Why Hollywood Keeps Butchering the Brontës
By Meredith Eldred
Innovative director Emerald Fennell is adapting Emily Brontë’s gothic masterpiece, Wuthering Heights, and according to the casting director, its fans might not be happy.
The Brontës: Trailblazing Baddies
Allow me to set the scene; it’s 1847, and Wuthering Heights has just been published by an elusive new author, Ellis Bell. Little does the public know that Bell is merely a pen name for one Emily Brontë, who died shortly after its publication, never getting to know the true extent of her work’s success. Emily and two of her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, were not only authors, but they were authors with something to say. Wuthering Heights might be famous now, but at the time of publication, Emily had readers absolutely quaking in their boots.
No—it was not because she had created the first situationship ever seen in literature, but because the book has depictions of both mental and physical abuse and cruelty, and voices criticisms of Victorian morality, religion, and the class system. When reading Charlotte’s beloved Jane Eyre, people were more astounded to read her social criticisms, conversations of class, sexuality, religion, and feminism, and Jane’s individualistic character. Emily and Charlotte Brontë, while questionable in their leniency for older men romantically pursuing young women amongst other things—Jane and Rochester’s nearly twenty year age gap, hello?—were trailblazing in their works.
So, what does this have to do with Emerald Fennell’s adaptation?
I am so glad you asked. You see, in both aforementioned novels, race plays an integral part to the storyline. In most (most, not all) book to screen adaptations of the Brontë sisters works, this part has been whitewashed.
Heathcliff, our main male character in Wuthering Heights is often depicted as white, when in the novel, he is described as being “a dark-skinned gipsy.” This is one of the many ways Emerald Fennell’s adaptation has joined the long list of movies that disregard Heathcliff’s description, when really it’s one of the most important pieces of his character. Heathcliff is berated and brutalized for being a presumably Romani boy picked off the side of the street, for being poor and uneducated, and yes, for his skin tone, particularly from a member of his own foster family, Hindley Earnshaw.
The closest we get to a realistic depiction of him is Wuthering Heights (2011) in which James Howson, a Black man, plays the notorious anti-hero. This adaptation isn’t perfect either, for many people are of the mind that it’s too brutal and violent to characters and animals alike. After all, there was no reason to hang puppies by their collars from fences.
When Fennell’s Wuthering Heights was announced, countless people took to the internet to claim it would be their Joker, myself included. But when Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi were cast in the main roles, the same people who were once thrilled were the first to notice the blatant inaccuracies to the source material. Both Robbie and Elordi are notably older than the characters in the book. Spoiler alert—though I’m not sorry, you’ve had 178 years to read it—Catherine Earnshaw/Linton is about eighteen or nineteen when she dies. Robbie certainly has a youthful face and persona, but at the end of the day, she looks too mature.
For Elordi, well, the problem is quite obvious. He is in fact, a white man. But the casting director—she would not let this detail deter her!
Deadline reported that the adaptation’s casting director, Kharmel Cochrane, who previously worked on Saltburn with Fennell and whose style has “been praised as dynamic and diverse,” is known for her unique process. When discussing the heat she’s taken for casting Robbie and Elordi, Cochrane’s response was, “but you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art… There’s definitely going to be some English Lit fans that are not going to be happy.”
According to whispers, this adaptation will focus more on the psychological and erotic elements of the story. As an advocate of yearning and a fan of the tormented lover—to the point that I have Haunt me, then! tattooed on my inner elbow—I am ecstatic for this element to be the focus. To see my favorite story through the eyes of a visionary such as Fennell, who created the masterpiece that was Promising Young Woman, was more than I could ever hope for. But this does not negate my frustration that certain plot points, most likely incorporated with intention by Emily Brontë, are yet again being ignored.
Jane Eyre & Madwomen
In the 2011 adaptation of Jane Eyre, Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender deliver a haunting, spell-binding performance that, when I watched for the first time, sent chills down my spine. Gothic, angsty, and shockingly sexy, they nearly did the source material justice.
In Charlotte Brontë’s original work, Bertha Mason, otherwise known as the OG “crazy” woman in the attic, is Rochester’s first wife. Bertha is a Creole woman that he married, not out of love, but because his father forced him to for money when they were in Spanish Town, Jamaica, which was her hometown. While at this time in history, describing a woman as Creole did not automatically make her a woman of mixed race, interpretations of the text have named it a distinct possibility.
Bertha, while being the most obvious of potential POC, is only one of the characters in the story described as having dark-skin, or being theorized by scholars as such. Out of all of them, Charlotte Brontë chose Bertha as the villain in this story—the first wife, the woman who came before, the other. More than just a villain, Jane describes her as, “Fearful and ghastly to me . . . It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of linaments.” Bertha’s madness is described as beastly, that she “snatched and growled like some strange wild animal,” and it is said that she scares Jane.
I sat with this description for a while before taking to the internet. I quite literally searched “race in Jane Eyre” and stumbled upon a magnificent piece written for LitHub by essayist Tyrese L. Coleman. The article, titled Reading Jane Eyre While Black, said, “In the preface to Jane Eyre’s second edition, Brontë writes that she intended the novel to serve as an evangelical text. Her choice of villain, however, is a woman of mixed race from the West Indies where slavery had not been abolished during the era depicted. I wonder about Bronte’s Christian mission to present a book ‘whose ears detect in each protest against bigotry—that parent of crime—an insult to piety, that regent of God on earth.’ This means that Brontë considered Bertha and those other dark and swarthy creatures to be of something other than God. That she would think so of me as well.”
While it is entirely possible that Bertha Mason was written to be a white woman, we can’t have any way of knowing for sure, can we? In her article, however, Coleman lays out quotes and evidence as to the contrary, stating that Bertha Mason was indeed a woman of color. From context clues, physical descriptors, and how POC were treated, described as “savage” and “beastly” at the time, evidence-based conclusions can be made.
In the 2011 film adaptation, as well as many others, she was a white woman. And yet I’d be remiss if I didn’t shout out the 2006 mini-series in which Bertha was played by Claudia Coulter, a woman of British and Latin descent—a true, biracial Bertha!
In those aforementioned other adaptations when the choice was made to remove the racial aspect, directors remove the chance for conversations to be had about colonialism, race, and the impacts they had both at the time and on the present. By removing the racial aspect, we neglect the much larger conversation to be had about Charlotte Brontë making the distinct choice to center white Christianity (Jane) and both demean and vilify people of color (Bertha). Jane Eyre might have made a splash in the waters of feminism, but that feminism was not intersectional.
The Case for & Against: Art is Up for Interpretation
Let’s think a bit more on what Kharmel Cochrane for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights meant when she said, “It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.”
Admittedly, there is validity to this statement. Cochrane also said, “Wait until you see the set design because that is even more shocking. And there may or may not be a dog collar in it.” While some might have qualms with a dog collar here or creative liberties there, I personally do not. I don’t even care that Margot Robbie as Catherine is blonde. I can even make peace with them changing the characters’ ages. I cannot, however, accept the consistent disregard of race in these adaptations.
While I say there is validity to Cochrane’s previously mentioned statement, I will also say it’s laden with irresponsibility. We as artists—and yes, I do say we, as I’m a writer myself—have responsibilities that come with interpreting and adapting the works of those that came before us. Sure, if we’re crafting our own work, there are fewer, but to take works from people of a different time and remove crucial aspects that are integral to plot and integral to conversation, it’s no better than censorship. It’s whitewashing. Perfect actors and actresses are there—we know this well. Countless actresses of multiracial or biracial backgrounds like Rosario Dawson, Rashida Jones, or Zoë Kravitz could play Bertha Mason. An actor such as Alfred Enoch would make a perfect Heathcliff.
Why Hollywood keeps butchering the Brontës: a seemingly simple answer to a loaded question. Simply put, there are descriptions in both Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre that distinctly connote specific characters as “other.” To brush this aside is to do the characters, the stories, and the viewers a disservice. The more loaded question; when will Hollywood no longer tolerate whitewashing and the minimization of characters and people of color?
Sources:
deadline.com/2025/04/kharmel-cochrane-lily-rose-depp-nosferatu-wuthering-heights-1236377682/
