Recently I watched the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. In the novel, Brontë skilfully uses her characters to offers up a social commentary on marriage; a thread that runs throughout the relationships of the main characters in the book. What struck me as odd about Emerald Fennell’s film was its curious (really, quite dedicated) lack of interest in any of it. Fennell trades that social commentary for a glossy, sensual romance between two beautiful people who cannot help but love each other despite all odds.
Most likely unbeknownst to Fennell was that Wuthering Heights was published 23 years before the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, the first law in Britain to give a married woman a legal identity separate from her husband’s.
In the film Catherine Earnshaw, the “protagonist”, decides to marry not the man she loves, Heathcliff, but her affluent neighbour Edgar Linton, because he can offer her material advancement and security (which she hopes can be later used to protect Heathcliff).
Catherine’s decision is not a superficial one. She may not know the law by name, but she understands, intimately, what it means to be a woman in her world and she plans accordingly.
That is to say, she is not a legal person unto herself. Before 1870, under the ‘doctrine of coverture’, a wife’s income, her property, any inheritance she came into, along with her children all belonged, legally, to her husband. She could not sue. She could not be sued. She could not own the roof over her head, even if she’d paid for it herself.
Brontë was not writing historical fiction but uses the novel to discuss the status of her legal present. As such she would have most likely been aware of the campaigns of her contemporary Caroline Norton, a social reformer who used the publicity of her abusive marriage to the Tory MP George Chapple Norton in 1827, to spearhead marriage reform in Britain, culminating in the Married Women’s Property Act.
She also helped to have Britain pass the Matrimonial Causes Act in 1857 which allowed for a legal separation by either wife or husband on the grounds of adultery, cruelty or desertion, a legal thread you can find traces of in Section 8 of Canada’s Divorce Act.
Against this backdrop the story of Wuthering Heights reveals itself as considerably more deliberate.
Fennell drops the entire second half of the book. Heathcliff spends the latter half of the book engineering a plan to ruin Edgar’s family, bloodline, and fortune.
Despite it all, Edgar Linton’s role is reduced in the new adaptation. He is Catherine’s husband, yes, and a rival to Heathcliff. The other bit of bitter irony is that Edgar Linton is a magistrate. He is the law. And yet the law fails his family from the inside in part due to his ignorance and prejudice. When Edgar finally moves to protect his daughter, Cathy Linton’s inheritance from Heathcliff, by drafting a new will to shield her having her property subsumed by Heathcliff, it is his own lawyer who betrays him to Heathcliff before the changes can be made.
Heathcliff in his plot for revenge, works to engineer a forced marriage between his dying son, Linton Heathcliff, and the Edgar’s daughter, Cathy, with the full knowledge that the instant she marries, everything she owns transfers to her husband. Linton is sickly and will undoubtedly die in the course of his marriage of Cathy. The result is that Cathy and her property (the inheritance she is to receive from Edgar) will entirely revert to Heathcliff’s control.
In the same vein, Heathcliff encourages his son to revel in the privileges that a husband holds over his wife:
“he [Heathcliffe] says I’m not to be soft with Catherine: she’s my wife, and it’s shameful that she should wish to leave me. He says she hates me and wants me to die, that she may have my money; but she shan’t have it; and she shan’t go home! She never shall! – she may cry, and be sick as much as she pleases”
Swoon.
The ever romantic, alongside these machinations, Heathcliff also marries Isabella Linton, Edgar’s sister. Their marriage is one of coercive control. Heathcliff understands, better than anyone in the novel, exactly where the legal line for “cruelty” sits, having been abused repeatedly by Catherine Earnshaw’s father in the beginning of the book. Heathcliff’s abuse is carefully crafted.
He is “strictly within the limits of the law”. He boasts to Nelly, the housekeeper at Wuthering Heights, “I have avoided, up to this period, giving her the slightest right to claim a separation”
Nothing screams romantic hero quite like a man who deliberately crafts his abuse to sit right under the legal threshold.
Fennell’s film ends the story at Catherine Earnshaw’s death. The forced marriage, the estate manipulation, the legitimate acts of abuse, and the magistrate father who fails to protect his own daughter until it’s too late, are gone.
What’s left is the doomed romance between Heathcliff and Catherine, filmed in the sensual, hazy register Fennell has said was meant to capture the feeling of a teenage girl reading this book for the first time.
This piece is inspired by Rosie Harte, Cambridge historian and writer of “The Criminal Conversation of Emily Brontë” on Substack.
Share this article on: