ITV adaptation of Wuthering Heights
The recent adaptation of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights on ITV1 was the best I’ve seen. Coming from West Yorkshire, I know Haworth and the moors very well, and they were stunningly captured in all their grandeur and isolation. Best of all, though, Tom Hardy made a very sexy Heathcliff, with all the erotic, brooding passion to make gay boys go weak at the knees. What struck me most, however, was how the gothic power of this tale may hold a particular relevance for us in the 21st century.
It can’t be stressed too much how shocking Wuthering Heights seemed when the novel was first pubished in 1847, especially when it was discovered that the writer who went under the pen-name of Ellis Bell was not only a woman, but one who lived in a remote country parsonage. What’s more, the novel is full of sex and violence, extreme cruelty, necrophilia, alcoholism, dark powers and revenge; and yet it remains one of the most loved and poetically evocative creations of English Literature.
Trailer for ITV’s Wuthering Heights adaptation
I was brought up a Methodist and recieved Wuthering Heights as a Sunday School prize when I was about eight years old, though I didn’t read the book till I was sixteen, perhaps due to its complicated shifting time scale, and it made a great impression on me. Though the Methodism I experienced was of the most benign nature, as a gay man I was left with a strong sense of sinfulness concerning my sexuality which I only cast off living in London in my early twenties.
Tom Hardy plays Heathcliff
This equates to the experience of many gay men, brought up as Catholics or from other religious backgrounds. The spectres of sin and guilt had to be faced and overcome before I could be a happy homosexual in full grateful acceptance of myself. Whatever we all have to face as we come out, we all have to be Heathcliffs in the way we forge an authentic self. Emily’s sister Charlotte , author of Jane Eyre, said, “stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone.” It was this strength, her refusal to be a “coward soul” that makes Heathcliff, however monstrous, so resonant to the gay imagination today and our need to accept ourselves totally.
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The gothic mood has links with the film Twilight, and vampire-related subjects, and for those who are into SM, there are close associations between gothic literature and the use of dungeons and master/slave scenarios, flogging and the like. Properly conducted, such sexual acts involve a fair degree of catharsis, just as Wuthering Heights ends with a sublime sense of resolution in the face of all that has gone before.
By John Hartley
John is a member of Mothership Gay Dating - user ID ‘outerlimits’
(c) Copyright 2009. All rights reserved.
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What did you think of the ITV adaptation of Wuthering Heights? Or the novel, or film versions? Do you see any gay parallels too? Feel free to comment below:
