actively pursues him. She appears at the
Heights alone under the ruse that her horse has gone lame and she had to stop. At a ball
the Lintons host at the Grange, Isabella becomes the flirt/sexual aggressor telling
Heathcliff, “You can hold my hand under my fan,” and “Let’s waltz. That way you’re
permitted to hold me.” Despite the addition of the flirting, Isabella in film and novel seem
to match in that both have a strong will and the ability to be passionate. However, the
Isabella in the novel has her natural violent nature and animal passion exacerbated by
living at the Heights. After Wyler’s Isabella has married Heathcliff and realizes he loves
Catherine and not her, Isabella does not become more fiery, violent, passionate—she
becomes passive and loses the aggressive spirit she showed earlier. Isabella still believes
Heathcliff would love her if Catherine were gone. Isabella honestly hopes Catherine will
die because then she might replace Catherine in Heathcliff s love. When Heathcliff leaves
to go see Catherine on her death bed, Isabella begs him not to go and says, “Let her die in
Edgar’s arms! Let her die!” We see her underlying aggression in her desire for
Catherine's death, but her aggression never becomes bolder. In the novel, once Isabella
realizes that Heathcliff never loved her, she gives up trying to win or regain his affection.
Instead she wants to stay alive to protect her brother and to exasperate Heathcliff to the
R ep ro d u ced with p erm ission o f the copyright ow ner. Further reproduction prohibited w ithout p erm ission .
best of her ability. She becomes verbally abusive and inflicts emotional and physical
violence as well. After Catherine dies, Isabella tells Heathcliff, ‘“ if I were you, I’d go
stretch myself over her grave and die like a faithful dog. The world surely is not worth
living in now, is it?’” (136) In the film, we see Isabella frustrated with Heathcliff saying
“I’m pretty, I’m a woman, I love you” and angry at Catherine, yet she is ultimately passive
and will not take her life into her own hands and change her situation as does Bronte’s
Isabella, who leaves Heathcliff, moves to a far away town, gives birth, and raises her child
on her own.
Hindley’s character is not exactly changed in the film but incidents are changed
which give the audience a different attitude towards him than the novel suggests. Bronte’s
Hindley is a damaged young boy usurped from his father’s favor by the interloper
Heathcliff. Wyler changes one scene in the novel thus ensuring that Heathcliff a
sympathetic character to the audience and the film’s hero, while Hindley is reviled as the
sole oppressive, violent character. The scene involving the boys, Catherine and ponies in
the novel has Heathcliff wanting Hindley’s horse, and threatening that if Hindley does not
comply, he will tell Eamshaw of the beatings Hindley has given him. Hindley threatens to
throw a iron weight at Heathcliff, who tells him to follow through on his threat, and then
he will tell Eamshaw “‘how you boasted that you would turn me out of doors as soon as
he died’” (31). Hindley proceeds to throw the weight at Heathcliff, which hits him in the
chest and knocks him down. The scene ends with Hindley relinquishing his horse and
tripping Heathcliff before running away. In the film, roles and dialogue are reversed.
Hindley demands Heathcliff give up his horse and if not, he will tell Eamshaw that
Heathcliff “boasted” of turning Hindley out when Eamshaw died. Heathcliff claims to
never have said such a thing and Catherine vouches for him. Hindley takes the horse and
leads it away with Heathcliff slowly following behind. Hindley turns and threatens to
throw a large rock at Heathcliff who continues advancing. Hindley throws the rock at
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Heathcliff s head which knocks him to the ground. Hindley then jumps on him and starts
to beat him. Catherine stops the one-sided fight by using her riding crop to beat Hindley
off Heathcliff and make Hindley run away without the horse. Thus, Heathcliff becomes,
according to Bluestone, “the sinned against instead of the sinner” (108). Later in the film
when Heathcliff slaps Catherine, gains ownership of the Heights, and manies and
subsequently humiliates Isabella, “his revenge, we feel, is not wholly in excess of his
injuries” (Bluestone 109). From novel to film then, Heathcliff changes from devil
incarnate to anguished lover.
In the film, Hindley’s violence could be attributed to his own passionate nature and
perhaps we could consider his meanness to arise from his jealousy of Heathcliff We only
see Hindley’s cruelty toward Heathcliff because the script omits Frances and Hareton,
therefore we do not see Hindley victimize his own son. Wyler’s Mr. Eamshaw is seen
only in the beginning where he brings Heathcliff from Liverpool and introduces the “gift
from God” into the family. The film depicts Eamshaw as a compassionate loving man
who not only rescues the starving waif from certain death on the streets, he manages to
bring Catherine and Hindley their requested gifts intact. Catherine receives her riding crop
and Hindley gets the best violin and accompanying bow that money can buy. Eamshaw
does not press to make Heathcliff a family member by introducing him to the children as
their new brother. Instead, he tells the family that “this is a little gentleman I met in
Liverpool who has accepted my invitation to pay us all a little visit.” As a guest,
Heathcliff will be favored and treated differently from the family because he is not one of
them, but this also implies that he will not become a family member. After this scene,
Eamshaw is never seen or heard from again. Hindley mentions his father is ill and we see
Dr. Kenneth come down the stairs and announce Eamshaw’s death. In the novel,
Eamshaw interacts much more often and negatively with the children, showing how
violent natures are exacerbated by brutal upbringing as well as living environment. In the
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film no Mrs. Eamshaw ever mentioned, only Ellen the servant. The film suggests the
father’s death is truly a tragedy for the children because he is portrayed as a loving, kind,
and fair man who would no doubt have had a positive influence on the children if he had
lived. Unlike the novel then, the problem with the children in the film is not a poor or
abusive upbringing, but rather the discontinuation of a good one.
The physical violence inflicted by Heathcliff throughout the novel is seldom shown
in the film. He does kick one of his dogs to make it stop barking and grabs Lockwood by
the throat and throws him out of Catherine’s bed-chamber after his encounter with the
ghost-child. Heathcliff has only one scene of acute physical violence. He confronts
Catherine in her bed-chamber about her change in attitude towards him since she has met
Edgar. She dismisses his feelings and tells him he is dirty. Heathcliff looks down at his
hands, which are quite dirty, and says to her, “That’s all I’ve become to you—a pair of
dirty hands?” Then he slaps her with each hand. As he leaves the room, he turns, looks at
her and says, “It doesn’t help to strike you.” Heathcliff s realization that he cannot change
Catherine’s mind or heart with violence echoes the second half of the novel where
Heathcliff makes the same realization about Cathy and Hareton: he cannot destroy them
through violence as their wills are too strong to be defeated. Because Heathcliff
understands the futility of physically lashing out at Catherine, he plods back to the stable
loft, examines his hands again, then thrusts his fists through the window panes. He holds
them out in the rain, and examines his dirty hands again as if the water will purify him and
wash away the shame of striking the one he loves so dearly. Wyler’s Heathcliff shows
remorse for physical violence whereas Bronte’s Heathcliff is never sorry for his brutal
treatment of others, even those he loves.
Bluestone believes that the single violent incident when Heathcliff slaps Catherine
is more effective “as a symbol of his guilt, despair, and suffering” than numerous violent
acts.” and commends Hecht and MacArthur for “Wisely using passion rather than brutality
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to advance their story-line” (108). Bluestone notes that in the novel, Bronte’s constant
and consistent use of “attributive adjectives and metaphors” for Heathcliff s violent nature
“creates a more devastating portrait than the one Olivier portrays in the film,” adding that
“The motif of demonism and violence which pervades the book is almost unrelieved”
(107). Bluestone acknowledges “the general atmosphere o f violence” throughout the
novel, with Heathcliff either performing acts of violence or “forever threatening violence”
(108). However, Bluestone defends Wyler’s decision not to have violent incidents on film
because they “would seem absurd on the screen” (108).
The dogs in Wyler’s film do not reflect the human relationships or signify primitive
animal passion as they do in the novel. When Lockwood enters the Heights in the film,
two dogs, one a Great Dane, the other one a bit smaller, bark ferociously and jump up at
him. Lockwood struggles with the dogs and mumbles something about having them called
off. No one comes to assist him in his potentially dangerous predicament. Finally a harsh
male voice yells “Down!” from off-screen, and the dogs comply with the command. The
scene where the dogs attack Heathcliff and Catherine at the Grange is graphically violent.
Heathcliff and Catherine must scale a high garden wall in order to escape the dogs. As
Catherine is struggling to get over the wall, a dog clamps on to her ankle and pulls,
growling mightily at its prey. Wyler spends time alternating shots between the dog on her
ankle, and Catherine groaning in pain. Heathcliff falls to the ground after jumping back
over the wall to rescue Catherine. Instantly, another dog sinks his teeth into Heathcliff s
forearm as he tries to protect himself. Eventually, the dogs must be forcibly removed from
both Catherine and Heathcliff. Yet to interpret the dogs fiercely holding onto their
conquests as Heathcliff and Catherine desperately clinging to one another or as society’s

