The 1930s bore witness to a multitude of film adaptations of canonical Victorian novels: William Thackeray's Vanity Fair, for instance, was adapted in both 1932 and 1935, the Christy Cabanne adaptation of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre was released in 1934, and five Charles Dickens novels made their way to the silver screen within the decade. While both literary and film scholars have theorized about and remain invested in the connection between Victorian novels and Hollywood cinema, less attention has been paid to William Wyler's 1939 adaptation of Emily Brontë's 1847 novel Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights—a narrative of both intense passion and visceral hatred, a love story steeped in Gothic horror—has remained a staple in the English literary canon with a, consequently, wide readership. The novel's magnetism has not only attracted a massive body of critics who have attempted for decades to make sense of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff 's often violent and terrifying attachment, but it has also become grounds for appropriation and adaptation. In this chapter, I discuss Wyler's approach to adapting the classic Victorian novel, including what drew Wyler to Brontë's fictional realm in the first place, as well as the generic consequences of this transnational film adaptation.

Before discussing the nuances of Wyler's adaptation, it is important to establish a basic, albeit oversimplified, understanding of Brontë's plot—this is a necessary precursor to our understanding of the creative liberties Wyler took with bringing only a select portion of the novel to the screen. Set in the moors of West Yorkshire, Wuthering Heights is a novel in essentially two parts. The first is the love story of the wild and devilish Catherine, who defies gendered expectations of the quintessentially Victorian Angel in the House, and Heathcliff, the orphaned Byronic Hero, who enacts his revenge after being rejected by Catherine out of her own self-interest, on the grounds of his low social status.