Wuthering Heights: Which is the right ending?

Despite the quotation marks in the title, signifying a different take, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, with Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in the lead, follows the time‑honoured template laid down in William Wyler’s 1939 adaptation of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel. The film, with Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff, Merle Oberon as Catherine and David Niven as Edgar Linton, ends with her death, keeping the focus on the love between the two. The Hollywoodisation of the novel, by concentrating on 16 of the novel’s 34 chapters, ensures Heathcliff’s Byronic‑hero status. With Catherine’s death, the character of Heathcliff loses his counterbalance and ends up being pointlessly vengeful, banging about gloomy corridors making everyone’s life miserable. Filmmakers recognised that and decided to defang the anti‑Romantic novel by ending it with Catherine’s death and made it a story of undying, tragic love instead of a destructive car wreck. Brontë’s novel, incidentally the only one she wrote, tells the story of a foundling of indeterminate race who is adopted by the Earnshaws, a wealthy family in Yorkshire. In Wuthering Heights, the Earnshaws’ home, Heathcliff finds love, respect and also unfortunately abuse. This image released by Warner Bros. Pictures shows Jacob Elordi in a scene from "Wuthering Heights." (Warner Bros. Pictures via AP) | Photo Credit: AP He forms a relationship with the daughter of the house, Catherine, and when she marries Edgar Linton, a rich neighbour, Heathcliff sets off on a path of revenge. With no Catherine to rein him in, Heathcliff, like a toxic whirlwind, destroys everything in his path, before burning out himself. Brontë provides a muted redemption with Catherine’s daughter, also called Catherine, and her nephew, Hareton, whom Heathcliff treats as a servant in his own house, falling in love. The 1970 version of Wuthering Heights, with Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff, also focused on Heathcliff and Catherine, excising the violence and abuse Heathcliff visits on the second generation. There was a BBC mini-series in 1978, shot on location on the Yorkshire Moors, which adapted the complete book as did the 1992 film adaptation. Directed by Peter Kosminsky, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (the author’s name had to be added to the title for legal reasons) marked the film debut of Ralph Fiennes. With Juliette Binoche as Catherine, Fiennes seared the screen as the demon lover. It was Fiennes’s “dark sexuality” as Heathcliff that prompted Steven Spielberg to cast him as the concentration camp commander Amon Göth in 1993’s Schindler’s List. Fiennes went on to play another tortured lover in Anthony Minghella’s 1996 sweeping love story, The English Patient based on Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Katharine (another Catherine!) Clifton, the married woman, Fiennes’ Hungarian cartographer László Almásy, falls hopelessly i