negative hold on the lovers is misplaced. Dogs—the only animals represented in the film
aside from horses used for transportation—are shown as doing their job. They are meant
to attack and protect their master which is precisely their function. They have no deeper
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significance to the film whereas the pervasive animal imagery in the novel connects the
humans to animals and helps convey the novel’s theme.
Wyler’s 1939 film adaptation is considered a classic film based on Bronte’s classic
story, and yet, it is a classic misinterpretation of the original text’s theme. By emphasizing
Heathcliff as the wronged romantic hero and focusing on a tale of unrequited love it
denies the truth about human nature, inherent violent tendencies, and how they are
exacerbated which are at the heart of Bronte’s novel. Would it have helped to have the
whole novel intact for the film? The next film which includes all thirty-four chapters of the
text will provide an answer.
CHAPTER 4
A BODY WITHOUT A SOUL: PETER KOSMINSKY’S 1992 ADAPTATION
In 1985, Joy Gould Boyum stated that if a filmmaker were to make a new
adaptation of Wuthering Heights, it would be markedly different from Wyler’s 1939
version because the modern viewing audience has different demands and expectations than
a pre-World War II audience. A modem audience does not want “traditional Hollywood
sop” including “bowdlerizations and happy endings” (Boyum 18), “pasteboard sets” and a
“saccharine film score” (Boyum 19). Knowing how important audience is to the making
and presenting of a film, audience appeal and ticket sales were the driving forces behind
Paramount's 1992 treatment of Wuthering Heights. When looking for an inaugural
project for their European branch, Paramount surveyed recent successful films and noticed
that Pretty Woman and Ghost had been commercial mega-hits. Therefore, Paramount’s
powers-that-be figured a project combining basic elements of the two films—a love story,
“sexy lead actors,” a touch of the supernatural—would be a sure-fire box-office winner
and decided Wuthering Heights fit the equation (Brooks np).
Paramount took risks with the project by hiring Peter Kosminsky, an award-
winning documentary director who had no feature film experience, to direct, and Mary
Selway, a casting director, to produce, and by casting relative unknowns Ralph Fiennes of
the Royal Shakespeare Company to play Heathcliff and French actress Juliette Binoche to
play both Catherine and her daughter Cathy. Paramount, however, did not take any other
risks with the adaptation apart from the casting and showing the novel in its entirety.
After principle filming began, Paramount was sued by the Samuel Goldwyn Co. for titling
the film Wuthering Heights—the same title as Wyler’s adaptation. The Goldwvn Co.
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objected, “claiming that the title exploits the popularity of its 1939 classic” film (Frook
27). The Motion Picture Association o f America ruled that Paramount could use the title
as long as it called the film Emilv Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and “so long as all four
words appear together and the words ‘Paramount Pictures’ appear above the title at half
the size” (Frook 27). The Goldwyn Co. recognized that by having the 1992 film with the
same title as the 1939, viewers and reviewers alike would then expect similarities between
the two films, and Goldwyn Co. did not want to invite comparison.
In general, the reviews of Emilv Bronte’s Wuthering Heights were unkind. The
London Times scoffed, “Something must be wrong with any adaptation o f Wuthering
Heights when it qualifies for a U certificate” (29), referring to the film’s approval for a
universal audience, the equivalent of a “G” rating in America. Lizzie Francke of Sight and
Sound said that while the film had several flaws, “Ultimately, the film’s failure lies in its
lack of cinematic vision .. . Kosminsky . . . offers only the most obvious visual
interpretation” (124). Both Francke and the reviewer for Variety felt that the film was
more like a TV movie or miniseries. Variety faulted the film for being too fast-paced,
lacking “atmosphere and passion” as well as “visual stylization and intense performances,”
and said that Kosminsky and his colleagues “seem[ed] over-bound by fidelity to the novel
and unwilling to take risks” (np). Here, though, “fidelity” is used to denote Kosminsky et
aj following the novel literally, not thematically. All reviewers agreed that the film’s most
glaring defect was the casting of Binoche, due primarily to her French accent. Francke
says of Binoche, “She may have the requisite mix of feral guilelesness and unworldly
beauty, but her performance is made risible as soon as she opens her mouth” (124). The
London Times claims to “hear the voice coach at work” (np). In the film’s comprehensive
production notes, Kosminsky defends Binoche’s casting: “‘The important thing is that
Juliette is the right actress for the p a rt. . . The French accent is a technical problem, but
it’s one that has been overcome’” (2).
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The reviewers were clearly dissatisfied with Kosminsky’s treatment of Bronte’s
complex novel. The reviewer from the Times recognizes the potential a filmmaker has
with Wuthering Heights: “Emily Bronte’s novel invites the filmmaker to push close to the
edge, to probe the darkest recesses of obsessive love and sexual passion” (29). Francke
says in her review.
To be true to the novel, any film of Wuthering Heights should be able to

reach out, like Cathy’s ghost crashing through the glass in Lockwood’s
chamber, and touch the soul. For a film that is about the turbulent
extremes o f emotion . . . it [the 1992 adaptation] is curiously—and
ridiculously—empty. (124)
Richard Brooks of the London Observer believes Kosminsky’s film is indeed “far truer to
the novel” than other adaptations in that it covers the complete story line, but he then asks
the all-important question, “But has it worked?” For him it has not: “It is a literal and
literary version of the book,” similar to one of Wagner’s transpositions, or Boyum’s
“dogged translations.” Brooks’s distinction between the 1992 and the 1939 adaptations
supports Boyum’s assertion that the best adaptations retain a novel’s theme as well as
Bazin’s argument that “a good adaptation should result in a restoration of the essence of
the letter and the spirit” of a literary work (67). Although Kosminsky remained faithful to
the original text by including all thirty-four of the novel’s chapters in his film, this inclusion
is decidedly incomplete. Instead of retaining the animal passion, love and, violence in the
novel, and transferring them to the screen, Kosminsky lessens the horror and drama by
changing the film’s focus. Brooks argues that, “the 1939 Wuthering Heights succeeded
not because it followed Bronte, but because it concentrated on an unrequited passion and
ended, more simply, with Cathy’s demise” (np).
Paramount’s synopsis of Emilv Bronte’s Wuthering Heights reads: “Emily

