Tragedy is the beating heart of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; it’s a gothic novel that takes place in a society built on hierarchy and oppression, and exposes the fragility of love and how easily it is distorted into dangerous obsession. Unsurprisingly, there is no happy ending.
Although every character in the novel is stalked by tragedy, few suffer as much as Isabella Linton. Unaware of Heathcliff’s vindictive motives, she becomes trapped in an intensely abusive marriage, one she is only freed from by fleeing to London. While she is undoubtedly a victim, in the end the character also has agency; Isabella is able to escape her abuser, though not without considerable scars. It’s a pivotal moment for her character, and one that she’s been stripped of in Emerald Fennell’s quote-unquote “adaptation”.
Fennell is no stranger to courting controversy, with much criticism directed at the film, chiefly regarding the conspicuous “whitewashing” of Heathcliff and erasure of regional authenticity. Having already expunged Heathcliff’s ethnicity to facilitate a romantic fantasy, Fennell has reduced Isabella to a willing BDSM participant; chained and treated like a dog, she consents to this humiliation. Though this may seem like a tantalising scene for those unfamiliar with the source material, Isabella has essentially become the dog that Heathcliff hangs in the novel. Once you have that context, it’s rather difficult to look past the fetishisation of Isabella’s degradation.
While some have argued that Fennell’s creative decision gives Isabella agency rather than removing it, the film Isabella is a narrative tool for Heathcliff rather than developing in her own right. She becomes yet another victim of “fridging”, a term coined by Gail Simone that references the way in which many female characters are disposable, depthless plot devices who are only there in service of another – usually a man.
Fennell has rejected suggestions she significantly altered the source material. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the director argued that while she “visually added some things” to the dog scene, it is “almost all Brontë”. Jacob Elordi offered an alternative view of the scene, remarking on how it depicts Heathcliff and Isabella going “off the deep end” as they live in a “kind of hell” of their own making. Interestingly, Elordi also adds how Heathcliff’s relationship with Isabella emphasises how his obsession with Cathy has devolved into “rabid desperation”, as if that excuses Isabella’s fetishisation. Yet, if anything, it only reaffirms that her character affects Heathcliff, with her bondage an extension of his experience and not her own.
Even more troubling is that Isabella’s so-called consent mirrors what is termed the “rough sex defence”. For decades, defendants have argued that they caused harm, sometimes lethally so, through willing acts of rough sex. The onus is placed on the victim; they’re the cause of their pain because they apparently consented. It’s one of numerous ways of excusing violence against women, and while legal reform has come about because of its flagrant misuse, abusers still readily pass the buck of blame.
For abuse survivors, to see Isabella become an objectified caricature is alarming. Whether intentional or not, it sends a worrying message to viewers whose only interaction with Wuthering Heights is through Fennell’s girlypop smut rather than Brontë’s gothic masterpiece. Fennell’s execution is deliberate. It’s designed to shock – a cheap, sexually charged attention grab, and one that misses the point of the generational trauma Brontë explores through Heathcliff’s actions towards Isabella. A crucial piece of the puzzle is eradicated. By turning Isabella into a consenting submissive, Fennell implies that Heathcliff’s actions, while still perverse, are easier for audiences to swallow. His behaviour seems less monstrous. Sexy, even.
Unfortunately, romanticising abusive relationships isn’t a feature of Fennell’s work alone. The recent film Pillion, based on Adam Mars-Jones’s Box Hill, also removed the tougher material of the original book to make it more palatable. What was originally described as rape in the book becomes a consensual exchange, albeit one that still lacks clear boundaries. Ultimately, what was intended as a dilution of Box Hill’s murky waters ends up only muddying them further. In a bid to remove accusations of sensationalism, the excision of Box Hill’s rape scene romanticises abuse. It’s less explicit, but the message is still there.
Still, Pillion is uncomfortable to watch, with the extreme dynamics of the relationship between Ray and Colin making for a more unvarnished portrayal than what we witness in Wuthering Heights. Fennell has repeatedly cited her teenage reading of the book, and this has coloured her interpretation; with its lavish cinematography and extravagant design, her film contains no transgressive complexity nor genuine discomfort.
Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a story of violation. It isn’t meant to be arousing or provocative; it’s about unhealed trauma that poisons everyone it touches. Brontë’s world of anguish cannot and should not be reconciled with the kind of fanciful naivety that Fennell espouses. The film-maker has robbed Isabella of her story to sell a grotesque sexualisation of a domestic abuse survivor.
