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Abstract
This article was originally delivered as a keynote lecture at the Bicentenary Conference for Emily Brontë, Emily Brontë: A Peculiar Music (7–9 September 2018, Marriott Hotel, York). It explores the cultural portrayal and legacy of Emily Brontë through an analysis of several representative screen adaptations of both her biography and her novel, Wuthering Heights. It uses the recent BBC biopic directed by Sally Wainwright, To Walk Invisible (2016), as the guiding screen adaptation around which to discuss the various ways Emily Brontë has been adapted as a cultural persona on screen, imagined in various guises as a mystical author, a radical feminist ‘sister’, and a muse for our contemporary age. Moving from classic Hollywood film to recent independent and BBC productions, this article suggests that Emily Brontë has become implicated in wider and ongoing cultural debates about authorial identity, gender and myths of creativity that contemporary culture has inherited from the nineteenth century.
Notes
1 To Walk Invisible, dir. by Sally Wainwright (BBC, 2016).
2 Hila Shachar, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 12–14.
3 Quoted in: ‘Earthly Passions’, Harper’s Bazaar (January 2017), p. 116.
4 Some of the representative reviews collated in: Patsy Stoneman, Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), pp. 11–31.
5 Charlotte Brontë, ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, Wuthering Heights: Complete Text with Introduction, Contexts and Critical Essays, ed. by Diane Long Hoeveler (Boston; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), p. 19; John Ruskin, ‘Of Queens’ Gardens’ [1865], Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures by John Ruskin, ed. by G. G. Whiskard (London: Henry Frowde, 1912), pp. 98–100.
6 Brontë, ‘Biographical Notice of Ellis and Acton Bell’, pp. 18–19.
7 Hila Shachar, Screening the Author: The Literary Biopic (Cham; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 66–70, 83–84.
8 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 21.
9 Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 9–21.
10 Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, dir. by Peter Kosminsky (UK/USA, Paramount Pictures, 1992).
11 Shachar, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature, pp. 99–100.
12 See my discussion of this scene in: Shachar, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature, pp. 99–101.
13 Wuthering Heights, dir. by William Wyler (USA: United Artists/MGM, 1939).
14 Goldwyn quoted in: Patricia Ingham, The Brontës (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 229.
15 Shachar, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature, pp. 41–42.
16 Patsy Stoneman, Brontë Transformations: The Cultural Dissemination of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights (London: Prentice-Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996), p. 127.
17 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights [1847], ed. by Ian Jack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 133.
18 Stoneman, Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, pp. 155–83.
19 Gilbert and Gubar, pp. 248–308.
20 Wuthering Heights, dir. by Andrea Arnold (UK, Film4/UK Film Council, 2011).
21 Shelley Anne Galpin, ‘Auteurs and Authenticity: Adapting the Brontës in the Twenty-First Century’, Journal of British Cinema and Television, 11.1 (2013), 86–100 (p. 97).
22 Arnold quoted in: Brandon Harris, ‘Andrea Arnold, Wuthering Heights’, Filmmaker Magazine, (2012), <http://filmmakermagazine.com/52951-andrea-arnold-wuthering-heights/#.VMzj-SzleuI> [accessed 31 January 2015].
23 For example, for a feminist analysis that melds Cathy and Heathcliff’s positions, see Susan Meyer, ‘“Your Father was Emperor of China, and Your Mother an Indian Queen”: Reverse Imperialism in Wuthering Heights’, in Wuthering Heights: Complete, Authoritative Text with Biographical, Historical, and Cultural Contexts, Critical History, and Essays from Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. by Linda H. Peterson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 480–502.
24 Shachar, Screening the Author, pp. 88–94.
25 Shachar, Screening the Author, p. 89.
26 Quoted in: ‘Earthly Passions’, p. 116.
27 To Walk Invisible, dir. by Sally Wainwright (BBC, 2016) [on DVD].
28 Shachar, Screening the Author, p. 91.
29 Jessica Jernigan, ‘“To Walk Invisible” showcases the kind of verisimilitude that Brontë Fans have been waiting for’, Decider (2017), <https://decider.com/2017/03/29/to-walk-invisible-the-bronte-sisters-review/> [accessed 28 December 2018].
30 Gracy Olmstead, ‘“To Walk Invisible” Explores the Suffering and Genius of the Brontë Sisters’, The Federalist (2017), <http://thefederalist.com/2017/03/29/walk-invisible-explores-suffering-genius-bronte-sisters/> [accessed 4 May 2017].
31 Shachar, Screening the Author, p. 92.
32 Shachar, Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature, pp. 41–42.
33 Agnes Mary Frances Robinson, Emily Brontë (London: W. H. Allen and Co., 1883), p. 143.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hila Shachar
Hila Shachar is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Creative Writing and Film, and a member of the Centre for Adaptations at De Montfort University. She is the author of the books Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), which was featured in The New York Times and nominated for the 2012 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards, and Screening the Author: The Literary Biopic (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), which has been praised as a ‘daring and imaginative book’ (Dennis Bingham, Indiana University — Purdue University Indianapolis, USA). She has also published widely on topics including nineteenth-century literature, French and Australian cinema and the screen representation of the Holocaust.