Bronte’s immortal classic of love and vengeance on the Yorkshire moors. The timeless
story of Heathcliff and Cathy—a passion bom of need and denied by convention; an
obsession so strong it transcended life itself’ (Notes 1). In the production notes
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screenwriter Anne Devlin enthusiastically describes Bronte’s novel as ‘“ passionate, deeply
pagan, and primeval’” (Notes 4). Unfortunately, Devlin only mentions Bronte’s novel in
this statement, not how or whether she has retained or transformed it for the film
rendition. For Kosminsky, the film is “‘about that choice of following your head or your
heart, and that’s what I’m trying to make the central theme of the film’” (Notes 3). Like
Devlin, Kosminsky makes no connection between film and novel. He describes the film’s
theme, but does not give his own idea of what he considers the novel’s theme to be, nor
does he position his adaptation in relation to the novel. Kosminsky is quoted in the notes
as saying about adapting Wuthering Heights: “‘Being asked to make the film is a
privilege, but also an overwhelming responsibility because it will not be done again for at
least a generation. It’s important that we get it right’” (3). He does not elaborate on what
“right” constitutes: Showing all thirty-four chapters? Interpreting the theme as head
versus heart? Since there is no critical investigation into this particular adaptation aside
from film reviews, we must look to the film itself to determine if Kosminsky did indeed
“get it right.”
Kosminsky’s decision to show all thirty-four of the novel’s chapters was a first for
a Wuthering Heights adaptation. However, compromises and adjustments to the original
text had to be made in order to fit the entire story into a standard theatrical time frame of
two hours. Boyum stated that selective omission is positive if done correctly; here,
though, the pitfall of omission is distancing the viewer from the story. Kosminsky begins
this distancing by opening his film with Emily Bronte wandering the moor and discovering
a house in ruins. As she investigates the house, she tells the audience through a voice
over that she is an author and the story they are about to see is not real: “I have imagined
this. My pen creates a world that might have been, a world of my imagining. And here is
one I’m going to tell.” We then cut to Lockwood trudging through the snow, signaling
the novel’s beginning. Thus, by having the author tell us that the story is, first of all, not
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real, and second, that this is just one of her many stories, the viewer is less inclined to
participate in the film, to become caught up in the story. Bronte as narrator distances the
viewer from the story because she does not participate in the story she is telling. Even
though in the novel Nelly does not relate the whole story, and Lockwood takes on the
narrator role, the reader forgets that a non-participant in the events is telling the story.
Wyler’s film begins with an ominous statement that the Heights is “as bleak and desolate
as the wastes around it,” and that, “Only a stranger lost in a storm would have dared to
knock at the door,” which serves to set the mood for the film and invite the audience into
the story. When Lockwood enters the Heights and Ellen begins her narrative in the Wyler
film, she is telling the story from the point of view of a past and present participant in her
own narrative, which makes her story more believable. Also in Kosminsky’s film, Emily
Bronte says in a voice-over as Catherine and Heathcliff ride together on a horse, “I cannot
live without my life. I cannot live without my soul.” This declaration is out of context.
When Heathcliff does utter the lines after Catherine’s death, they have decidedly less
impact on the audience because they are a repeat of what we have already heard the
author saying.
In addition to Kosminsky’s having Emily Bronte in the film, condensing the plot
also distances the viewer from the story thereby decreasing the text’s horror and passion.
To save screen time and move the story along, characters in Kosminsky’s film tell the
viewer outright their thoughts, feelings, and intentions instead of allowing the viewer to
discover them throughout the film. Heathcliff s reason for pursuing Isabella in the novel is
to revenge himself on Edgar and eventually gain Isabella’s fortune. In the film, he tells
Isabella, and thus the viewer, directly, “I’m a villain. I’m only after your fortune.” Much
later in the film, Edgar explains to Cathy that her Uncle Heathcliff wants to get her fortune
in order to revenge himself on Edgar because Heathcliff hates him. Once she is locked in
the Heights, Linton calmly tells Cathy that Heathcliff plans to have the two marry so
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“father will then be master of the Grange.” Nelly says to Hindley, “I remember when this
house was full o f the sound of laughter Mr. Hindley. Now there’s nothing but bitterness
and hatred.” This information helps move the story line along, and yet directly telling it
renders the moment, and thus the story, decidedly less horrific.
Incidents are changed to make Heathcliff a sympathetic character, as was done in

the 1939 film. Again Hindley is the evil, violent one, harming Heathcliff out of jealousy
and a need to feel superior to his father’s favorite. When they are children, Hindley
pushes Heathcliff into a door and roughly tells him, “Nothing here belongs to you. Not
now, not ever.” The camera shot is taken from a low angle from Heathcliff s point of
view on the ground looking up to Hindley, giving the impression to the viewer that
Hindley is an ominous, dominating bully. When the family returns to the Heights after
Eamshaw’s death, Hindley prevents Heathcliff from crossing the threshold and decrees
Heathcliff is banished henceforth and must sleep in the stables slamming the front door in
his face. Several years later at the Christmas dance held at the Heights, Hindley spies
Heathcliff observing the festivities from a doorway and orders him out of the house. He
rushes up to Heathcliff, punches him in the stomach, then throws him into a small
adjoining room against a heavy table. Hindley uses a club-like staff to strike Heathcliff
three times, hard enough to send him to the ground. Bluestone’s comment on Wyler’s
changing of Heathcliff s character from “sinner” to “sinned against” by Hindley thereby
making Heathcliff s later “revenge” as “not wholly in excess of his injuries” (108) applies
equally here.
Aside from Heathcliff, changes in the second generation characters of Cathy and
Linton remove the passion and violence from the second half of the novel. In Bronte’s
text, both Cathy and Linton have their inherent violent tendencies exacerbated by the
environment of the Heights and Heathcliff s brutal parenting. Kosminsky shows Linton
only as a teenager at the time he marries Cathy. He does not show Linton’s childhood,
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reveal his personality or his extreme fear of his father. Kosminsky shows Linton as a
passive, sickly, yet unharrassed teenager who does not suffer physical violence or threats
from Heathcliff. The second Cathy has more screen time, but she does not, as she does in
the novel according to Nelly, “enter into the spirit of her future family, and draw pleasure
from the griefs of her enemies” (218). Kosminsky’s Cathy has a strong personality like
Bronte’s Cathy. However, unlike the Cathy in the novel, the Cathy in the film remains a
lady. Her temper never gets the best of her. She has a big heart, forgives people, and is
on all accounts terribly virtuous. She does not raise her voice, threaten, or physically lash
out at anyone at the Heights, aside from the one instance when she bites Heathcliff s hand.
There is never any sign of her dislike or distaste for Hareton as there is in the novel. She
taunts Hareton by imitating him smoking a pipe while cleaning his gun or by throwing
small pieces of food at him at the dinner table. These actions, though, are more playful
than vengeful on her part. Kosminsky’ Cathy is never cruel.
Passion and horror in the film are also lessened by changing the order of action
concerning Catherine’s death. In the novel, Nelly visits Isabella and Heathcliff at the
Heights; Heathcliff goes to see Catherine on her deathbed; Cathy is bom; and Catherine
dies shortly after giving birth. In the film, however, the events appear in this order:
Cathy’s birth; Nelly visits Isabella and Heathcliff at the Heights; Heathcliff visits Catherine
on her deathbed; Catherine dies an unspecified time after HeathclifFs visit. Changing the
order of the events changes their implications. In Bronte’s text, the events and their
subsequent tension build upon one another. HeathclifFs ability to be physically violent is
established during Nelly’s visit. The fact that this violent man is going to meet with a
dying pregnant woman has the reader in suspense. Then, the fact that Edgar can discover
their meeting at any moment increases the suspense, passion and desperation of the scene,
and the exchange between Heathcliff and Catherine. And the fact that Catherine gives
birth and then dies but a few hours after the meeting with Heathcliff makes the reader
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believe the lethal combination of Heathcliff s embrace and the birth of the child killed her
Catherine in the novel does not die peacefully. Kosminsky’s rearranging the order of
events in the film removes their passion, suspense, tension, and desperation. We discover
Heathcliff s violence to Isabella after Catherine has given birth, so we do not feel
Catherine is in any potential mortal danger from Heathcliff when he pays his visit.
Heathcliff goes to Catherine while Edgar is out of town. Heathcliff freely opens the front
door of the Grange and proceeds up to Catherine’s bed-chamber. The lovers are
completely safe from any interruption or discovery as no one is in the house. In the
scene’s final moments, Heathcliff lies on top of Catherine on the bed where they kiss
passionately, and continue to kiss while the scene fades out. Therefore, Kosminsky’s
Catherine appears to die peacefully in the throes of love, not in physical and mental
anguish as the Catherine in the novel.
Apart from Hindley’s three scenes involving Heathcliff, animal passion manifested
as physical violence is not shown often or to any distressing degree. Heathcliff threatens
to hit Edgar with a fire poker, but instead uses it to strike the doorknob off the locked
door. At the Christmas dance, Heathcliff smashes a teacup on the ground in response to
Hindley’s order to remove him from the house. When Nelly sees Isabella at the Heights
after the latter becomes Mrs. Heathcliff, Isabella has cuts on her lip and what appears to
be the remainder of a black eye. Heathcliff ends the women’s visit by dragging Isabella by
her arm upstairs, not stopping when she stumbles. The most intense physically violent act
appears near the end of the film in the scene where Heathcliff has locked Cathy up at the
Heights so she will marry Linton. Cathy attempts to wrench the key out o f HeathclifFs
hand. He laughs during the struggle then throws her against the stairs. Undaunted, she
tries again, this time biting his hand causing him to drop the key. But before she can
retrieve it from the floor, he wheels her around and slaps her fiercely three times, sending
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her to the ground, echoing the earlier scene of Heathcliff s beating by Hindley at the
Christmas dance.
It is interesting to note the occasions when Kosminsky chooses to include violent
scenes from the novel and which moments he changes to non-violent ones. In the novel,
when Heathcliff and Catherine spy on the Lintons at the Grange, Isabella and Edgar are
fighting over a dog which they have injured in their passion for possession. When
Heathcliff and Catherine peek into the window in the film, Edgar and Isabella are quietly
and most civilly playing a game resembling paddle tennis in the parlor. As for the pain and
suffering of childbirth, Bronte only mentions that Hindley’s wife, Frances, and Catherine
give birth, she does not provide details. Kosminsky plays up the pain and suffering in the
film by having scenes where the Frances is heard screaming in pain while the camera
shows Hindley’ suffering by hearing her in agony. A similar scene takes place when
Catherine gives birth, but we are shown a brief moment of Catherine in labor, with Nelly
and the doctor assisting her after we have scene the helpless, pained expression on Edgar’s
face.
One wonders why Kosminsky chose not to show more of the novel’s violence in
his film. He seems to ascribe to Bluestone’s comment about Wyler’s 1939 film that less
violence has more impact on the audience. Bluestone felt that Wyler’s showing the single
scene where Heathcliff slapped Catherine was more effective than having more scenes like
it, because for him, “raw brutality, literally transposed” to the screen becomes “absurd”
(108). Kosminsky’s interpretation of Wuthering Heights also seems to be more akin to
Wyler’s in that both adaptations choose to highlight Heathcliff and Catherine’s love for
one another instead of their inherent violent natures. Although we can say Kosminsky did
“get it right” by showing all thirty-four of the novel’s chapters, he did not “get it right”
thematically. Kosminsky made enough substantial changes otherwise to change the

thematic impact of the film. The sporadic violence he showed does not reflect the
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pervasive violence in the novel. Bazin would say that Kosminsky got the “letter” of the
novel correct in his adaptation, but not the “spirit.” Having the novel’s structure without
the accompanying theme is like having a body without a soul; it lacks the spark that that
makes the body/film truly “alive.” After analyzing the 1939 and 1992 adaptations, it
seems as if it is impossible to make a text-based adaptation of Wuthering Heights that still
manages to retain the novel’s theme. Director Luis Buiiuel, though, will change our
minds.
CHAPTER 5
BRIEF, YET INTENSE: LUIS BUNUEL’S 1953 ADAPTATION
Like the 1939 and 1992 films, Buhuel’s adaptation had a rough start. In his
autobiography, Bunuel claims to have written the script with Pierre Unik in 1930 (205),
though various sources put the date at 1932. Unfortunately, Unik and Bunuel could not
convince anyone to produce it, resulting in the project being shelved for twenty years.
Bunuel was two weeks into shooting a comedy when he finally got the go ahead to make
Abismos de Pasion—The Depths of Passion, also known by the alternate title Cumbres
Borrescosas. a literal translation o f Wuthering Heights. However, realizing his long-
awaited desire came with a condition: he had to use the existing cast of a musical (Bunuel
205). Therefore, Isabel (Isabella) is played by a rhumba dancer, Eduardo (Edgar) by a
singer, and the actress in the lead role o f Catalina (Catherine) is actually Polish (Bunuel
205). Understandably Bunuel was not happy with the situation, but he was compelled to
realize his vision and agreed. Although Bunuel’s adaptation is far removed from Bronte’s
novel—it is set in Mexico, not England; the characters speak Spanish; Nelly and Joseph
are all but absent; Lockwood is completely omitted; and the film covers only six of the
novel’s thirty-four chapters beginning with HeathclifFs (Alejandro’s) return in chapter 10
and ending shortly after Catherine’s (Catalina’s) death in chapter 17—his film is actually
the closest to Bronte’s text than the other Wuthering Heights film adaptations. From the
fade-in of the first frame up to the fade-out of the last, we are inundated with the true
primitive core of human nature where animal passion, manifest as love, violence, or a
perverted combination of both, is conveyed through disturbing images, devastating lines of
dialogue, physical and emotional suffering, and animal imagery.

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In his book surveying Bunuel’s career, Freddy Buache says of Abismos de Pasion.
“Bunuel creates a desolate poetic atmosphere which . .. comes much closer to the spirit of
the novel than did . . . [the] 1939 version” (109). Buache also credits Bunuel with giving
the film “a realistic visual violence” by showing the intense animal cruelty of the
characters’ emotions (109). Reviewing the film in re-release in 1983, Vincent Canby of
the New York Times calls Bunuel’s adaptation “an almost magical example of how an
artist of genius can take someone else’s classic work and shape it to fit his own
temperament without really violating it” (Cl 1). Caryn James, also of The New York
Times, states that since it is “virtually impossible” to translate the entire novel to the
screen, the extreme truncation of the original text is not an issue for her. She concedes
that “For all its obvious departures from the original, Bunuel’s version is far more
conscious of its source” (Cl 5) than Wyler’s, which she describes as “all thwarted
romance” in comparison to Bunuel’s “all vengeance” version (Cl 1). Anthony Fragola
responds positively to the film in “Bunuel’s Re-Vision of Wuthering Heights: The
Triumph of L’amour Fou Over Hollywood Romanticism.” Fragola argues that Bunuel’s
film is close to Bronte’s text in that it is imbued with as much intense passion as the novel.
Because the characters’ animal passion is the focus, the absence of the second
generation is not even an issue worth discussing for Fragola. His interpretation o f the
novel coincides with mine; the novel does not have a happy ending culminating in
“fulfillment in death” for Catherine and Heathcliff (53). While the second generation in
the novel serves to further illustrate the theme begun with the first generation, if a
filmmaker can convey the animal passion, violent tendencies, and the combination of love
and abuse in a condensed plot structure, he will have successfully adapted Wuthering
Heights. By concentrating and intensifying the novel’s theme through only the first
generation of characters, Bunuel nullifies his need to show the second generation as
extending the violence begun in the first generation; the first generation so completely
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demonstrates Bronte’s themes. As film theorist Andre Bazin stated, artistic license in an
adaptation o f a novel is not undesirable as long as the film does not stray too far from the
original text. Bazin considers the best adaptations to achieve some middle ground
between “the letter and the spirit” of the original. Joy Gould Boyum concurs with Bazin
that an adaptation can radically depart from the plot points and details of the original text
as long as it retains the text’s theme or qualities as Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood
does.
Some film critics dismiss Bunuel’s adaptation altogether due to the overwrought
Wagner Tristan and Isolde score and the amateur actors. James, however, does not
consider these issues to be the film’s largest flaw. Instead, she finds it difficult to
understand the Catalina-Alejandro passion because the film begins in the middle of the
narrative: “Bunuel makes it impossible to understand how that fierce passion grew” (15).
I disagree with James. We do not need to have the inception of their passion spelled out
for us; that is not the point of the story. We only need to know that their passion exists,
as the story hinges on existing and continuing passion. Moreover, in the novel Bronte
does not give a reason as to why Catherine and Heathcliff are so wildly attached to one
another, we simply know that they are. The gut-level rendering of the characters’ raw
natures by the amateur actors intensifies the passion and primitivism in and between
Catalina and Alejandro. Their unrefined performances convince the audience that these
are real people with real emotions up on the screen, not actors playing a temporary role.
Bunuel truly throws viewers into the depths of passion where they are sucked under by
passion’s relentless turmoil. Passion is not supposed to be a pleasant experience because,

for the Surrealists, love was not pleasant, happy, or romantic. In his book on Bunuel,
Raymond Durgnat explains that Surrealists were interested in Bronte’s novel because it
was “celebrated as an exemplar of 1’amour fou. the love which, acting out rather than
smoothing over all its torments and ambivalences, defying all the distractions and obstacles
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posed by the world, casts aside all scruples, all calculations and all egoistic restraint” (85).
Fragola points out that “Concomitant with Pamour fou is fierce passion, even violence”
(51), and he concludes, “By adhering to the surrealist concept of Pamour fou Bunuel
remains true to the unadulterated passions of Bronte’s lovers” (55). Due to the
Surrealists’ concept of Pamour fou. they seem uniquely able to understand and depict
Bronte’s vision of human nature.
Abismos de Pasion opens with a static shot of a single-paged “Dear Viewer”
statement from Bunuel as an introduction to the film. This brief statement warns the
viewer that the characters in the film are “at the mercy of their own instincts and
passions,” thus preparing us for a world where thunder sounds like gunshots, people carry
whips, riding crops and sticks, and continually demand of one another, “Why are you so
cruel to me?” and “Why do you torture me so?” Moreover, the statement provides a
description of Catalina and Alejandro’s love for each other as “a fierce and inhuman
feeling that can only be fulfilled through death,” which foreshadows the passion, violence,
and destruction to come.
In his article “Wuthering Heights and its ‘Spirit,’” Michael Popkin takes issue with
Bunuel’s adaptation, claiming it “reflects the ‘spirit’ of Bunuel instead of, or rather in
addition to, the ‘spirit of Emily Bronte’” (121). Popkin asserts that in his film, Bunuel has
depicted “his own vision of a love whose basis is cruel treatment of the beloved and
sadistic treatment of everyone else” (120). As we have seen earlier in this thesis, Bunuel
does not offer a unique vision—cruelty and sadism are strongly evident in the text.
Popkin also believes that Bunuel has strayed from Bronte’s “spirit” in that Bunuel’s film
offers no second generation and therefore no chance of redemption for any of the
characters:
As if to emphasize there will be no redemption even in the next generation .

. . Bunuel’s Caterina [sic] dies while giving birth to a son. There can
therefore be no reconciliation between the two houses in the next
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generation: the little boy [who] is abused and ignored by his drunken
father . . . will not be magically transformed by a Caterina who succeeds
where her mother has failed. (121)
Clearly Popkin has fallen into the trap of expecting the film to coincide with his personal
interpretation of the novel: Boyum’s notion of “sameness,” which, as stated earlier,
reveals the viewer’s naivete of the relationship between novel and film. Despite his
criticism of Bunuel’s choices, however, Popkin declares that even though the director has
veered far from the original text, he has not “betrayed” it by any means and has, in fact,
proven his directorial genius by “radically misread[ing]” the text (121). Closer
examination of the film reveals that Bunuel has not radically misread the novel; rather, he
has successfully understood Bronte’s pessimistic view of human nature.
J. Hiliis Miller’s description of the Wuthering Heights of the novel as a place

