“Something destabilizing”: Fidelity and Joseph in Emerald Fennell’s Adaptation of Wuthering Heights

As in a theater the eyes of men

After a well-graced actor leaves the stage

Are idly bent on him that enters next

Thinking his prattle to be tedious

— Richard II, Shakespeare 

Known for her Oscar-winning debut feature, Promising Young Woman (2020), and the seductive, surrealist spectacle of Saltburn (2023), director Emerald Fennell returns to the screen with a bang: a fresh adaption of Emily Brontë’s 19th-century novel, Wuthering Heights. As the press peeled back the curtain in the months leading up to February 14th, 2026—revealing the casting of “Barbie” Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and the pale Jacob Elordi as “gipsy” Heathcliff—the audience turned anxious then cynical about Fennell’s take on the beloved classic. “Emily Brontë is rolling in her grave,” users’ commented under the trailer for the provocative, deconstructive, and orally fixated feature film. Fennell should stick to the original, they said; she’s ruining the Brontë image. “There’s an enormous amount of sadomasochism in this book,” she remarked at the 2025 Brontë Women’s Writing Festival prior to release, “people were deeply shocked by it” (O’Neill). With the infamous #1 BRAT (Charli XCX) as composer and “The Greatest Love Story” the tagline, what could possibly go wrong on the day of release? This paper evaluates Fennell’s adaption of Wuthering Heights to question how we define fidelity today and what this suggests about the evolving threshold for creative licensing in liberal film today. “We asked: if we were aliens given [Brontë’s] text, how would we create this world?” Fennell told W Magazine; “if you make something destabilizing, then it transcends time.” Furthermore, I evaluate the transformation of Joseph from a cantankerous servant into a young, kind, and lascivious figure, treating his character as a microcosm of Fennell’s broader restricting of Brontë’s narrative. Finally, I contend that this film is an intertextual mosaic of the twenty-first century; as such, it must be judged holistically rather than by the parameters of its eponymous source.

 

At the heart of adaptation studies is a struggle with the definition of fidelity—a concept that remains as essential as it is ill-defined. According to critic and theorist Robert Stam, faithful film adaptions are fundamentally unachievable due to the “automatic difference” inherent between the creative mediums (55). Each adaptation hinges on both the filmmaker’s interpretation of the text, the intermediary factors contributing to the construction of their subjective view in the physical dimension, and subsequently the viewing experience of the product on 2-D screens. As Stam puts it, a successful adaption must “[confront] someone else’s phantasy” (54). Traditionally, the director would first isolate the key pillars of the source text and then reflect those essential elements in the physical world with the support of visual and auditory components. Unlike a novel, filmmaking is a fundamentally collaborate art that renders fidelity, in the traditional sense, unfathomable; a film adaption shifts from a “single-track” of a written work to the “multitrack” melody of film, which is composed of performance, music, photography, digital effects and the like (55). Each additional component will automatically disturb the literal fidelity of a single-tracked novel (56). Moreover, a film depends on the technology of the time, the budget of the production, and those cast as characters to create a final product. The failure of David Lynch’s Dune (1984) was in large part due to the absence of technology to adapt Frank Herbert’s staggering science fiction; in contrast, Denis Villeneuve’s recent adaption of Dune (2021) was a box-office hit of critical acclaim. The vision of the director, despite it being an accurate expression of the original source, may be muddied by the various vehicles used in the genesis of that vision. In the same way, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is more so the culmination of collective effort and external forces rather than a direct reflection of Fennell’s vision.

 

A common method of adaption involves the “pruning” the source, which cuts instead of condenses the referent material (Raitt 48). This method reaffirms the adaption as faithful in origin because the “marble” isolated by the pruning process comes from the textual “quarry” of its source text (49). Fennell takes a different approach to adaption: she translates the novel into a language that pays respect to the spirit of the text but simultaneously searches for an intertextual foundation distinct from Brontë’s—the “marble quarry” of the film and the text is dissimilar. Her film reimagines, in some cases ignores, textual pillars that public deems essential for an adaption of the same name; however, audiences were misled to believe that the classic novel was Fennell’s primary quarry. The liberal deconstruction of Brontë’s novel sought to align the adaption with her experience of reading, imagining, and thinking about the surreal world of Wuthering Heights: “I wanted to make something that was the book that I experienced when I was 14” (Youngs). As a result, the film lacks the second generation, comprised of Hareton, Cathy, and Linton, and their commentary on and mending of the shortcomings of their parents, Hindley, Catherine, and Heathcliff. Gone is the tenant of the Grange, Mr. Lockwood, who introduces a foreign upper-class bias to the reliable narration of Nelly Dean in Brontë’s framed narrative, which is also removed. Moreover, Fennell replaces nineteenth-century dress with a contemporary anachronistic wardrobe, supplements the metaphysical and platonic intimacy of genteel Catherine, who is ironically non-genteel in speech and manner, and servantile Heathcliff with sensual yearning and physical lust, and reinvents Joseph, the groundskeeper best-known for his perplexing Yorkshire dialect and intense Christian devotion, as a sexually active young man. In effect, her adaption is unlike any previous film of Wuthering Heights.

 

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has effectively strayed from the classified pillars of the text and lost its evaluative rigor on the fidelity scale, which resulted in a general dislike of the film: The Guardian called the film “horniness at the expense of all else” (Cosslett). Negative audience reception manifests primarily when an adaption fails to produce an experience on par with reader expectation—Fennell’s Wuthering Heights “… was not the adaption of which we had dreamed [or] would have liked to live” (Stam 55). That is not to say that all the textual pillars were transferable to the screen; many elements from Wuthering Heights require functional equivalents designed by the director for a film adaption. Literature is conditioned by its destiny as read; “film dialogue is conditioned by its destiny as filmed” (Fried 294). It is “the visual and verbal [medium] working through difference” that naturally constructs “new meanings” in the adaption as it engages with secondary influences, such as socio-political contexts, pop-culture, and audience expectation, to shrink the difference between the signified and the signifier (Raitt 47; emphasis). For Fennell, elements of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights served the sole purpose of satisfying a nineteenth-century readership and zeitgeist; the rising industry of England, the hierarchical structuring of the upper-class family, and the distinct speech of each character used by Brontë to reflect their economic standing in society are no longer significant to Fennell’s intended audience. By removing time specific pillars and incorporating equivalents that articulate the structural logic of contemporary media and cultural industries, Fennell was able to create an adaption not limited to its original perimeters. If written text is just a “linguistic transcription of a stage potentiality” why subject the audience to a “potentiality” that no longer applies to their way of being? (Fried 295).

 

Humanity’s persistent appetite for adaption points to a collective desire for narrative reanimation, despite their deviation from source material. Film critics today argue the essence of adaption is not in the preservation of foundational pillars because a narrative removed from its original context will “[transmit] new meanings, intentional or not, to some if not all spectators” (Raitt 49). Some push for a fundamentally hierarchical processes of categorization, which describes adaption as the refining of a crude and raw textual material. For instance, George Bluestone believes the novel is a raw material used by filmmakers to create unique structures and Brian McFarlane claims that both novel and film share the same raw material but are distinct in their approach (Meikle 174). Dudley Andrew contends the uniqueness of the original text is relative to the extent of its “unassimilation” in adaption—only that which is left untouched will be original (Raitt 48). These beliefs hold books as natural resources of varied renewability and malleability; Thomas Leitch complains that pushing hierarchical perspectives “[allows] only one creator per project and dismisses other claimants as … servile imitators” (Meikle 174). Contrarily, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights follows what Kyle Bishop calls “assemblage filmmaking,” in which filmmakers incorporate raw materials from other works and artists in the creation of a new work—a process not unlike the syncretic making of a mosaic or collage (Meikle 175). Adaptions rely on a relationship with and influence from other works in their climate; as such, adaptions also rely on the audience’s recognition of their inherent intertextuality. Consider Isabella Linton’s monologue synopsizing the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet that was included precisely because Fennell assumed her audience would find intrigue in and appreciation of intertextuality with a work of Shakespeare. Adaptions are melting pots of external influence that are not limited to a single source; they are more volatile than their filmic mode and more texturally complex than their textual origin. To answer the question of adaptation fever: audiences desire new adaptions precisely because of the “pop-cultural knowledge” absorbed and safeguarded by them (Murray 7). In other words, adaptions prove there is always more meaning to create.

