‘Rough and vulgar’ Wuthering Heights gets a little rougher

IT’S one of literature’s greatest love stories: the wild tale of Heathcliff and Catherine and the complicated family life of the Earnshaws, set around the moorland of Top Withens near Haworth. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre may have been more of a critical success during the lifetime of the Brontë sisters in the 19th century, but it is Emily’s Wuthering Heights which has since attracted great praise for its originality and emotional power. It’s a compelling narrative that keeps film makers retelling the story, with different treatments tailored for each successive generation.

Now a radio adaptation of Wuthering Heights is to be aired on BBC Radio 3 this coming Sunday night – with swear words added to the script to “capture the shock” that greeted the novel when it was first published in 1847. Heathcliff and Cathy will both use the f-word – an addition which writer Jonathan Holloway says will help to make his version “left field”. He said: “What I wanted to elbow out is this idea that it’s the cosy, greatest love story ever told – it’s not... For me Wuthering Heights is a story of violent obsession, and a tortuous unfulfilled relationship. This is not a Vaseline-lensed experience.”

Mr Holloway told radiotimes.com that adaptations have often trivialised the novel, and he picked out for special mention Sir Cliff Richard’s 1996 musical, Heathcliff. However, his comment is rather unfair to several film adaptations of the book, which worked hard to capture the rough-hewn charisma of Heathcliff, whether played by Laurence Olivier, Timothy Dalton or Ralph Fiennes, and the increasingly unhinged nature of his relationship with Catherine.

Although the novel’s many fans may raise their eyebrows in horror when they hear this latest version, Mr Holloway says he wanted to recreate the effect the book had when it was published.

According to Andrew McCarthy, director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, the original manuscript of the novel had words scored out because they were considered too strong for public tastes. An example of this is: “No, I was told the curate should have his (blank) teeth shoved down his (blank) throat if he stepped over the threshold.” The exact missing words have been lost, but certainly the f-word wasn’t prevalent back then. Mr Holloway’s intention to reinject rawness into the story, for an age when many of its violent themes are more familiar, seems to boil down to the addition of a few expletives.

“Wuthering Heights was considered to be a rough and vulgar novel when it was published,” says Francis O’Gorman, professor of Victorian Literature at Leeds University. “It was full of swearing, such as phrases like ‘what the devil...?’ and ‘damnable jade’. This was quite shocking language at the time, and many Victorian writers would only put in a couple of letters and blank out the rest of the word. If you want to capture some of the provocation, coarseness and vulgarity of the book, just adding the f-word isn’t a particularly imaginative way of doing it, especially as so many dramas use those words today.

“On a broader, more conceptual, point of updating such a novel and making it more accessible, Wuthering Heights is an odd text, all about strangeness and alienation – something that’s going to be missed if you try to bring it into the 21st century.

“It was very much aware of its moment in time, with characters who are astonishingly violent to each other, and with a great deal of cruelty to animals. It’s a story that’s set in a real place and stands out for its sheer strangeness, which is what makes it so gripping and compelling.”

Jeffrey Richards, professor of cultural history at Lancaster University, describes the addition of modern expletives as misguided and believes their inclusion will lead to antipathy towards the book by those who may hear the story for the first time via the Radio 3 adaptation.

“It’s anachronistic to use words which were not common at the time. I hate anachronisms, such as the use of the words ‘hack it’ in a period adaptation I saw the other day. What’s shocking about Wuthering Heights is there in the story – the emotional power, the wildness, the violence and obsession. Hearing the f-word put in there inappropriately will outrage fans of the novel, and those who don’t know it simply won’t listen. But then Radio 3 has an audience that’s too small to measure anyway. I really hope we are not going to see a trend of modern swear words being put into other Victorian stories, such as the novels of Charles Dickens.”

[email protected]