“where destruction is the law of life” certainly rings true for the nameless “Heights” in
Bunuel’s film. Destruction in the film ranges from the literal—Alejandro smashing in
windows and breaking down doors—to the intangible emotional destruction of a human
being. When Alejandro and Catalina visit their version o f Peniston Crag, he uncovers
buried treasures from their childhood— a large knife and a lantern broken when Catalina
threw it at him because he would not talk to her. These objects suggest the dynamics of
their earlier relationship. The knife symbolizes physical, mental, and emotional pain; the
lantern represents the search for direction and warmth in a dark world. Only now, the
lantern gives off no light or heat, and the broken glass symbolizes broken relations and is
on par with the knife as a sharp object with pain-inflicting potential. When Catalina
refuses to go away with Aiejandro noting, “We have threatened each other so many
times,” her statement suggests their relationship has never been physically injurious to
either one of them. “This time,” Alejandro responds, “I’ll do something that will hurt
you.” The viewer infers from Alejandro’s statement that he will, at last, physically harm
Catalina. Instead, he proceeds to throw the two treasures against a nearby tree and
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trample them. He wants to hurt Catalina emotionally by destroying the precious objects
which represent past time together, presumably before she met Eduardo. Catalina sits
calmly watching him, and smiles satisfactorily at the emotional pain she knows his own
action, and her absence of reaction, causes him. Although Alejandro seems to be the
violent one in this scene, Catalina is perhaps more violent in her passive-aggressive
behavior. Here, she inflicts more pain than he does by doing nothing.
In certain scenes in the film, Bunuel selectively uses pieces of dialogue from the
novel to further illustrate Bronte’s theme of passion. Catalina openly taunts Eduardo
about her love for Alejandro, blatantly telling Eduardo, “You won’t be able to love me
half as much as Alejandro loves me.” In a later scene she declares to her husband, “I love
Alejandro more than my soul’s salvation,” and claims, “Your love and mine will end in
death. The love I have for Alejandro is not of this world.” We can see how Catalina’s
dialogue directly connects to Catherine’s statements: “‘Whatever our souls are made of,
his [HeathclifFs] and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from
lightning, or frost from fire’” (62); “‘My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods.
Time will change i t . . . as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff is like the
eternal rocks beneath’” (64). While Catalina’s and Catherine’s assertions are forceful,
Catalina’s are stronger, more devastating, and have greater impact than Catherine’s
because Catalina speaks her lines directly to Eduardo, whereas Catherine reveals her
thoughts to Nelly. Catherine’s notions might upset Nelly or even shock her, but they do
not emotionally damage Nelly as they would Edgar.
Catalina appears to enjoy inflicting pain upon Eduardo much as Isabella enjoys
exasperating Heathcliff in the novel. For as much as she loves Alejandro, Catalina is
faithful to her husband and will not leave him. By staying married, Catalina successfully
causes Eduardo and Alejandro to suffer: her not leaving Eduardo hurts Alejandro while
her loving Alejandro as fiercely as she does hurts Eduardo. Similarly, Isabella will not
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leave Heathcliff because she knows her presence maddens him, and she rather likes that
sense of power over him. Catherine as well, wants to see both Heathcliff and Edgar suffer
and plans to break their hearts by breaking her own. In the film, Catalina truly enjoys the
suffering of others and being the cause o f their suffering. Catherine also wants to see her
‘loved ones” suffer and wants to be the cause of their suffering. The novel gives us the
explanation for this: pain is the only way she knows how to have a relationship. She
learned from her parents, particularly her father, that one behaves brutally, not tenderly, in
a love relationship.
Like Catalina, Alejandro “loves” by inflicting pain, thereby displaying the animal
passion within him. He behaves like a predator in his tracking and capture of Isabel. He
chases her, comers her, then toys with her physically, mentally, and emotionally. In one
scene, Alejandro spies Isabel walking alone in a bare sandy valley. The fact that he
confines her next to an enormous dead twisted tree trunk suggests twisted intentions and
reinforces the concepts of death, decay, and destruction in human relationships pervading
the film. By the tree, Alejandro asks Isabel if she loves him, then proceeds to kiss her,
although “kiss” is not an apt verb to describe the action. Alejandro forces Isabel’s head
back and buries his face completely in the side of her neck, like an animal ripping out the
throat o f its victim, thus connecting kissing with killing, love with violence. Astonished,
Isabel stands frozen after Alejandro’s departure. In a later scene, stunned again after
Alejandro “kisses” her neck, Isabel holds her hand up to her cheek, as if he had kissed her
there, not on her neck. Her reaction suggests that by holding her cheek, she associates his
kiss with a blow to the face. Finally, she agrees to elope with him after he breaks into her
bedroom from the balcony and “kisses” her once again. Alejandro’s barbarous displays of
affection recall Catherine’s death scene where she pulls HeathclifFs hair and he bruises her
arms and ultimately crushes her to death from embracing. Alejandro’s reaction to Isabel
immediately after their marriage reflects that he has successfully captured his prey and
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satiated his desire. When Isabel turns to kiss him on the lips, he turns away from her and
wipes his mouth with his hand as if something distasteful or unsightly clings to them.
There is no need to “kiss” her on the neck—to continue to kill her when she is already
dead to him just as Heathcliff has no use for Isabella after he has married and impregnated
her.
BunuePs ending to the film solidifies the connection between love and violence.
Late one night soon after Catalina’s death, Alejandro goes straight to her tomb, an
underground crypt whose heavy metal doors have been chained and locked. Desperate to
be with her again, Alejandro uses a crowbar to force the lock open and break the chain. J.
Hoberman in his review o f BunuePs film for Village Voice in 1984 calls this moment “a
brilliantly jarring touch th a t. .. concretizes Alejandro’s thwarted sexual desire” (52).
Hoberman relates Alejandro’s thrusting of the crowbar into the lock as an act of displaced
rape; since Alejandro could not consummate his love for Catalina, he resorts to this act of
violence to express his violent passion for her. I would argue that instead of rape, this
scene suggests BunuePs answer to Heathcliff s digging up Catherine’s grave twice in the
novel: the night of her burial and after Edgar has been buried. After Alejandro has
opened the crypt’s doors, Ricardo shoots him in the heart, causing Alejandro to stumble,
bleeding fatally, down into the crypt. Once down there, Alejandro spies Catalina in the
coffin, her burial attire a white dress complete with veil, which makes her look like a bride
or an angel— of death. Alejandro lifts the coffin lid, clutches Catalina’s hand, touches her
forehead, removes the veil covering her face, and passionately kisses the lips of his dead
love. This is the first time he has kissed her—they have only nuzzled each other’s faces
before—and she is the only woman he will kiss on the mouth. Alejandro hears Catalina
call his name, and turns to discover an apparition of her standing on the crypt’s staircase
with arms outstretched, beckoning him, and smiling seductively. Suddenly, Catalina’s
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image is replaced by Ricardo who shoots Alejandro again, this time in the head, before
ascending the stairs and slamming the tomb doors.
Alejandro’s vision of Catalina is not a hallucination from loss of blood due to his
injury nor is it a form of wisn-fulfillment; Catalina is undoubtedly present. Buiiuel uses the
ghost Catalina to answer to Catherine’s ghost in the novel; a ghost only Heathcliff can see.
Heathcliff tells Nelly, ‘“ I have a strong faith in ghosts; I have a conviction that they can,
and do exist, among us!”’ (219) When Heathcliff digs up Catherine’s grave on the night
of her burial, he claims to have heard a sigh and felt a breath on him, both of which he
attributes to Catherine: “‘I felt that Cathy was there, not under me, but on the earth.’”
(219). In the film, Catalina wants Alejandro to turn and see her precisely so Ricardo will
provide the fatal blast, ensuring Alejandro’s death. This calculation on her part closely
resembles the end o f Bronte’s text where Catherine returns to the Heights to haunt
Heathcliff and lead him to his death by slow torture. At the Heights, Heathcliff “sees”
Catherine’s ghost in the house and outside. Whenever he sees her he interrupts whatever
he is doing to follow her wherever she leads him. Usually, he sees her at meal time and
leaves his food to pursue her; thus she causes Heathcliff to slowly starve himself.
Although Popkin believes Bunuel strays from the original text, he states that
Buiiuel is faithful to the novel in that he includes “animals who are tortured and
gratuitously killed, an element which not only pervades the film but serves as a metaphor
for the way characters interact” (120). Unlike the novel, though, the film makes no
distinction between adult and younger animals; therefore, Miller’s and Thompson’s
theories about the meanings of killing adult animals versus killing young animals does not
apply. The animals in BunuePs film can be distinguished by size as either large or small;
however, all animal references serve to reflect the human’s condition. Once the film’s
introductory statement has faded to black, the film’s action begins with a literal “shot” as
Catalina shoots at buzzards in a tree. Isabel runs in the house and orders her brother
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Eduardo to make Catalina stop. Eduardo, though, is too busy to be distracted. He selects
a live butterfly from a large glass jar, examines it admiringly as it flutters in his fingers,
then skewers it with a long pin and places it, still struggling to live, on a holding block to
dry flat. Isabel is horrified: “Can’t you see how it suffers?” Eduardo is immune to her
protests. “It’s precisely that way that they don’t suffer.” Catalina refers to her own killing
of animals without remorse, stating matter-of-factly, “I don’t make them suffer. I kill
them with one shot. They pass to death’s liberty without feeling anything.” When she
tells Eduardo that what he does to his butterflies and other insect conquests is much
crueler, the camera pulls back to reveal that the walls surrounding the desk where
Eduardo sits engaged with his hobby are covered with insect-filled glass trophy cases.
Winged creatures are not the only ones to suffer in the film. A frog is sacrificed
and used as part of an exorcism by Jose (Joseph) with the help of Jorgito (Hareton). The
live frog is placed on burning coals in a metal container that Jose and Jorgito then carry
around the house making the sign of the cross at every doorway. The smoke created by
the burning frog flesh supposedly has the power to purify the house and chase the devil,
Alejandro, out of it. Additionally, the roasting amphibian also subtly represents Alejandro
as the devil burning in the confinement of hell. In another, more horrific scene, a man
sharpens a butcher knife while pigs squeal in the background. Two other men go to the
pig pen, drag out a large pig who resists mightily, and finally manage to lift it onto a table
and restrain it. The man wielding the butcher knife stands behind the pig, which is still
squealing furiously, while another positions a bucket in front of the pig’s neck. The
tension builds as the viewer anticipates the pig’s impending fate. But the moment the
knife plunges into the pig’s throat, the shot instantly switches to Isabel, disgusted and
frightened watching the slaughter, putting her hands over her ears to drown out the pig’s
final squeals of terror and pain, and finally running away from the scene of death. But
there is no sanctuary in the depths of passion; she inadvertently runs into Alejandro, a man
74
whose “kisses” on her throat will “kill” her symbolically just as the butcher uses the knife
to kill the pig literally by slitting its throat.
Characters in Bunuel’s film are likened to animals, given animal characteristics,
and are commended or condemned for their animalistic behavior, much as the characters in
the novel are. Alejandro bitterly remembers how Jose used to make him eat table scraps
like an animal. It is also important to note that while the film does not rely on dialogue
directly from the novel, Buiiuel extracts and incorporates select quotations from specific
scenes in order to support his reading of the text and understanding of the novel’s theme
concerning human nature and animal passion. Ricardo treats his own son, Jorgito, like an
animal, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck, which is one way to completely subdue an
animal and render it helpless and docile. He threatens Jorgito with, “I’m going to pull
your ears” and “I’ll cut your ears off’ as if he were a dog, thereby directly repeating
Hindley’s same threat to Hareton, ‘“Now, don’t you think the lad would be handsomer
cropped? . . . . get me a scissors’” (57). When Catalina tells Alejandro that Isabel is in
love with him and the girls struggle, Isabel bites Catalina’s hand so she will release her.
Catalina screams, immediately shows her wound to Alejandro and says, “look, she’s worse
than a tiger. . . . She will bite you too if you marry her.” Alejandro replies, “If she would
dare do that I would pull her teeth out one by one.” Here, Bunuel’s dialogue mirrors
Bronte’s where Catherine calls Isabella a “tigress,” and Heathcliff says of Isabella’s
fingernails, “‘I’d wrench them off her fingers, if they ever menaced me’” (83).
In a fashion similar to the novel, the film’s animal suffering mirrors human
suffering. In the scene following the pig slaughter, Catalina is extremely upset that
Alejandro is pursuing Isabel and questions his motives. He says he wants to marry Isabel
in order to hurt Catalina the way she has hurt him: “You married the brother, why can’t I
marry the sister?” When Catalina asks Alejandro how he would react if he realized she did
not care who he married or what he did, he tells her, “If you didn’t care I would cut my
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throat right now.” Without hesitating, Catalina walks over to a table, picks up a large
knife, hurls it at him, and tells him to go ahead and do it. Alejandro, of course, does not
follow through on his threat to himself. His lack of action does not prove his cowardice;
rather, it reveals that Alejandro causing himself physical pain will not cause Catalina
emotional pain.
To further connect animals with humans, Buiiuel employs light, shadow, and mise-
en-scene. The great room of the house resembles a large, dark, uninviting cave, which is
perfectly suited to the primitive, animalistic inhabitants. In the novel, Isabella describes
the interior of the Heights: ‘There was a great fire, and that was all the light in the huge
apartment, whose floor had grown a uniform grey; and the once brilliant pewter dishes . . .
partook of a similar obscurity, created by tarnish and dust” (107). Therefore, Bunuel’s
creating a part cage, part cave-like atmosphere is appropriate. Intricately paned windows
and doors along with spindled balconies and fences abound in the setting, thus giving the
illusion that the characters are in a cage. Buiiuel shoots scenes through the various “bars”
either from the point-of-view of an observer looking into the cage, or from the point-of-
view of one of the characters looking out of it. With the black and white photography and
subdued lighting, shadows are a constant feature, reinforcing bar imagery as the viewer
sees the original panes and spindles in addition to their shadows which cover the walls or
appear heavily across characters’ faces. Fragola states that the elements of the house
“suggest a subterranean labyrinth o f the damned who cannot escape their fate” (54-55), an
interpretation of the mise-en-scene that connects it to a cage or prison. The novel’s
description of Heathcliff s bed-chamber with its tom wallpaper, draperies wrenched from
the curtain rod, severely damaged furniture, “and deep indentations deform[ing] the panels
of the walls” (111) gives the impression that a savage beast, not a human, caused the
damage during a passionate frenzy.
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Continuing with the cage motif, Catalina has a pet bird she keeps in a cage. She
sweetly asks the creature, “isn’t it enough that I love you for you not to mind being locked
up?”, confident that the bird prizes her love for him more than freedom. Similarly,
Eduardo believes a woman should be happy in the cage of marriage as long as she is loved
by the one who imprisoned her, and he cannot understand why Catalina is so discontent in
her gilded cage. Hoberman connects Alejandro’s thrusting the crowbar into the lock on
Catalina’s tomb with “prissy Edgardo [sic] fastidiously sticking a pin through the spine of
a captured butterfly” (52). He interprets the crowbar and insect pin as phallic symbols
linking penetrating the female with impaling the female, passion with malice. Eduardo’s
pinning fragile insects to a board manifests more than his “thwarted sexual desire” for his
wife, it manifests his desire to confine her to one place, as he does with his insects. If she
is pinned to Eduardo’s board, she cannot fly into another man’s yard and become his prize
specimen. Though it seems Catalina defies confinement by another and causes others to
suffer, she actually confines herself by staying in her marriage to Eduardo, and causes her
own suffering, finally ending with her death.
Although in his autobiography Buiiuel himself called the final product o f Abismos
de Pasion “problematic at best” (205), he did in fact live up to the last line in the film’s
introductory statement which reads, “Most importantly, this picture tries to remain true to
the spirit of Emily Bronte’s novel.” As we have seen, the suffering of humans and animals
throughout Bunuel’s film clearly shows his understanding of Bronte’s dominant theme of
Wuthering Heights: that humans have a primitive core of animal passion that manifests
itself either as love or as violence or some cross-pollination of both. Bunuel’s adaptation
belongs in the same “Best Adaptation” category as Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood: Buiiuel
and Kurosawa extract key themes of the original texts their films are based on, and
successfully convey them to the screen. Thus, Joy Gould Boyum’s argument that the best
adaptations are not the ones which literally follow the original word for word, scene for
scene, is sound. Buiiuel is able to radically depart from the original text without radically
misreading it.
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CONCLUSION
Literary critic Wade Thompson asserts that “Wuthering Heights is basically a

