Wuthering Heights: Emerald Fennell’s $80M Wet Dream

There is something quietly radical about Emily Brontë, not the quiet that is missable but the silence that follows a presence that need not announce itself.

Brontë did not have the language of contemporary feminism at her disposal when she created Wuthering Heights in 1847. While illustrating the female experience set against the rigid moral climate of the 19th century and exploring "otherness", she did so as a pioneer. The words she selected destined to be a brick road for artists of every medium to follow, inspiring the likes of Guillermo del Toro, Stephanie Meyer and so on. Naturally, Emerald Fennell plucked this classic off the shelf and through the lens of inner workings landed it at the box office for an impressive opening weekend, raking in $14 million on Valentine's Day alone, with disgruntled literature purists taking to the internet to argue with fans over its reception.

Is it Feminist to frolic, create, and indulge without care for the implications of what you leave behind? Who does it serve and what do we owe to the women of the past?

Wuthering Heights pulses with a defiance that feels startlingly modern on paper, but struggles to transfer to the screen, with potential intimacy teetering on vapid sexual spectacle. Without the careful study of audience members who care more about Brontë's criticism on society than studying Jacob Elordi's pectorals, risqué scenes quickly become self-indulgent.

The characters, not originally meant to be paragons of virtue or victims flattened by circumstance; are instead feral, desiring, and contradictory by design. Catherine Earnshaw is not written to be liked, she is written to exist - a wild heroine, selfish, passionate, and destructive, and granted a psychological agency rarely afforded to women in Victorian literature. When a film mishandles this freedom or honesty in instances like the abuse of Isabella Linton to instead create a palatable fantasy that sells, what becomes of its purpose?

Courtesy of Warner Bros.

Through Heathcliff, meant to be racially othered, socially ostracized, and perpetually denied belonging, Brontë sketches a sharp critique of prejudice and classism. The novel does not romanticize his abuse, but illuminates his social exclusion as it festers into resentment. Heathcliff’s treatment exposes a society that manufactures its own monsters and how the most seemingly invisible scars of prejudice linger, affecting all involved. Long before intersectionality had a name, Brontë was illustrating how race, class, and power intertwine. Emerald Fennel has inherited that criticism, a neatly prepared gift, only to turn it into one long Charli XCX music video, void of the voices that made the story significant and its cautionary tale. In taking large liberties, what remains is a colorful and exciting shell of something that just wants to be fun, flirty and taboo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZZtN-l8peU

Emerald Fennell is a self-identified feminist whose works are known for aesthetic excess. When do we stop bedazzling the message?

In films like Promising Young Woman and Saltburn, Fennell tackles themes of sexual violence, class exploitation, addiction, and social decay but often through a lens so stylized that the suffering risks becoming sensationalist. Where Brontë dissected power structures with moral gravity, Fennell’s narratives can feel intoxicated by their own audacity and endless resources, flirting with critique while settling in the very decadence they claim to expose. In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë never recoils from the grotesque or the morally unsettling. In the novel, we see Heathcliff’s fixation culminate when he bribes the sexton. He asks for the sides of he and Catherine's coffins to be removed so that they might commingle in decay for eternity. It’s gross and insane. Brontë did not sanitize love, death, or obsession but displayed them with plain tenacity.

Emerald Fennell’s film adaption, with its skin-colored walls and sex montages, materializes as a distinctly personal navigation of the original text. An adaptation that can't be credited for having any of the grit or depth it seemingly possesses since that was already present in the novel. Instead, it showcases a unique brand of intoxicated deviance, one that ironically serves as an introspective work into today's culture.

Is invoking feminism in name enough or does feminist storytelling demand we share the ones that have come before us?

Brontë, constrained by her era, wrote against the grain, embedding radical ideas inside effervescent gothic fiction that refused to flatter its audience. Fennell, working in an age shaped by generations of feminist work, operates with far greater freedom. Freedom that she uses to indulge her singular fantasies rather than to interrogate the world around her.

To be progressive is not simply to shock or to center taboo subjects. It is to illuminate systems, to complicate power and to humanize those flattened by it. Brontë’s legacy suggests that true radicalism lies not in aesthetic provocation, but in moral clarity.

As theatergoers continue to enjoy the film, cooing over cinematography from the legendary Linus Sandgren, breathtaking wardrobe from two-time Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durranover and riding the waves of erotic highs provided by on-screen chemistry between a stunning Margot Robbie and rugged Jacob Elordi, book fans wait on the wing. Will there ever be an adaptation of Wuthering Heights brave enough and funded as finely, willing to address the story with the existential awareness it deserves or with respect for the haunting Gothic beauty that saturates its pages? We can only dream.