Every time a new film or television adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is announced, it seems that at least one writer espouses the opinion that maybe, just maybe, Wuthering Heights is one of those novels that will never be able to be adapted successfully at all.  The narrative frame is too complicated — the characters are too morally deficient — the passions are too wild and the revenge is too off-putting.  It just won’t translate to the screen, big or small.

Even if I’m not convinced that the novel is un-adaptable, I have to admit that most film adaptations of the novel have fallen pretty short of the mark.  And while I had high hopes for the new ITV adaptation — aired here in America on Masterpiece Classic on PBS — I was, sadly, pretty disappointed again.

The one thing this adaptation had going for it was atmosphere.  I felt like it managed to convey the tension and discontent that leaps off the pages of the novel.  Everyone was appropriately frustrated, and all of the “happy” moments were appropriately balanced right on the edge of the knife, ready to tip over into anguish and despair at any given second.  That was good — that felt like the novel I experienced as a reader.

The acting as a whole was also well done.  I felt Charlotte Riley missed the mark when it came to capturing Cathy’s petulant and grasping madness, but Tom Hardy was unusual and sometimes haunting as Heathcliff.  Hardy’s acting was best for me in the scenes immediately after his sudden reappearance; he really captured the boastful, almost funny facade that Heathcliff puts on to cover the resentment and anger at Cathy, Edgar, and Hindley that still simmers and bubbles underneath.  I thought Andrew Lincoln was one of the brightest spots in the adaptation.  He managed to turn Edgar, who is so often simpering, passive, effeminate, and bland, into a more human character.  Rather than merely a foil for Heathcliff, Lincoln’s Edgar was a frustrated man in his own right, trying to do his best within the societal constraints that he so clearly subscribes to.  Overall, though, these are weak versions of the characters presented by the novel — there’s no dog-hanging, no baby-dangling, no wrists against broken windows, and no head-versus-couch trauma to be found here.

But there were so many small things that had been tweaked and changed that I was really distracted from the main relationships at times.  The screenwriter, Peter Bowker, chose to re-set the action of the novel from 1801 to 1848 for reasons I could not quite discern.  Really — how many novels begin with such a concrete assertion of place and time?  Was it for the sake of costuming?  Was it because he wanted to locate the novel’s action approximately at the time of its publication?  If he was realigning the time frame of the novel to fit with either of those reasons or some other, I didn’t feel like it was a justified choice within the adaptation.  Sometimes a time shift can work (Sandy Welch reconfiguring North and South so that the characters could attend the 1851 Great Exhibition is a good example, in my mind), but when it’s done for seemingly arbitrary reasons, it doesn’t make sense to me.

Along with the time shift, Bowker also reconfigured the ages of the characters.  Heathcliff, Cathy, Edgar, and Isabella are all approximately seven years older during most of the adaptation than they were in the novel.  Cathy is 25 when she gives birth to Cathy II and dies (we see a shot of her tombstone, giving her year of death as 1830 — 48 years later than she dies in the novel). She and Heathcliff are adults when Mr. Earnshaw dies, instead of twelve and thirteen, and they are adults when Hareton is born, when in the novel they would have been about thirteen and fourteen.

This “aging” of the characters creates multiple problems.  The most glaring of these is the issue of the three-year delay of Edgar and Cathy’s wedding, the same three years that pass while Heathcliff disappears to parts unknown.  In the novel, they wait to marry because of Cathy’s age, her health, and the mourning period for Mr. Linton; in the film, the wait is nonsensical, because Cathy is of age and did not have the hysterical reaction to Heathcliff’s departure that she does in the novel, and Mr. Linton’s death is never even addressed.  There’s no reasonable way to explain why Edgar and Cathy wait so long to marry in the film — except that they have to be made to wait in the script to give Heathcliff his time to transform and return to wreak havoc.