perverse book . .. and that its power is owing precisely to its perversity” (69).
Absolutely. We are drawn to the novel’s perversity because it reflects our own primitive
human nature: our perverse ability to link love with violence. As readers, we live through
the characters, throwing ourselves into the depths of passion, vicariously experiencing
emotions and actions forbidden in modem civilized society. Equally fascinated and
revolted by the characters, we read to understand ourselves, to discover what
differentiates us from animals. We are horrified that people could act, think, and feel so
primitively passionate, and we are again horrified to remember that as readers, we are
members of that same human race. Thompson concludes that in the novel, “the wild
emptions of cruelty and violence are so vivid that one tends not to notice how frequently
pain is inflicted just as a matter of course” (70). It is difficult to conceive of any reader of
Wuthering Heights being able to ignore the pervasive violence in the novel between
people, between animals, and between people and animals. Perhaps this fascination with
human nature is the reason Wuthering Heights is such a popular text to adapt into other
mediums. And yet filmmakers ignore “the wild emptions of cruelty and violence” inherent
in human nature and do “not notice how frequently pain is inflicted” throughout the course
of the novel, instead focusing their energy on romantic love.
After examining a representative set of film adaptations of Wuthering Heights, our
question is answered as to what makes for a good film adaptation of a literary work. The
best adaptation embodies a central theme of the original text as it is the spark which gives
life and substance to the structure. We have also seen that adaptation is interpretation and
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each filmmaker will, just as each reader will, interpret the novel and its thematic emphasis
differently. From William Wyler’s 1939 and Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 films, we have
learned that there is more to an adaptation than simply transposing the text to the screen
as “mutations,” as Bluestone warns us, do indeed occur when changing a linguistic text
into a visual one. Even though these two films convey the novel’s plot, they do so
without conveying Bronte’s original theme of people having inherent violent tendencies
and a primitive nature made of animal passion. Because this is missing from both films,
they cannot be considered good or faithful adaptations of Wuthering Heights.
Luis Bunuel successfully retains Bronte’s theme of passion and violence and
intensifies it in his 1953 film adaptation of the novel. Thus, Bunuel proves that a worthy
adaptation does not need to slavishly follow the original text as long as the filmmaker
recognizes the novel’s most strongly supported theme and uses it as the film’s foundation.
By retaining the theme, the filmmaker can then depart from the plot conventions and other
elements of the text such as time frame, location, and which characters to include in the
film. Bunuel proves to be the masterful adapter in that he departs from the text to create
his own vision of the novel, yet he still extracts images, lines of dialogue, and
characterization from the text and powerfully reincarnates them in his own way on the
screen. Thus, Buhuel’s film is what Bazin calls the best type of adaptation: it is one that
achieves some sort of balance between a literary work’s “essence” and its literal meaning:
“a good adaptation should result in a restoration of the essence of the letter and the spirit”
(67). Bunuel has no need to fear that he has failed in his attempt to “remain true to the
spirit of Emily Bronte’s text” as is stated in the final sentence of the opening written
statement to Abismos de Pasion. He has indeed remained “true” to the text through
thematic emphasis.
The study of film adaptations can enrich the study of literary texts from any time
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80
period. Some people think that in a course involving film and literature, greater attention
will be paid to the films than the texts they are based on. While this is true that one must
spend a great deal of time watching the films in question, one must, however, have
intimate knowledge of the text in order to thoroughly analyze a film and asses its
worthiness as an adaptation. Therefore, studying film adaptations not only invites reading
the original text, but a deeper, more critical reading o f it. Without sufficient knowledge of
the text, one will not be able to recognize textual details or nuances, dialogue out of
context, added scenes, or a change in emphasis. Reading the text causes one to re
examine the film; conversely, viewing an adaptation causes one to re-examine the text and
come to terms with one’s interpretation of it. Analyzing literary works and their film
counterparts increases awareness of each medium’s limitations and abilities as well as

fosters a deeper appreciation for each medium.
i
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WORKS CITED
81
WORKS CITED
Andrew, J. Dudley. The Maior Film Theories: An Introduction. New York: Oxford
UP, 1976.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. New York: New American Library, 1961.
Bazin, Andre. What is Cinema? Ed. and trans. Gary Hugh. Vol. 1. Berkeley: U of
California P, 1967.
Bluestone, George. Novels Into Film. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1957.
Boyum, Joy Gould. Double Exposure: Fiction into Film. New York: Universe Books
1985.
Bronte, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Wiliam Sale Jr. and Richard J. Dunn. 3rd ed.
New York: Norton, 1990.
Brooks, Richard. “Stormy Wuthers.” Observer [London] 11 Oct. 1992, np.
Buache, Freddy. The Cinema of Luis Bunuel. Trans. Peter Graham. New York: A.S.
Barnes & Co., 1973.
Bunuel, Luis. Mv Last Sigh. Trans. Abigail Israel. New York: Knopf, 1983.
Burgan, Mary. “Some Fit Parentage: Identity and the Cycle of Generations in Wuthering
Heights.” Philological Quarterly 61 (Fall 1982): 395-413.
Canby, Vincent. “Bunuel’s Bronte.” New York Times. 27 Dec 1983. Cl 1. Rev. of
Abismos de Pasion dir. Luis Bunuel.
Champlin, Charles. “Original Heights Returns to Screen.” Rerev. of Wuthering Heights.

dir. William Wyler. Los Angeles Times 17 Aug. 1971: Dll.
Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film.
Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1990.
Druxman, Michael B. Make It Again. Sam: A Survey of Movie Remakes. New York:
Barnes, 1975.
Durgnat, Raymond. Luis Bunuel. Berkeley: U of California P, 1977.
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. Dir. by Peter Kosminsky. Perf. Ralph Fiennes and
Juliette Binoche. 1992. Videocassette. Paramount, 1993.
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Fragola, Anthony. “BunuePs Re-vision of Wuthering Heights: The Triumph of IP amour
Fou Over Hollywood Romanticism.” Literature/Film Quarterly 22 (1994): 50-
56.
Francke, Lizzie. “Wuthering Heights.” Rev. of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, dir.
Peter Kosminsky. Sight and Sound. Oct. 1992. Sight and Sound Film Review:
Mav 1992 to December 1992. London, BFI Publishing, 1993. 124.
Frook. John Evan. “MPAA Ruling Sends Goldwyn’s Anger to New Heights.” Daily
Variety. 16 Dec. 1991: 27.
Hanson, Patricia King, exec. ed. American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures
Produced in the United States. Feature Films. 1931-1940. Film Entries. M-Z.
Vol. F3, part 2. Berkeley: U o f California P, 1993.
Harrington, John. "Wyler as Auteur.” The English Novel and the Movies. Eds. Michael
Klein and Gillian Parker. New York: Ungar, 1981. 67-82.
Hoberman, J. “Passion Pit.” Village Voice 3 Jan. 1984: 52. Rev, of Abismos de
Pasion. dir. Luis Bunuel.
James, Caryn. “No Depth on Wuthering Heights.” New York Times. 9 April 1989.
Madden, William A. “Wuthering Heights: The Binding of Passion.” Nineteenth Century
Fiction 27 (September 1992): 127-154.
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McMaster, Juliet. “The Courtship and Honeymoon of Mr. and Mrs. Linton Heathcliff:
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INFORMATION TO USERS

The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the

Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by

Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced

California State University, Long Beach

of the Requirements of the Degree

UMI Microform 1387640

This microform edition is protected against unauthorized

INTERPRETING PASSION AND VIOLENCE IN

Wilhelmina Hotchkiss, PhD. (Chair) English

Beth Lau, PhD. English

Stephen Cooper, PhD. English

ACCEPTED AND APPROVED ON BEHALF OF THE UNIVERSITY

Frank Fata, PhD.

California State University, Long Beach

INTERPRETING PASSION AND VIOLENCE IN

THE 1939, 1992, AND 1953 FILM ADAPTATIONS

adaptation o f a literary work.

changes from novel to film and their implications.

1. ADAPTATION, INTERPRETATION, EXPECTATION, AND

3. THE CLASSIC: WILLIAM WYLER’S 1939 ADAPTATION . . . . 44

4. A BODY WITHOUT A SOUL: PETER KOSMINSKY’S 1992

In Bronte’s fictional world on the unforgiving Yorkshire moors, humans have by

violently passionate—“loving” in order to inflict pain on the “loved one.”

a classic novel? Is it plot? Is it characters? I set out to find answers to my questions by

ADAPTATION, INTERPRETATION, EXPECTATION, AND MISCONCEPTION

the opportunity or ability to read masterpieces of literature. However, as Boyum points

version directed by A. V. Bramble in 1920 for Ideal, a British company. According to

Wuthering Heights first appeared on television in 1948 as a “Kraft Theatre”

production (Hanson 2477). Part of the novel appeared as a dramatic scene on Ed

Paramount expected it to be and it was never released in the United States.

spiritual experience” (Andrew 121). An adaptation based on a “realistic” or “naturalistic”

centered on action occurring internally—within a character’s mental or emotional state—

complexity of visually-defying internal emotions (Andrew 121). Kracauer believes devices

Unfortunately, Bazin remains vague as to what he considers the “essence” of a novel to

success—that is critical acclaim, audience approval, profit, and awards—for each

the film-maker necessarily adopts in order to make a nineteenth-century British novel

many of us are attracted to adaptations” to be “the promise they carry of allowing us to

we determine the sense of any work if it changes according to individual interpretation? Is

“commentary,” and “analogy.” Wagner terms an adaptation a transposition when “a novel

least-used mode of adaptation, “where an original is taken and either purposely or

category. According to Wagner’s terms, Wyler’s Wuthering Heights is a commentary,

“faithful,” and “literal” to encompass the various types of adaptation possibilities. A

imagination— cannot be as adequately represented by film as by language” (47) and that

An adaptation of a classic work answers to two interpretive communities—filmic

decisions regarding the adaptation’s profitability which are based on audience

sophistication in order to succeed or merely break even. Boyum believes adaptations

given the sensitive and insightful selection of materials reflecting great

If successful adaptations are a question o f interpretation, with each reader/viewer

on the “validity” o f an interpretation. For an adaptation to be deemed valid, Boyum says

Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, a Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, as “one

Bunuel’s adaptation of Wutherina Heights is akin to Kurosawa’s adaptation of Macbeth.

In order to apply Boyum’s concept of “validity” to Wyler’s 1939, Kosminsky’s

PASSION IN THE NOVEL

Wade Thompson calls “the world of Wutherina Heights . . . a world o f sadism,

walls of Wuthering Heights, a place where characters are passionately violent—they

Grange inhabitants who come to stay or live at the Heights—Lockwood, Cathy,

Linton will be referred to throughout as Catherine, whereas her daughter, Catherine

numerous metaphors . . . . [P]ain is frequently suggested by threats o f choking, throttling,

is directed by a servant to a little-used bed-chamber where he falls asleep after perusing

against Lockwood himself. He is physically attacked by the congregation, resulting in a

Heathcliff’s separate but equally convincing reactions. Lockwood screams, is paralyzed

As we have seen, Isabella’s and Lockwood’s violent natures and ability to be

thrive as where he wandered’” (32). According to Burgan, the passing on of an abusive