When I first read Wuthering Heights last year, though I could acknowledge and even admire its more forward-thinking aspects, I remained generally unmoved by the melodrama, propelled as it is by stupidity and sensationalized behavior/sentiments. These are, of course, staples of the Gothic Romance, and how Emily Brontë muffles the hysteria by concealing the meat of her story underneath a more sane (albeit “unreliable”) narrative layer assuredly plays a part in why it has retained the status of a classic almost two centuries after its publication; although it is certainly the plot’s brooding avenger Heathcliff and his doomed romance with Catherine Earnshaw, not clever literary technique, that most strongly lives on in public imagination.

Such is why most film and TV adaptations excise the original enfolding narrative and mainly focus on the Heathcliff/Catherine dynamic, plus the two’s involvement with the neighboring Linton Family; and ending the story when Catherine dies, heartbroken, as her childhood love rages at their ill-starred fate. It’s a smart choice for the sake of efficiency (stuffing an elaborately plotted novel such as Wuthering Heights into the confines of a feature-length production requires significant cutting anyway) but, as a result, leaves the audience with a sopping pile of melodrama undamped by the source material’s conceit of a more or less neutral POV being narrated to and reacting with reserved distress at the goings-on. […]