what bothers me most about Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights is the discourse that continues to be propagated (often by women themselves!) that because it was written by a woman, the novel must reflect the kind of relationship the author secretly dreamed of, that she was quirky, dark, perhaps secretly romantic in a morbid way. if it had been written by a man, everyone would say: “oh, the author is analyzing toxic relationships through these characters. he’s criticizing them.” it always bothered me that Brontë was immediately branded as a weird lovelorn woman, when in reality there is not much in her biography to attest to that. she was just a very intelligent writer who thought about a very intelligent subject like any of her male counterparts.
the canon always sees men as universal observers and geniuses who undertake social studies, but when it comes to women, they are reduced to being mere subjective chroniclers of interiority, supposedly recording their personal romantic fantasies.
many novels contain a romantic thread. among other things, Wuthering Heights opens with one. but most of the book is about revenge, cruelty, trauma, inheritance, generational damage etc. and yet, because it was written by a woman, only the love story is treated as significant.
if Wuthering Heights had been written by, say, F. Scott Fitzgerald, critics would likely praise the ruthless anatomy of obsession. I am just so sick of this. I sure would love to see the day when The Great Gatsby is marketed as the greatest love story ever told, overflowing with loose erotic scenes, rather than the highbrow social critique it’s usually presented as. the idea that women write “from emotion” while men write “from intellect” is still too deeply sedimented in how we talk about art.
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