Is this love? Don’t be Heathcliff and Cathy – what you should watch, read and play this week
Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is a loose (very loose) adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel. The film is, as the director has attested, the intense, “unhinged”, gothic story she remembers reading as a 14-year-old. As such, it is full of imagined passages and heightened romance and violence. It’s truly Fennellian in its excess – if you’ve seen Saltburn, her story of class envy, you know what that means (bathtub scene, grave scene, so many other scenes).
This new film version is not alone in marketing the story of star-crossed lovers as “the greatest love story of all time”. However, if you’ve ever read the book you know that it’s not really the sort of love anyone should strive for. It’s cruel and abusive. Heathcliff is not some broody prince but a violent tyrant. Cathy is spoiled and manipulative. Everyone around them suffers in the pair’s maddened need for each other. If you’re looking for love, this is perhaps not one you would want to emulate.
So this Valentines day we bring you recommendations that counter some of the worst traits found in Wuthering Heights.
Do you remember Wuthering Heights as romantic? Let us know in the comments what struck you most of Emily Brontë’s books the first time you read it.
The first recommendation, if you find yourself in need of some Wuthering Heights this Valentine’s day, is the Andrea Arnold film from 2011. This is a beautiful adaptation that stays true to the darkness and uncontrollable wildness of Brontë’s novel. The child actors are particularly incandescent and little Cathy (Shannon Beer) describing her love for Heathcliff is a beautiful piece of acting.
Wuthering Heights by Andrea Arnold is available on Disney+
Read more: Was Emily Brontё’s Heathcliff black?
Playfulness
The romance in Wuthering Heights is dark and stormy, unnervingly intense and completely serious. It sounds like there are comic moments in Fennell’s film (intentional or not) but adult Cathy and Heathcliff could do with being a bit more playful with each other. The 1st-century Roman poet, Ovid, believed that play was important to attracting and keeping a lover. In his manual The Art of Love, one of his top tips is to play boardgames, and, importantly, play to lose.
Roman board game researchers Tim Penn and Summer Courts explain how the Romans used play to flirt. They also reveal how such play brought them together – the two became close over the course of their research and ended up married!
Read more: Fall in love Roman-style by playing board games
If you’d like to play a game to foster romance this Valentines then we recommend you try out one of these five short game poems. These are small video games that only take a few minutes to play and each captures a feeling, a thought, or a fleeting moment.
Read more: These five short video games work like poems – and they’re ideal for Valentine’s Day
Swoonworthy romance and repentant grief
If you want more of a fantasy view of love from the past – love that is more pure-hearted and less toxic – then watch the latest season of Bridgerton. This is the sort of swoonworthy, slightly silly romance we can go for. This season we see an upstairs-downstairs romance blossom and questions over class, power and consent explored. There is as much sex here as Fennel has injected into her Wuthering Heights, but it comes accompanied with a lot less horror.
This season’s couple meet at a masked ball; Meg Kobza, an expert in Regency social life, writes about three true love stories that began at such soirees.
Bridgerton is on Netflix now
Read more: Bridgerton: three true tales of love at first sight at Regency masquerade balls
The thing about Wuthering Heights is that most people, including Fennell it seems, focus on the brief period of romance between adult Heathcliff and Cathy. The rest of the book follows him as he is consumed by grief after she dies, waging a life-long campaign of violence on himself and all around him. If you’re looking for an alternative tale of a man driven to madness and revenge by grief, then we recommend seeing the new adaptation of Hamlet starring Riz Ahmed.
Set in an uber-wealthy south-Asian community in modern-day London, Hamlet is the heir to a vast property developer empire. Greed and dodgy business deals abound in this adaptation by Aneil Karia. There are some clever twists on the well-known tale that Shakespeare adaptation expert Elizabeth Schafer found fascinating. However, unlike Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, it doesn’t cleave too far from Shakespeare’s original.
Hamlet is in cinemas now
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Read more: Riz Ahmed’s British south-Asian Hamlet is a moody tale of grief and shady family business