Literary scholar contrasts new 'Wuthering Heights' film with classic novel
The new film adaptation of the tumultuous love story, “Wuthering Heights,” hit theaters last week.
Shoshana Milgram Knapp, a scholar of 19th and 20th century literature, offers her take on how the 2026 version both reshapes and challenges Emily Brontë’s enduring novel, published in 1847.
The film adaptation expands the novel’s famous violent turmoil beyond the Earnshaw home, blurring the traditional contrast between the wild Wuthering Heights and the refined Thrushcross Grange, Knapp said.
“For Catherine to choose [Edgar] Linton and Thrushcross Grange means that she is choosing wealth and comfort, but she is not thereby choosing peace,” she said. “In this version of the story, moreover she decides, the day after accepting Linton’s proposal, that she does not want to marry him after all. Yet she marries him anyway. She appears to make a decision, but she does so in an indecisive way.”
In the film, both Heathcliff and Linton display overlapping traits of rage and charm, softening the stark oppositions that drive the novel’s central conflict.
“This film retains Heathcliff’s powerful reproach to Catherine, that she betrayed her own soul,” Knapp said. “But within this version of the story, his reproach is inaccurate. Without Linton as the anti-Heathcliff (or Heathcliff as the anti-Linton), Catherine’s marriage to Linton does not clearly merit the weight of Heathcliff’s anger or the viciousness of his revenge.”
The adaptation also makes sweeping structural changes, omitting and modifying major characters, including children, and stopping midway through the original narrative. It combines Catherine’s father and brother into a single figure — a choice that raises questions about plausibility and character consistency, Knapp said.
Still, it’s expected that film adaptations and novels largely are different from one another.
“Making changes is not, by itself, a bad thing,” Knapp said. “Reproducing a novel on the screen is rarely a good thing, because changing the medium will often require changing the structure. An adaptation needs to have its own artistic purpose and integration. It is not a problem that [writer and director] Emerald Fennell’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ is not Emily Brontë’s ‘Wuthering Heights.’ It would be a problem if future readers of a novel were misled by any film or if they confused one with the other.”
About Knapp
Shoshana Milgram Knapp is an associate professor of English whose scholarship focuses on 19th century and 20th century literature (American, British, French, and Russian) and the moral and philosophical dimensions of fiction.
Schedule an interview
To schedule an interview, contact Jenny Boone at jennykb@vt.edu or 540-314-7207 or Margaret Ashburn at mkashburn@vt.edu or 540-529-0814.
