Wuthering Heights and Media: Assignment

As my other source of media for this work of Literature, I watched the 1992 version of Wuthering Heights with actors Juliette Binochet and Ralph Fiennes. It was a very interesting take on the book, which I was still reading while I watched, and did stay for the most part true to the happenings and sequence of the book. All the characters were very similar and it followed a chronological order. The scene in the movie that was most shocking to me however was the scene and the beginning of Volume II, when Ellen Dean comes to tell Heathcliff that Catherine has died.

Now, I had read Wuthering Heights before in high school and I had also read this part of the novel before I watched the movie. Yet the scene actually moved me to tears. In the book, I pictured a dark scene with Heathcliff standing in a garden or park-like scene behind Thrushcross Grange looking totally wild and dirty, having already banged his head against the tree several times before Nelly arrives. In the book, Heathcliff cannot stand to see Nelly crying, and curses Catherine for dying and leaving him on the earth. He screams at her to haunt him and drive him mad until he dies and then bashes his head against a tree, making it bleed. It is a very powerful scene, filled with passion and anger and hate and love.

However this is not how it takes place in the movie. In this version, there is a specific lone tree in the moors that was of great significance to Catherine and Heathcliff in their youth. This is where Nelly meets him. Heathcliff neither yells, nor shows any sign of violence, and is more like the Heathcliff character I envisioned in the book. He holds all his pain and anguish inside himself, scarcely letting it be seen. However to me, this made it all the more difficult to bear. He speaks to Catherine in a quiet voice, as if she is standing next to him, and sounds more pleading and desperate than angry that she died. It was absolutely heartwrenching and actually envoked a lot of sympathy from me.

The killer part for me was one line at the end. In the movie, when Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights for 3 years upon hearing Catherine say it would degrade her to marry him, Catherine is physically and emotionally devastated. The scene shows her leaving the Heights to go to Thruscross Grange to marry Edgar and her voice comes over the scene and says "I cannot live without my life, I cannot live without my soul." And it is as if she is saying it to Heathcliff. This is the line Heathcliff speaks in the presence of Ellen but more to Catherine as he learns of her death. It is the first time in the movie we see Heathcliff as an openly loving character.

The only bad thing I have to say about this movie is that without reading the book, I do not think I would have had the slightest clue what was going on. I watched the movie at home with my mom this weekend and actually had to get out the family tree page in my novel to show her who was who. Also, I don't think it really conveyed the relationship between Heathcliff and Catherine very well, it did not show much of their companionship but more so of their bickering toward each other. It made it much more difficult for my mom, who had neither read the book nor seen the movie, to really understand their characters or their love -- the most important part in my opinion. Other than that, I loved watching the movie, as it gave me new images while reading the rest of the book and different faces for the characters.