The Problem Was Never Wuthering Heights Or Are We Disturbed by Female Sensuality?

In light of the uproar surrounding Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, I find myself observing something that goes far beyond literary fidelity.

Suddenly, everyone has become a scholar and analyst of English Literature. The pages of Emily Brontë are being obsessively flipped through in search of inaccuracies.

As if Fennell hasn’t repeated dozens of times that this is her own version. She put it in the title. She stated it in the opening credits. She said it in interviews.

And yet.

With Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein — a work also based on a female author (which I also found magnificent) — the discussion did not revolve with the same intensity around fidelity. On the contrary, we saw ideas clearly belonging to Mary Shelley being attributed to the director. The creator disappeared behind the male vision.

So why such aggression here?

Are we disturbed by the deviation or by the director's point of view?

Let’s say it plainly:

Some things never change. Gothic literature, from its very birth, was addressed primarily to women.

Dark landscapes… forbidden love.

Patriarchal structures… the supernatural… sensuality… the damsel in distress… oh yes, and the mysterious man.

These were not merely narrative motifs, but safe spaces of fantasy in an era when female desire had no social legitimacy.

In the Victorian period, such readings could even be used as “evidence” of hysteria if a husband wished to confine his wife to an asylum.

And yet, women read them. With fear yet immense passion.

Then came the Harlequin romances. Again, for women.

Again, ridicule.

“Women’s romance novels.”

“Without literary value.” (Spoken, of course, by experts in Marvel and video games.)

The pattern did not change. Only the era did.

Have we, perhaps, criminalised forsaken love or too much toxic obsession as if we are all perfect and we can go above and beyond our "flaws" so we cannot name it love story or we cannot enjoy watching the passionate intimacy of two forsaken star-crossed lovers because in their self- destructive love affair they are too...sensual?

We live in a time that calls itself liberated.

Sex is everywhere. Nudity is a commercial tool. Vulgarity is normalised.

And yet, a sensual atmosphere without even a hint of nudity is enough to provoke discomfort.

Why?

Have we learned to consume sex, but not to endure sensuality?

Sensuality requires tension.

Suggestion… anticipation… emotion.

And emotion is threatening in an age of emotional sterilisation.

The corset left the body but perhaps it relocated to our nervous system.

Why so much dismissal and primarily from men?

It may be uncomfortable to say, but it is worth considering:

When a male director adapts a classic work, we speak of “vision.”

When a female director dares to interpret it through sensuality, we speak of “betrayal.”

Why?

Is it because the female gaze on love remains threatening?

Is it because tragic, pathological, dark love the kind that is not “healthy,” not “rational,” not “well-adjusted” still excites women? Because we can see beyond Heathcliff's rotten psyche and still find reasons to cry or sympathise with him?

And that does not fit easily into the modern, sanitised narrative.

The Gothic was never proper.

Wuthering Heights is indeed not a romance.

It is obsession....it is self-destruction....it is demonic love.

And perhaps that is what unsettles us more than anything else.

Not the inaccuracies. Not the deviation from the book. But the fact that, even today, women are moved by the tragic.

They cry over impossible loves. They are drawn to enigmatic men. They recognise the shadow within themselves.

And no matter how much the modern world promotes autonomy and realistic, healthy relationships, the myth of dark love has never died. Perhaps because it does not concern the Man. It concerns the unconscious.

The question is not whether Fennell is novel faithful.

The question is why female sensuality, when presented with seriousness and aesthetic depth, continues to cause discomfort or offense?

And we were are centuries later, having the same discussion over the propriety of the Wuthering Heights...like back then in the 19th-century.

It is a proof that Gothic novel remains revolutionary (as it was- and this is something I learnt when i was studying English literate) still making noise, still disrupting the status quo like the laces of a corset cut open with a knife by Heathcliff.

Get over it!

Anastasia Diakidi

16/2/2026