Adaptation Vol. 5, No. 2, pp.

268–273
doi:10.1093/adaptation/aps019

Film Review

Adapting Victorian Novels: The Poetics of Glass

in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
Monika Pietrzak-Franger*

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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 nine-
teenth 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 dis-
placement 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 ter-
rain 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 inter-
pretation, […] 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) adapta-
tions, Wuthering Heights appears audaciously innovative, ‘bracingly original’ and ‘refresh-
ingly 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 auda-
ciously 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 com-
ments, the centuries-long rhetoric of Charlotte’s groomed vision and Emily’s wild, unruly

Siegen University, English Studies, Adolf-Reichwein-Str. 2, 57076 Siegen, Germany

*

© The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press.

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 The Poetics of Glass in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights  269

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.
Contradictoriness lies at the core of the dramatic rhetoric of these films’ critical
reception. Where Jane Eyre has been described as ‘atmospheric,’ (Jenkins), Wuthering
Heights has been regarded as ‘visceral’ (Bradshaw, Calhun, Stebbins). At the same time,
in both cases, reviewers have repeatedly bemoaned the films’ ‘restraint’ that hinders a
clear exposition of the inner lives of the characters, sieving out their passions as it does
the dramatic qualities of Brontës’ texts: French regards Arnold’s perpetual othering

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of Heathcliff (his skin colour and continual framing as an outsider), paired with little
insight into his emotional life, as responsible for his appearance as a mere ‘puzzle, a
tornado of resentment’ as opposed to the ‘fascinating, insoluble enigma’ of Brontë’s
literary Heathcliff. For Bradshaw, the ‘cerebral restraint’ of Jane Eyre distinguishes it
from preceding screen versions (‘Jane Eyre’). This criticism is indicative not only of
certain (commonly held?) expectations towards Brontë adaptations, but it also hints at
the unremitting interlocking of the texts and their cultural resonance.
The incessant dialogue between Brontës’ novels is clearly visible in the uncanny the-
matic, structural and symbolic similarities of Fukunaga’s and Arnold’s films. Both begin
in medias res with Jane and Heathcliff at the moment of crisis, positioned, literally and
metaphorically, on a threshold: Jane, as she is framed by the door through which she
leaves Thornfield Hall, Heathcliff as he engages in repetitive acts of self-inflicted vio-
lence in his and Cathy’s childhood abode, with the window that is a sole intradiegetic
witness to his self-aggression. In both adaptations, Yorkshire moors feature as a con-
densed symbolic and material space of emotional upheaval and isolation. They render
visible the turmoil of Jane’s feelings after the discovery of Rochester’s previous mar-
riage and Heathcliff ’s tumultuous emotions ranging from resentment and loathing to
resignation, which also embrace sexual frustration and feelings of loneliness. While in
Jane Eyre the moor’s role is limited, it clearly becomes a continuous projection space
in Wuthering Heights, where the visions of (child) eroticism, brutality and hostility are
mirrored by the material tangibility of nature. Both films also shift the narrative per-
spective and focalization. Arnold’s is a case of subaltern vision (rather than a verbal
account) of Brontë’s story, with the difference that it does not attempt to fill in the gaps
(as Jean Rhys’s humanist rewriting of Antoinette does). Rather, through the eschewal of
Nelly Dean and Mr. Lockwood as narrators, and through making Heathcliff almost the
sole focalizer, the film grants us considerably less access to the tale, as e.g. Cathy’s love
avowal for Heathcliff is inaudible both to him and to us. His position is our position.
A lot of the film’s action embraces tense exercises in observation: many of the scenes
are often as unrevealing to us, as outwardly incomprehensible as they seem to him. In
Fukunaga’s adaptation, the perspectival shift is different. Jane’s initial close framing in
the door of Thornfield Hall, and her stolen look back, entices us to follow her story, as
do many moments of subjective first-person focalization. Although indirect, this device
is a subtle substitute for Jane’s direct address (‘Reader, I married him,’ 297) in the book.
Most importantly, both films use the poetics of space and glass to recount the
major conflicts in the stories and to evince the inner struggles of both protagonists.
Window-scapes become contradictory sites of displacement and projection where char-
acters’ possibilities, longings and passions are both articulated and questioned. While
270 MONIKA PIETRZAK-FRANGER

Jane’s initial framing encapsulates her claustrophobic condition and the burden of her
momentary oppression, the film itself shows an evolution in the camera space desig-
nated for her, with the final scene, which, set on the premises of Rochester’s property
but separated from the gothic ruins of Thornfield Hall by a life-giving river, hints at
her liberation from the confinement that has hitherto been her fate. Narrow space of
imprisonment rhythmically returns in the film as a sign and site of women’s limited
possibilities. The space between the curtain and the window, which repeatedly marks
the presence of the young Jane, also evinces her marginality to the Reed family and

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foreshadows her future marginal position as a governess. The patterned plainness of
windows at Lowood School spotlights the uniformity of the girl-students, whose views,
like the views from the classroom, are (made) shallow and unattractive. In the course
of the film, the window becomes a distinctive space of womanliness, with Jane, Mrs.
Fairfax and Adèle often positioned against its background as they pursue their daily
chores and pleasures. Regularly, window-scapes set the limit to women’s agency. When
Jane wonders why ‘the skyline […] is ever our limit,’ she is framed behind a prison-like,
monumental façade of a heavy, tightly woven grid of window partitions. Window as
a barrier returns with an uncanny regularity as when Jane talks to Adèle about world
expansion, indicating the routes on the globe, while both are delineated on the tightly
laced background of the windows in the study. It separates Jane from the world of the
Ingrams and imprisons Bertha Mason: the barricaded window of her cell, which alleg-
edly protects her from self-injury, also bars her view on the world.
While the semantics of glass in general signifies women’s limited possibilities, for Jane
window-scapes are also sites of weighty potentialities and quiet self-reflection. They are
locations of creativity and reflexivity when she draws, reads and contemplatively looks
through them; they are spatialities of ‘a reflexive and textual act of seeing’ (Armstrong
124). Pinned against the regularity of interlaced glass planes, Jane also becomes a cli-
chéd image of ‘a surplus of bodily and psychic longing that breaks against the boundary
of the window’ (Armstrong 122). Not always are the windows of Thornfield Hall barri-
ers to agency; at times they become apertures of transitive seeing on which Jane hangs
her hopes for the future, as is the case when she returns to her room after wounded
Mason is taken away from Thornfield Hall. The open window is also a sign of her lib-
eration, concurrent with her escape from Thornfield Hall. Neither Rochester’s fortress
nor his intense passions, suggestively conveyed by the flickering shadows of the fireplace
and candle light, can keep her prisoner.
Like in Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre, in Arnold’s Wuthering Heights, ‘[t]he window’s boundary
marks a “crossing”, a crisis or epiphany that brings about existential change […]. Freedom
and limit come about through the physical pressure of its barrier’ (Armstrong 132). Here,
the rhetorics of glass resonates with and refracts the heavy legacy of window poetics in
Emily Brontë’s text.1 It is a site of Heathcliff ’s social and psychological metamorphosis.
“Of the moor,” often literally merging with the landscape, Heathcliff is barred from its
wilderness at the outset of the story. Up to the point of Mr. Earnshaw’s death, he gazes
from inside out – as though longing to merge with the forces of nature that have been pre-
cluded from him. The moor, and the people outside the window, forge with the glass itself,
as when Hindley is punished for his viciousness against Heathcliff and, with the refocusing
of the camera, metamorphoses into a crack in the window pane. The window becomes
 The Poetics of Glass in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights  271

the incarnation of the life outside and Heathcliff ’s identification with it, but also a tangible
borderland of unattainability. Disbanded from the house, now looking from outside in,
Heathcliff sees the Earnshaws and the Lintons in a series of tableaux vivants framed by
the light of the interior space and flanked by the windows of their houses. Variations of
Catherine’s window delimit the hours of his longing. Finally, after Catherine’s death, the
window returns as a site where real and imaginary spaces are joined in a violent and ‘claus-
trophobic history’ of her and Heathcliff ’s relationship (Armstrong 128). At last the window
is thrust open, to the score of the wind’s wailing sound, accompanied by the bashing of
rain and pounding of the tree branch against it. In the abstract cinematic space of the

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window, Lockwood’s nightmarish vision of young Catherine and Heathcliff ’s death scene
are merged in what seems to be a deformed shape, which could be Heathcliff ’s reflection
or the space where the immateriality of Cathy’s soul becomes apparent. It proclaims the
end of her (and his?) material existence and points to the transcendence of their love as
the film returns to the vision of them as children at a moment of utter happiness on the
moors. Heathcliff ’s various positioning vis-à-vis the film’s window-scapes marks the steps in
the story’s development and structures the film.
Windows, doors and various other passages also indicate our position as viewers. As
the access to the (inner lives of the) characters continuously changes through their fram-
ing, they never become entirely disclosed in either of the films. We continually encoun-
ter encumberments that hinder our vision, be they in the form of out-of-focus shots,
object barriers or the enveloping darkness of the interiors. The opacity of both films
foregrounds our position as viewers and the difficult role of adaptors embracing paratexts
in new acts of exposition. In ‘Reframing the Victorians,’ Thomas Leitch spotlights the
significance of Victorian novels as ‘the other against which the adaptation industry has
chosen to define itself ’ (8). At the same time, Neo-Victorian criticism makes a broader
argument concerning our contemporary situatedness as inexorably dependent on our
positioning vis-à-vis the Victorians.2 Contemporary adaptations and appropriations of the
Victorian era, which foreground the fundamental role of a strict differentiation between
now and then, carry a constant threat of transforming the Victorian era into an imagi-
nary orient, a space of our projection that creates hierarchies of power (Kohlke 2008).
In both adaptations, in which the subtext resurfaces in a spectrum of nuanced signs
(Heathcliff ’s skin colour, Bertha/Antoinette’s story), there is a smaller danger of a single-
handed dismissal or a simplistic definition of the Victorian era or text. This complexity
arises from both films’ ambiguities that are mirrored in reviewers’ responses. Heathcliff ’s
and Jane’s positions could be ours. Like them, we are exposed to a serialized procession of
window-scapes (camera-scapes) through which the texts are refracted, not the least by the
activation of other glassworlds through intertextuality and intermediality (Pre-Raphaelite
windows, the motif of a romantic solitary figure at the window, casting, which references
Wasikowska’s previous role in Burton’s Alice, etc.). Like them, we are asked to reflect on
the world outside the window (screen), as is indicated by the final scene of Arnold’s film.
In his review, Young regards Arnold’s inclusion of the final song, which constitutes a
clear rupture with the raw score of nature-sounds, as a ‘misstep.’ To me, however, this
gesture has a similar function to the last-minute zooming out of the camera in Lech
Majewski’s The Mill and the Cross (2011): it takes us back to our situatedness; it makes us
aware of our position in front of the screen and thus also foregrounds the question of
272 MONIKA PIETRZAK-FRANGER

interpretation. Where Majewski’s film offers ‘an extended contemplation of the creative
process’ (Gold), Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heitghts throw into relief our positioning vis-à-vis
the Victorians. In the context of Neo-Victorian studies, two terms have readily been
used to define the position of contemporary interpreter: that of ‘mirroring’ and ‘stere-
oscopy.’ While the former (e.g. in Joyce’s The Victorians in a Rear-View Mirror, 2007), has
often been deployed to indicate the haunting and uncanny presence of the Victorians
in our (visual) culture, the latter (Krueger xi; Munford and Young 5) throws into relief
the composite-like character of contemporary interpretative imagination, which cre-

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ates three-dimensionality through a superimposition of past and present visions. Both
the mirror and the stereoscope belong to the rhetorics and poetics of glass that Nancy
Armstrong focused on in Victorian Glassworlds (2008). Stereoscopic vision encapsulates
the complexity and multi-layered character of adaptation projects.
“Looking through” could be used as another useful term to indicate our (and adap-
tors’) position in the reimagining of the Victorian era and our contemporary situat-
edness. