WITH more than a dozen film versions, Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” is something of a cultural touchstone for ill-fated love. The title alone conjures up images of a brooding Heathcliff and a delicate Cathy clinging to each other or suffering alone on the Yorkshire moors. For many fans, the characters are synonymous with Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon in the 1939 movie. And yet, at least when it comes to screen adaptations, the novel may be the most misunderstood book of all time.
“I think it’s developed a cultural mythology, sort of like ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ but there are so many other plotlines,” said Hila Shachar, author of “Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company.” The love story is appealing as myth, she continued, “but why do we remember it as a love story?”
Certainly the 1847 novel contains a romance. Heathcliff and Cathy, raised as adopted siblings, fall in love but are torn apart by their agonized passion and a jealous brother, Hindley. They find solace on the desolate moors, but Cathy’s marriage to a wealthy neighbor, Edgar, turns Heathcliff bitter, and he disappears for years, returning a rich man but reconnecting too late, as Cathy dies after giving birth to a daughter.
But that’s not the end, and even the most moor-obsessed among us would be hard-pressed to recall the second half of the book, when Cathy’s daughter grows up to marry both Heathcliff’s son and, after his premature death, Hindley’s son, while an aged Heathcliff tries to manipulate their fates. He’s motivated by the desire to get back at Hindley, who tormented Heathcliff as a child. And that, many scholars have argued, is the central conflict of the book: two men battling over power and property, of which Cathy and the next generation are an extension.With such a convoluted plot, not to mention hundreds of pages of period British colloquialisms, screenwriters face enormous challenges in dialogue and characterization. Unlike “Jane Eyre,” by her sister Charlotte, which is almost tailor-made for film with its linear structure (at least 27 adaptations for film and television), Emily Brontë’s novel, her only one, is chock-full of almost Faulkneresque passages and requires a regular return to the family treeand a glossary to keep it all straight.
Is it any wonder that despite the ending of hope and renewal — the love among the second generation ultimately softens the fallout from Cathy’s death — many film versions, as well as musicals, operas and pop songs, only focus on the tragic love story while taking liberties with structure and narration?
“If you end with Heathcliff and Cathy you end with tragedy, but if you end where the book ends it’s about the defeat of Heathcliff’s desire for revenge and hatred,” said the playwright Peter Bowker, who wrote the 2009 TV version and focused much of the four-hour adaptation on the love between Catherine (Cathy’s daughter) and Hareton (Hindley’s son). “In his final speech with Nellie the housekeeper, Heathcliff says he’s failed. He’s the victim of his own vengeance.”
The latest version of “Wuthering Heights,” which opens in New York on Friday and later across the country, comes from the writer-director Andrea Arnold, and she, too, makes the Cathy-Heathcliff love story central to the plot. Heathcliff in this case is played by the black actor James Howson, perhaps a reflection of scholarly arguments that Brontë was writing about race and class in addition to sexual inequality and the dangers of revenge.
“Brontë’s book is not Romanticism — it’s a harsh and brutal book,” Ms. Shachar said by phone from Perth, where she is a professor at Western Australia University. “When you read the reviews from that time, critics called it savage, and they criticized it even more when they found out it was written by a woman. But we’ve turned it into a romance, because that suits us.”
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James Howson plays Heathcliff in Andrea Arnold’s take on “Wuthering Heights.”CreditAgatha Nitecka/Oscilloscope Laboratories
Indeed, it has suited many filmmakers. In addition to the director William Wyler’s hugely influential 1939 version and Mr. Bowker’s mini-series, starring Tom Hardy and Charlotte Riley, the book has been adapted for the big screen or television at least 15 times. These include a 1920 silent film shot on the Yorkshire moors; a 1953 version by Luis Buñuel set in Mexico; a 1985 take by Jacques Rivette that many consider to be more authentic because of its shocking depiction of the embattled families; and a 1992 adaptation starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche reminiscent of Merchant-Ivory films but with bad hair.
“Wuthering Heights” has also been adapted into operas (including a well-respected one by Bernard Hermann), at least two musicals (including the beefcake romp “Heathcliff,” a vehicle for the British pop star Cliff Richard) and the ethereal 1978 pop song by Kate Bush, who gives voice to Cathy as the tormented ghost pleading for her lover.
The fact that “Wuthering Heights” is so adaptable heartens some scholars, who celebrate the novel’s messiness and survival in popular culture nearly 200 years after baffling readers and critics.
“My view is that you cannot spoil a classic text, because it’s a renewable resource,” said Charmian Knight, a lecturer, writer and member of theBrontë Society who happens to be a longtime Yorkshire resident. “Every reading is sort of a new work of art and a new reconstruction of the text, and ‘Wuthering Heights’ has a huge extended life outside of its pages.”
Ms. Arnold’s reconstruction offers a new interpretation of a character Brontë referred to as a dark Gypsy boy from Liverpool, a slave port. She cast virtually unknown actors, including Mr. Howson in his acting debut, and uses minimal dialogue. Instead she fills the screen with volumes of detail about the nature of the moors, the constantly changing weather and the haunting solitude of life there two centuries ago. Heathcliff and Cathy are truly pounded by rain and mud on location in North Yorkshire, a far cry from the conditions Olivier and Oberon — who reportedly detested each other — faced on the fake moors of a Hollywood soundstage.
Ms. Arnold, whose credits include the thriller “Red Road” (2006) and the bleak drama “Fish Tank” (2009) and won an Oscar for live action short in 2005 for “Wasp,” declined to be interviewed for this article, but said last year at the Venice Film Festival, where the film had its premiere, that she regretted not including the second half of the book but felt that she could ultimately not include it time-wise. She also likened Heathcliff to many of the mistreated characters in her other films.
Part of the challenge of adapting the book is that it’s told from the perspective of a rain-soaked stranger who stops at the home of an embittered Heathcliff. But the housekeeper tells the narrator the family story, relaying years of information over hundreds of pages. So it’s basically a narrator interpreting a second narrator relating two generations of family dysfunction.
“We can’t trust those voices because they’re all characters with their own agenda,” Ms. Knight said. “With Dickens or Charlotte Brontë or other 19th-century writers, you’re with a safe driver and are told the truth. With Emily Brontë, you’re overhearing conversations and don’t know what to believe.”
For all these reasons, it’s understandable that Samuel Goldwyn, who produced the 1939 version (and considered it one of his greatest achievements as a Hollywood producer), reportedly wanted the novel reworked as “a story of undying love that transcends the gloomy nature of its backgrounds.”
For Mr. Bowker, the gloom and the background were part of the challenge.
“It’s like being a jazz musician trying to adapt Thelonious Monk because it’s so crazy in its structure,” he said. “It’s brilliant, but trying to do a cover version of it is almost impossible.”
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