Film adaptations of Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights” as intermedial discourse: at the intersection of nineteenth-century English literature and visual culture

Abstract

The article presents an intermedial analysis of five film adaptations of Emily Brontë’s novel “Wuthering Heights” (1939, 1970, 2009, 2011, 2022) in comparison with the literary source text. The aim of the study is to focus on five well-known screen adaptations of Emily Brontë’s novel, to conduct a comparative analysis of their cinematic receptions, and to identify the common and distinctive features of the adaptations, thereby highlighting the cultural and aesthetic tendencies of the periods in which they were produced as well as the specific characteristics of the directors’ visions. The study examines the particularities of the media transformation of a literary work into cinema and identifies the directorial strategies employed in the reception of the novel over a period of almost nine decades. The methodological framework combines intermedial, comparative (comparative-typological), hermeneutic, narratological, semiotic, and historical-cultural approaches.

It is established that each film adaptation offers its own model of interpreting the novel, foregrounding different aspects of the author’s conception: romantic, Gothic, psychological, social, or existential. A consistent evolution of cinematic reception is traced, from the predominantly plot-oriented adaptations of the mid-twentieth century to the more psychological and conceptual interpretations of the twenty-first century. It is demonstrated that media transformation encompasses composition, the system of characters, chronotope, genre dominance, the nature of the conflict, symbolism, and the system of artistic details. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which Heathcliff is interpreted, the reception of Catherine, the role of the second generation of characters, the transformation of Gothic motifs, the opposition between “self” and “other”, and the distinctive features of the final scenes in different film versions.

The study demonstrates that film adaptations not only represent the novel through different artistic means but also construct independent models of meaning, bringing to the fore issues of identity, memory, traumatic experience, and transgenerational inheritance. The practical significance of the study lies in the possibility of applying its findings to research on intermediality, reception poetics, the history of film adaptation, and comparative literary studies.