No, it seems the reason that Bowker and the filmmakers of this version chose to age the characters was so that they could comfortably translate Heathcliff and Cathy’s passion for each other as young adolescents into clearly sexual terms.  Brontë’s Heathcliff and Cathy are younger when they tromp around together on the moors, and though sexual activity between them isn’t counted out by the text (really, it’s surely not called Penistone Crag for nothing), there is no clear indication that they express their apparently overwhelming emotional connection into physical actions.

Hardy and Riley’s Heathcliff and Cathy most certainly do tryst out on the moors, with a scene of the pair rolling around passionately on the rocks of the crag.  Emotional jealousy then becomes physical jealousy as well — Heathcliff reacts incredulously when he learns that Cathy is considering Edgar’s proposal because she “lay with him” only weeks before.  After Cathy marries, her sexual relationship with Edgar also becomes a more significant issue in this adaptation — she denies him on their wedding night because she is pining for Heathcliff, and when the two do sleep together, it is also presented on screen.  Heathcliff and Cathy’s post-wedding relationship breaks not because of her role as Edgar’s legal wife but because he is jealous that she has gone to bed with her husband and refuses to touch her now-defiled body.

The sexuality of the novel, translated as it is by this adaptation, is problematic, but doesn’t necessarily violate the general sense of the text.  One part of the adaptation that does reshape the very heart of the novel in uncomfortable ways is Heathcliff’s death, presented in the television version as a suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound.  Having Heathcliff kill himself in such an active way presents major problems for one of the central themes in the novel — the issue of whether or not there is any hope for salvation for Heathcliff and Cathy.  So much of their childhood is depicted in the novel as a struggling against the concept of life after death as a polarized heaven-or-hell dichotomy, something that is dismissed by Cathy as a girl but later comes back in full-force after her death.

Though Heathcliff surely always doubts that his soul could ever be “saved” as much as the reader does, the entire second half of the novel seems to be centered around two projects for him: first, gaining control of both the Heights and the Grange, and second, finding a way to return to Cathy.  The afterlife-locale of Cathy’s soul is questionable at best, too — she may, after all, be haunting the moors near the Heights rather than strumming a harp on a cloud in heaven — and Heathcliff certainly jeopardizes his shot at the pearly gates every time the rage and need for revenge over take him.

Regardless, though, a literal suicide on Heathcliff’s part, rather than the slow cessation of life that he goes through in the book, takes away the important thematic question about the final resting place of the soul — in nineteenth-century terms, suicide meant an automatic refusal of salvation.  Moreover, it takes away the neatly-wrought parallel of Heathcliff’s death and Cathy’s — I’ve always read Heathcliff’s hunger strike and death as a patterned behavior, learned from Cathy.  A suicide takes that away — and it takes away the image of Cathy buried between her husband and her lover, as someone who dies by their own hand would not have been buried in a churchyard in 1801 or in 1848.

But even after all of this, I still think this is a novel that can be adapted.  None of the attempts have been anywhere close to perfect so far, if any adaptation even can be, but my favorite attempt is the BBC’s Sparkhouse, a 2002 modern version of the story starring Sarah Smart as a female Heathcliff character, Joseph McFadden as a male Cathy figure, and Richard Armitage as a modern Hareton.  The struggle to be assimilated in society is well-played in this version, and the cruelty and almost deranged behavior that so many adaptations seem to feel would alienate the audience is out in full force.

Though that modern version is my personal favorite thus far, I’d still like to see a faithful adaptation of the original story.  Plain and simple, I’d love to see a straight-from-the-page adaptation that retains the frame structure of the novel as well as all its problematic and sometimes off-putting characters and behaviors.  Surely if Austen’s Pride and Prejudice can be done in a grand six-hour BBC production, the same could be done for Wuthering Heights.  We need Lockwood to see different shades of Heathcliff; we need to see Cathy and Heathcliff’s mutual cruelty in all its glory to truly understand the psyche of the text.  Instead of more truncated, feature-film-length versions like this most recent one, we really do need the whole shebang for this novel to work on film.