 

From a phenomenological point, film adaptions better situate the text in the real world; however, if art is but a representation of real life, then adapting other art is “one step further away from real life” and one step closer to the unreal (Meikle 176). Adaptions are effectively representations of representations—be it music, video games, plays, films, or novels—that instill a pseudo-life in a combination of functional, and simultaneously unreal, equivalents. If Wuthering Heights is an artificial portrait of two families living on the Yorkshire Moors in the 1800s, then Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a doubling of Brontë’s already dubious and orchestrated representation of picturesque English life. Rejections of fidelity criticism are often accompanied by revelations of its moralistic and sexually loaded judgements that accuse films of “unfaithfulness,” “betrayal,” “debasement,” and the like to depict adaptions like Fennell’s as a violating force against a pure textual origin (Murray 5). This belief that translation is inherently inferior to its referent stems from the belief that literature itself is a definitive and supreme medium. The artist behind the BRAT (2023) album, Charli XCX, was hired to compose the soundtrack for Fennell’s film predominately because of her cultural impact on music and culture in the past decade. In a way, Fennell’s adaption is a visualizer for Charli XCX’s soundtrack and subsequently a filmic depiction of a larger experimental movement, in which Charli is both influence and participant. We can assume that Fennell designed her raunchy Wuthering Heights as a reflection of the current zeitgeist; characters and inanimate elements serve an ephemeral and didactic purpose to make the narrative titillating for a modern American audience—consider the introduction of a revolutionary pop-cultural musician and the commissioning Barbie adjacent costuming as a capitalist message. It is the transience and relevancy of Fennell’s adaption that makes Brontë’s Wuthering Heights worthy of yet another screening. There is no such thing as a definitive work; instead, filmmakers like Fennell treat their textual source as a time-specific entity that must be incubated and reborn in the present

 

In the Preface to the 1850 edition, Charlotte Brontë writes “…there is a dry saturnine humour in the delineation of old Joseph.” Although the first mention of the cantankerous man in the text comes from Heathcliff, which works to contextualize Joseph as a servant (“Joseph take Mr Lockwood’s horse; and bring up some wine”), Brontë allocates the first description to Mr. Lockwood, who thinks him “an old man, very old, perhaps, though hale and sinewy” (4). Graeme Tytler argues Joseph plays a major role in Wuthering Heights relative to the minor presence typically assigned to servant characters in nineteenth-century English fiction (188). His relations with social superiors induce readers to question, despite his socially subordinate position, if he deserves respect regardless of his cynical, at times tyrannical, disposition. Further, readers are naturally inclined to consider if text itself is an unreliable representation of real events because the narrative is ultimately framed by a biased recounter. According to the internal narrator, Nelly Dean, when Joseph’s master Mr. Earnshaw had fallen ill, Joseph exercised his “knack of sermonizing and pious discoursing” to reap a position of authority. She however fails explain to her interlocutor how this Joseph—who Nelly describes as wearisome and self-righteousness—was intrusted by Hindley Earnshaw to both educate Catherine and Heathcliff by way of sermon and punish them without his explicit consent: “… reminded him to order Heathcliff a flogging, and Catherine a fast from dinner” (46). Rather, she depicts him as a vile leech that strips the goodness from both friend and foe: “the more feeble the master became, the more influence he gained” (41). Notwithstanding her apprehension against her associations with Joseph, the initially supposed difference between her and him is later contradicted by Nelly herself—she too has a knack for reaping the fruit of another’s lamentation.

 

Fennell’s Wuthering Heights capitalizes on the corrupted narration of the text issuing from Nelly’s acute dislike of Joseph and natural susceptibility to imperfect memory recall by describing a definite vision of what transpires at the Heights. As aforementioned, adaptions are inevitably loaded with anomalies; hence, the history of the Heights, which is effectively the entire narrative of Brontë’s text, is but a single and subjective interpretation issuing from Nelly. Moreover, Wuthering Heights is first narrated by Nelly and then retold by the somewhat superficial and socially inept aristocrat, Mr. Lockwood, who contribute to a looming sense of instability. Readers are required to question the reliability of Brontë’s narrative including the potential instability of objects common to both Nelly’s and Mr. Lockwood’s detest, such as the depiction of Joseph. Nelly’s fallible narration is repeatedly illuminated by Brontë via the linking of the foil characters, her and Joseph, by a shared decision; they willingly remain at the Heights for the duration of the text (with the expectation of Nelly’s temporary dismissal). Hindley Earnshaw neglected his servants following the death of his wife, Frances, by consumption immediately after the birth of their son. Nelly tells Mr. Lockwood that only she and Joseph persisted through Hindley’s manifestation of grief as the other servants could no longer bear his “tyrannical and evil conduct” (65). If Nelly is to be believed, then Joseph stayed at the residence because he liked to be where there is plenty of wickedness for him to reprove and hector, but Nelly stayed out of duty and sincere fondness for her charge. Interestedly, Nelly fails to mention both economic motives—the necessity of a wage albeit it small to live in the lower-class—and social motives—an associated with the upper class to then earn a wage—as a rationale for her and Joseph’s continuous, eerily pious, devotion to the family and the estate. Nor does she ponder on the implication of Joseph’s observation, “we’ve all as summut uh orther side in us,” that neutralizes his extreme binary with Nelly and by extension the stark contrast between Heathcliff and Catherine, Mr. Earnshaw and his son, Hindley, and finally Cathy and Hareton (251). In contrast, Fennell’s adaption lacks a fundamental sense of unreliability and distrust; the story of Wuthering Heights unfolding in the present, but Brontë frames the narrative as a memory recalled by a biased subject to the mind of Mr. Lockwood. Not even he, Brontë’s narrator, trusts Nelly as an infallible source: “she would prove a regular gossip” (33).

 

Despite the option to implement a filmic substitute to mirror Brontë’s framed narrative, Fennell works instead to push her rigid interpretation of the text. Filmmaker William Wyler argued, “I have never felt any obligation to be faithful to every word” because authors “didn’t write films to be seen but books to be read” (Stecher 146). The significant narrative restructuring of Brontë’s text, including the complete removal of second generation of characters, begin with the first sound version: the black-and-white Wuthering Heights (1939) directed by Wyler and starring Laurence Olivier. He argued that his adaption would freely “add or subtract from the original…to best serve my medium” (Stecher 147). The explicit infidelity and fluidity of Wyler’s adaption echoes Stam’s automatic difference, including the difficulty of adapting mediums that lack concrete visual languages into a film. For instance, a written play must assume that each venue and each individual performance would deviate from the playwright’s norm and produce an ad hoc interpretation. A novel however does not approve of the same benchmark for ambiguity and interpretation as theatre. The authour of the narrative and the readership both consume the novel with the assumption that their experience begins and ends unaccompanied. In other words, the experience does not depend on others because a novel lacks the visual element of theatre and film that is produced by a variety of people carrying distinct interpretations. Consider how reading a play is only half of the experience but reading a book is the entirety of its experience, that is unless an adaption catches the reader’s interest; nonetheless, the source-familiar audience will anticipate that the is a departure from the original source and simultaneously view the adaption through the lens of their own interpretive bias. Both Fennell and Wyler believe their additions and alterations help best depict the Gothic mode of Wuthering Heights for the medium of film, albeit not with the objective of fidelity. Fennell’s adaption satisfies the intentions of the Gothic by “[getting] to the body itself” to “quickly [arouse the system] and quickly [allay] the physical reactions to fear” (Stecher 147). She diverges from Wyler’s PG-13 rated film by literally embodying the ethos of the Gothic mode in the physicality between Catherine and Heathcliff—like many elements in her adaption, Fennell interprets Brontë’s allusions and insinuations physically and literally to produce a sexually charged narrative of skin-walls and bread-kneading: “I am Heathcliff,” Brontë’s Catherine asserts and Fennell’s Catherine moans (81).

 

In Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, “man and object become interchangeable” as “the inanimate joins the animate as an actor” to perpetuate a unique adaption of an existing art (Meikle 177). The character of Joseph is less a human and more a device used by Fennell to drive the narrative—Joseph and object are fundamentally interchangeable. His purpose in the film is to expose Catherine to intercourse. Catherine observers Joseph and Zillah, another servant of the Earnshaw household originally delegated to the second generation, partaking in explicit roleplay in the barn through a gap in the floorboards. Their encounter is masochistic; Joseph puts a bridle on Zillah’s head and restricts her movement before ascending on her. Joseph is not the grumpy old man devoted to Christianity of the text; he is a young, promiscuous and a presumably secular individual subjected to voyeurism. Further, Joseph loses his notoriously heavy Yorkshire dialect in favour of one more intelligible to the American audience. He is the chief microcosm of the adaption: Joseph’s character is no longer indecipherable and pious but coherent and optimistic just like the adaption, which reflects a singular, albeit ambiguous, interpretation of Wuthering Heights. Fennell’s adaption does not evolve Joseph’s character from a symbol of brutality that punishes young Heathcliff to then begrudgingly serving Heathcliff, the chief subject of his ridicule, as master. Rather, Fennell’s Joseph treats Heathcliff and Catherine as equals, which is explicitly acknowledged by Catherine during sex by comparing her marriage to Edgar Linton to Joseph’s aforementioned intercourse with Zillah: “It would make even Joseph and Zillah blush, what he does to me.” Heathcliff only finds this comparison infuriatingly sensual because he believes Joseph to be someone worthy of embodying as Catherine’s equally wanton partner. Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a provocative and hypostasized response to the classic novel that driven by the primal qualities latent in its characters; thus, the film depicts an abundance of explicit encounters in favour of implicit, at times unnatural, analogies.

 

In classical rhetoric, imitatio, Latin for mimetic emulation, was a fundamental principle of art attributed to a realm of perfection (Halliwell 57). In other words, all art stems from a metaphysical source that is simultaneously eternal and in need of constant revival, imitation, and adaption. However, modern critics today struggle to identify if adaption theory today should approach the referent source as superior to its representation, or if the product of mimesis is but a missing piece that supports both the source and the representation. The execution of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights by Emerald Fennell, a filmmaker known for her equivocal films and for a divided consensus, takes a third methodology in the creation of her perfect Catherine and Heathcliff. For Fennell, the adaption was an opportunity to invigorate the insular source text with an energy that appeals to the modern zeitgeist. If fidelity criticism presumes that an adaption’s value stems from its proximity to its textual source, then Fennell’s adaption exposes the fragility of the assumption.

 

Adaption is less an enterprise of preservation than one of transformation and contextualization; Fennell displaces the fundamental structure of Wuthering Heights to construct an alternative “quarry” that mediates the classic narrative with a modern outlook, privileging contemporary culture over textual fidelity. The film participates in intertextuality—it synthesizes influences to create a fresh mosaic out of a drained and alien material in the context of the twenty-first century. It funnels Brontë’s unstable narration through a crafted lens focused less on the historical foreground of Yorkshire and more on the meaning left to be created by filmmakers today—nowhere is this more eident than in the characterization of Joseph. Fennell’s adaption eliminates uncertainty in favour of a narrative characterized by physicality and wanton desire, which is shaped by the noise of this century’s pop-culture. Although the film is not exactly a box-office hit nor on the road to becoming a modern classic, one must agree that Fennell’s Wuthering Heights has and continues to contribute to the artistic movement by retaliating against structural approaches to filmmaking and fidelity criticism.

***

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