In season three of the HBO series Veep, presidential candidate Selina Meyer tells her team that, if she’s going to win the race, “I can’t identify myself as a woman. Men hate that, and women who hate women hate that (which I believe is most women).” A few years later, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie (2023) expressed a similar sentiment: “Everyone hates women. Men hate women and women hate women. It’s the one thing we can agree on.”
Emerald Fennell inadvertently proves them right in her new adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Emily Brontë’s novel is a tale of generational trauma, recounting the intertwined lives of two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, over the span of thirty years in 18th-century Yorkshire. Fennell cuts out the second half of Brontë’s story—which deals with the aftermath of Cathy Earnshaw’s death, as well as Heathcliff’s quest for revenge on the next generation—and focuses exclusively on sexual desire between Heathcliff and Cathy. In doing so, the film luridly illustrates the many ways in which, since the sexual revolution, women have been encouraged to see themselves as products to be used and abused. Unfortunately, as a filmmaker, Fennell isn’t critiquing this phenomenon. She is enthusiastically participating in it.
There are many reasons why, on a technical level, Wuthering Heights (2026) is a profound disappointment. Artistically, it’s like a staircase that leads to nowhere: there are constant allusions to well-known stories and literary tropes, but there’s no clear message behind them (why is Cathy dressed in a red velvet coat in a clear reference to Little Red Riding Hood?). There are symbols everywhere, to the point of surrealism (why is there a giant sculpture of hundreds of hands reaching out from above the fireplace in the living room at Thrushcross Grange?), but the meaning of these allusions and symbols is so obscure that even the lead actors admit only Fennell can explain it.
These filmmaking choices are not purely aesthetic. They are a direct result of Fennell’s particular brand of sex-positive feminism, which teaches women three lies: first, that violence is proof of love; second, that consent is the only necessary framework within which to engage in sexual relationships; third, that sex is pleasurable when it involves physical and/or emotional pain.
Lie No. 1: Violence is Proof of Love
In the chapter “Violence Is Not Love” of her best-selling book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Louise Perry notes that “One striking feature of typical female sexuality is a preoccupation with partners’ displays of emotional loyalty.” She goes on to explain that some women, due to both biological and societal factors, are predisposed to look for aggression as proof of their partner’s commitment to them.
Fennell toys with this idea throughout the film, without pushing it to its logical conclusion. In Fennell’s adaptation, Cathy, played by Margot Robbie, is consistently turned on by the threat of violence. Her moment of sexual awakening happens when she accidentally witnesses two of the household servants having consensual BDSM sex which involves a horse’s bridle being placed around the woman’s mouth. Towards the end of the film, she is similarly aroused when Jacob Elordi’s Heathcliff offers to kill her husband Edgar, all while calling her a “bitch.”
The threat of violence is meant to arouse the female audience, which is the target demographic for the film, but in the end, Fennell always holds back. She knows that if we were to actually witness Heathcliff engage in physical violence, the illusion of him as a great romantic hero would vanish. So, she makes Heathcliff threaten murder, makes him describe himself as “rough” and “cold-hearted” while, in fact, he does very little that could truly be said to be physically aggressive. The worst we see is some frustrated chair-smashing, and even that act is so he might burn the wood fragments to keep Cathy warm. This is a clear departure from Brontë’s Heathcliff, who is both emotionally and physically abusive. Frankly, it’s much easier to thirst after Elordi’s hunky rendition of the character. Unlike readers of the novel, film viewers don’t have to see him abuse his wife Isabella, subject his nephew Hareton to forced labour, or coerce his own son Linton and his niece Catherine to forced marriage.
In fact, Fennell’s Wuthering Heights removes a large part of the blame from both Heathcliff and Cathy for their behavior. In the novel, Cathy marries Edgar Linton because she wants the high status and life of luxury which he can offer. In Fennell’s version, she’s largely motivated by her father’s impoverishment, an obvious attempt at making Cathy seem more noble in her intentions. Similarly, in Brontë’s story Heathcliff is indeed mistreated, not by his adoptive father Mr. Earnshaw, who genuinely cares for him, but rather by his brother Hindley, who is jealous of Mr. Earnshaw’s affection for Heathcliff. By removing the character of Hindley and shifting the abusive behaviour to Mr. Earnshaw, Fennell lessens Heathcliff’s moral agency. Growing up without a kind father figure, who can blame him for continuing the cycle of violence?
It’s the aesthetic, not the reality, of male violence with which Fennell is ultimately fascinated. She is happy to include real violence (the opening scene shows a young Cathy witnessing an execution by hanging; halfway though the film, we hear a pig being killed and see Cathy walking through a pool of its blood). But we don’t see violence explicitly connected to romantic love. Fennell’s Heathcliff is aggressive, but never quite enough to make us genuinely scared of him.
By contrast, Brontë’s Heathcliff is genuinely terrifying. He is an enabler who encourages his adoptive brother Hindley’s gambling and alcoholism. He traps his wife Isabella at Wuthering Heights, torturing her both emotionally (by hanging her dog) and physically (the incident in which he throws a knife at her, causing a neck wound, prompts her to finally leave him). A fourteen-year-old reader may ignore these facts and focus instead on Heathcliff as the brooding, tortured hero. An adult woman should be able to tell that Brontë depicts such a character not to condone, but to warn.
Lie No. 2: Consent Justifies Degradation
It was clear even from the trailer that Wuthering Heights was going to feature some pretty grotesque visuals, from close-ups of snails slithering down a window, to Cathy’s bedroom being wallpapered to resemble her own skin. These are not simply the creative choices of an eccentric director, but a reflection of Fennell’s obsession with female degradation. Both Cathy and Isabella Linton, Edgar’s sister, are objectified and objectify themselves throughout the film.
Once again, Fennell betrays her distinctly millennial, sex-positive brand of feminism here. She also once again wilfully misunderstands Brontë’s novel. In Brontë’s story, Heathcliff convinces Edgar’s sister, Isabella Linton, to elope with him as a form of revenge against Cathy. Isabella is a true victim of the situation. The worst that can be said of her is that she lets her infatuation cloud her judgement, thus failing to act prudentially in marrying a man who, it should be obvious, is still in love with another woman. Heathcliff proceeds to abuse and neglect her for the entirety of their marriage.
But in Fennell’s version, Isabella is fully aware that Heathcliff intends to mistreat and degrade her. In fact, the degradation is part of a twisted sort of pact they make before they have sex for the first time. He lays out his intentions before her. He wants to marry her to make Cathy jealous. He doesn’t love her. He intends to be brutish towards her. “Do you want me to stop?” he repeatedly asks her. Each time she shakes her head or says “no.” Her verbal assent is enough within the logic of the script to establish that he has done nothing non-consensual, and hence nothing wrong. (At the theatre where I saw the film, each time Isabella said “no,” the women in the cinema tittered. They were loving it.) When Nelly, Cathy’s maid, goes to Wuthering Heights to try to convince Heathcliff to let Isabella come back to her brother’s home, he serenely points out that he has done nothing to Isabella which she has not herself agreed to. As he says this to Nelly, Isabella is on all fours, on a filthy stone floor, a collar around her neck, pretending to be a dog.
The women of Wuthering Heights (2026) are consistently dehumanised. They are either likened to animals, from Isabella’s dog collar to the housekeeper Zillah’s horse bridle, or reduced to parts of their own bodies, from Cathy’s skin wallpaper room to the incredibly busty Oktoberfest-style costumes which Margot Robbie wears as Cathy. And any argument one might make that this is to show the male characters’ misogyny doesn’t hold up, either. At no point in the film is any of these forms of degradation shown to be anything but consensual. Fennell’s women really do hate themselves as much as the men hate them.
Lie No. 3: Pain is Pleasurable
When degradation is justified by consent, then it becomes very difficult to separate sex from pain. Degradation itself becomes a form of pleasure. As the philosopher Martin D’Arcy insightfully remarked in his 1945 book The Mind and Heart of Love, human romantic love should not be marked by “brutal possessiveness” as it is in the animal kingdom: “In creatures which are swayed by animal passion the male instinct is to dominate and take, the female to yield and give. They are unhindered by any moral considerations, by mutual respect.” This sense of personal dignity is entirely lacking from Fennell’s story.
If this film were directed by a man with an imagination of comparable sordidness to Fennell’s, I would expect that it would have contained much more graphic nudity. Wuthering Heights has plenty of disturbing sex, but by recent cinematic standards, it is in one sense surprisingly tame: the most one is shown is Heathcliff taking off his shirt. Even so, it’s a deeply pornographic film.
Pornography is characterised by deindividualization. It reduces people to instruments of pleasure, thus stripping them of their personhood. It’s very easy to see how this happens in visual material. Yet the definition doesn’t rest on seeing the naked body, but rather on the material in question exciting sexual arousal. Indeed, women often seek arousal by reading erotic fiction rather than consuming pornographic films.
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is somewhat of a hybrid. It’s a film, and so of course a visual medium. Even so, it functions more like a self-insert erotic fanfiction. For those fortunate enough to have escaped awareness of this phenomenon, Y/N is a subgenre of fanfiction often found on platforms like Wattpad and AO3. It is written in the second person, which enables the reader to insert herself into the story; Y/N stands for “your name.” Often, the writer focuses on a heterosexual relationship, describing the behaviour of the male protagonist, and letting the readers imagine being the female protagonists within the story. This type of (often very sexually explicit) fanfiction has become incredibly popular. Whether Fennell is aware of this trend or not, she has gone on record saying that her film is not a straightforward adaptation, but rather a version of the story as she imagined it while reading it for the first time when she was fourteen. The similarity is striking.
I can’t claim to know what was going on in Fennell’s teenage brain, but I do know that many teenage girls deeply struggle with their sense of identity. It’s well-documented that body dysmorphia, anorexia, and self-harm are all typically female disorders. As Jonathan Haidt suggests in The Anxious Generation (2024), such internalizing disorders have been only exacerbated by social media usage in young women. Mix this recent phenomenon with the fact that the sexual revolution has instilled expectations of constant female availability for male pleasure, and you get quite the destructive cocktail: women who associate love with male sexual aggressiveness, and pleasure with pain.
All the female characters in Wuthering Heights fit this description. Cathy is aroused by violence, Isabella self-harms when she feels undesirable. They’re not so much eighteenth-century Yorkshire women as they are the unintentional reflection of a contemporary malaise.
What Can Literature Depict?
Still, I can guess what a common objection might be: that art should be free to portray virtuous and immoral behaviour alike, and that any critique of it is akin to censure. To be clear, I have no issues with depictions of violence or discussions of sex in literature. This is not a matter of prudishness. I simply want to make the case that it deeply matters how such sensitive topics are presented.
I have noticed a pattern in recent filmmaking of homing in on extreme depictions of female suffering not with compassion, but with sexual undertones. Recently, Robert Eggers did this in the Nosferatu (2024) remake, which ends with a protracted close-up scene of the titular vampire feeding on the female protagonist in a highly sexualised manner until he has bled her to death. One of the final scenes of Wuthering Heights is startingly similar. We are shown Cathy lying down, legs sprawled wide, and we realise that she has died overnight from an untreated missed miscarriage. As the camera zooms out, we see bloodletting leeches all over her chest, and a river of blood flowing from her legs through the sheets. The camera lingers uncomfortably on her hemorrhaged body. The scene could have been filmed from a number of different angles—perhaps from the point of view of Edgar, who wakes to find Cathy has died. Instead, Fennell gives us Cathy’s dead body as a spectacle. There is something disturbingly voyeuristic about it.
What is more, it can’t be argued that Wuthering Heights depicts unhealthy relationships without condoning them, or even as a warning against them. Within the logic of the film, these relationships can’t even be described as abusive, because Fennell espouses a consent framework that allows women to be sexually degraded all while invoking their agency. That shows in the way in which the film has been promoted. Robbie and Elordi, in what is no doubt a well-rehearsed marketing move, have described their relationship on set as “codependent” and “a mutual obsession” respectively. In the lead-up to the film’s release, Warner Bros. even partnered with UK lingerie brand Lounge to promote an edit of their products, splashing the film’s tagline (“it’s time to come undone”) all over their website. Fennell and Robbie, who both also served as producers, are well aware of what they are doing. As the saying goes, sex sells.
Finally, we’re not shown the long-lasting detrimental effects of Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship. The novel is famously split in two parts, the second of which deals with a new generation of characters, the children of Cathy, Heathcliff, and Hindley Earnshaw. As I’ve mentioned, they all suffer at the hand of Heathcliff in his quest for revenge even years after Cathy’s death. But because the film ends with Heathcliff embracing a dead Cathy and a sentimental flashback to them as children, their relationship is instead implied to be something pure, even transcendental. Nothing about this film frames its characters’ acts of sexual violence, adultery, and manipulation as anything but excusable in the name of a perverted idea of love.
Wuthering Heights postures itself to provoke. In the end, it is nothing more than an expression of the kind of feminism that dominated our culture when Fennell and Robbie were themselves growing up. It’s a feminism which calls itself sex-positive, but is painfully unaware of what actually helps women to foster healthy sexual relationships: not mere consent, but true respect of individual dignity; not domination, but mutual self-giving. We can choose to leave this kind of feminism in the past. It’s time for women to stop hating themselves.
