Agricultural Ghosts in Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights

Drive across the Yorkshire Moors, from Hebden Bridge towards the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth, and you’ll pass the derelict farmstead Nook. The family home and attached longhouse still stand against the bolting wind, although the farmer’s roof, probably made from pantile stone slates, ‘theaksteeans’ to locals, has long since disappeared. Rubble marks where granaries, hen houses, and other agricultural infrastructure once stood. 

Travel further North to the village Low Row, hemmed in between the B6270 and River Swale, and the grade II listed Low Whita farmstead is only a short walk away. Indicative of a smallholding type common during the 18th and 19th centuries, although Low Whita is a rarity today. More abandoned farmsteads like Low Whita and Nook are scattered on the Yorkshire Moors, all emanating a rich heritage history. This resonance is exactly what Andrea Arnold tunes into in her 2011 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

The details of this monolithic novel are stained into the zeitgeist (partial credit to Kate Bush), and rightly so. Heathcliff’s adoption into the Earnshaw estate on the Moortop farm Wuthering Heights and the subsequent tale of hatred, revenge and bruised love that follows has had an inexhaustible fascination for readers across centuries. Seeing Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw’s love blossom under the hostility of Catherine’s brother Hindley is tragically beautiful, made even more so upon Catherine’s marriage to wealthy neighbour Edgar Linton. The strain put on the two lovers only intensifies their passion, leading to an elemental clash of loathing and love which the reader sees build up over decades. 

While Brontë’s novel sees out Heathcliff’s descent into immorality, Arnold’s adaptation prioritises the doomed generational, interracial romance between Catherine (Shannon Beer as a young Cathy, Kaya Scoderlario as older) and Heathcliff (Solomon Glave before James Howson), the very romance which sends Heathcliff down his dark path. 

Another notable shift from the novel is evident in Arnold’s casting. Where the novel vaguely categorises Heathcliff’s ethnicity, calling him a “dark-skinned gypsy, in aspect” (4) or “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (50), Arnold grounds the brooding outcast as a black man. Glave and Howson’s casting (both unknowns with the latter scouted in a Job Centre) imbues the airy insults on Brontë’s pages with vinegar, streaming every spittly slur hurled Heathcliff’s way into the loathing figure we see in Arnold’s film.

While the push and pull romance which sees the two swept up in a destructive cycle of passion, to paraphrase Roxana Hadadi, is familiar to many, the most iconic feature of Brontë’s novel is the ghostly, sodden Yorkshire Moors which the star-crossed lovers stalk.

Arnold also sees this as the novel’s most evocative feature. Panoramic vistas, plucked from a Western, backdrop the burgeoning friendship between young Heathcliff and Cathy. When riding upon the Moors, packed tightly on one horse, the sun soothes their backs, all while hills tower over them, all rippled in shadow.

Yet the land can go sour, turn blue, as in the awkward excursion between older Heathcliff, Cathay and third-wheel Frances (Amy Wren). Here the heather is still warm under the sun, et that sparkle exclusive to golden hour seen earlier is now dulled, washed out by the rumbling gales which ruffle Cathy’s red dress. Don’t be mistaken, this is no lifeless wasteland—the bustling network of heather engulfing a tor which the trio climb sells the landscape as a living entity. It is as if the Moor is sternly beautiful, responding to the events of the narrative with appropriate hostility. 

It is unlikely that Arnold and cinematographer Robbie Ryan intended this. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” admitted Arnold in an interview at Tribeca Film Festival, “... There was no place to sit down. There was mud everywhere. It was cold. We had to carry all the camera equipment because there were no vehicles allowed on the land.” In a discussion with The Guardian, Arnold relayed similar troubles with shooting with limited daylight. Compromises were made, visions of a “day when the earth and sky are merging” weren’t met to the exact specifications intended. And yet, watch the film, and there is a sense of the elements cascading, colliding and clashing, all around this cataclysmic affair.

It’s easy to get obsessed with the Moors—they are undeniably the book’s most iconic feature—yet the titular farmstead and doppelganger manor Thrushcross Grange, positioned somewhere between a hike and stone’s throw from each other, each sews a thread into the knotted bracken which dominates the film’s mise en scene. Anthropological heritage is also a powerful presence in Arnold’s film, manifest in spectres of agricultural labour haunting the two homes. 

Take the opening shot, a close-up of an etching marked on a bunkbed in Wuthering Heights. Cathay and Heathcliff shared this bed during childhood, but this encounter is anachronistic to this information, a flash forward to the consequences of that youth. This crude engraving depicts a farmhouse with a path winding down to a tethered horse. Contrast this picturebook idyll with its canvas, wrought wood planks flaky with paint, and hope of domestic comfort bitters. 

Arnold then cuts to reveal adult Heathcliff, bashing himself against the walls of this room like a tempest in a picture frame. Heathcliff’s self-harm and the chipped, almost curdled, plaster walls make it clear that Wuthering Heights is set towards decay, both physical and emotional.

The rotting Wuthering Heights we see through the film, a soot-black building swamped in mud, ruptures into reality through the abandoned farmsteads mentioned earlier. Indicative of the increased use of Moorland for recreational hunting in the 19th century, a likely past-time of the Lintons of Thrushcross Grange, Wuthering Heights feels doomed to decay, haunted by the real structures of Nook and Low Whita like a manuscript palimpsest. 

It is also worth noting that agricultural practices on upper Moorlands were predominately used for short-term ploughing of arable land through the 18th and 19th centuries. By holding onto Wuthering Heights and perverting the farm into a prison for painful memories, Heathcliff damns the residents and building to disuse.

The ins and outs of agricultural labour likely never crossed the minds of either Arnold or Brontë during the production of their works. Yet the evocative buildings in the film do resonate with the real abandoned farmsteads peppered in the Haworth area, Wuthering Heights unofficial setting and Emily Brontë’s stomping grounds. Less so to pick apart historical inaccuracies in the plot, Arnold’s film elicits the elemental, profound reaction felt when encountering abandoned heritage sites—one raw and clouded in secrecy.

Published 11 Feb 2025