Adapting Victorian Novels: The Poetics of Glass in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights

Do the latest film adaptations of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s novels hint at an aesthetic turn with regard to contemporary adaptations of the Victorian era and literature? Are Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre (2011) and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011) indicative of a transition in the perception of these texts, a transformation in our view on the long nineteenth century, and a metamorphosis of our relation to the Victorians? It seems that both films, which have been criticized for their ‘restraint,’ use the poetics of glass and rhetorics of window-scapes to evince the inner lives and passions of their characters. While this displacement may be responsible for the reviewers’ discontent with the films’ moderation, it also throws into relief our tastes and acquired notions of what an adaptation of a Victorian text should look like. There are indelible differences in the reception of both films, which curiously echo the long-standing battle concerning the quality of the Brontë sisters’ novels. Where Fukunaga’s adaptation is regarded as ‘enclosed in a crinoline of intelligent good taste’ (Bradshaw ‘Jane Eyre’), Arnold’s brings on ‘the shock of the new’ (Bradshaw ‘Wuthering Heights’). Differences in the films’ reception are most visible in the rhetoric of loss and gain, exercised on the terrain of central love duets and readers’ love affair with the paratexts. For Brooks, Arnold’s adaptation is a case of ‘creative vandalism which rips the layers of fluffy chiffon that have adhered to the tale through the course of numerous stage and screen adaptations.’ For Bradshaw, it offers an illusion of ‘pre-literary reality …, not another layer of interpretation, … but an attempt to create something that might have existed before the book, … a raw semi-articulate series of events, later polished and refined as a literary gemstone’ (‘Wuthering Heights’). On the backdrop of other (Brontë and Victorian) adaptations, Wuthering Heights appears audaciously innovative, ‘bracingly original’ and ‘refreshingly unconventional’ to the point of ‘intolerability’ (Stebbins). In contrast, classiness rather than originality is underscored in many reviews of Jane Eyre. Fukunaga is said to manage to walk the tightrope ‘between fidelity and self-actualization’ (Jenkins) as his adaptation is ‘an altogether more respectful affair’ (French ‘Jane Eyre’). The temporal proximity of the two films encourages their comparison that eerily echoes Brontës’ criticism: ‘So audaciously cutting-edge does it feel,’ writes Young about Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, ‘that it suddenly makes Cary Fukunaga’s … adaptation, the solidly respectable Jane Eyre, look almost as old-fashioned as Robert Stevensons’s 1943 version.’ It seems that, in such comments, the centuries-long rhetoric of Charlotte’s groomed vision and Emily’s wild, unruly imagination (and text) is revived by film critics, thus once again igniting the battles between the two sisters’ devotees, an indelible part of the Brontë franchise.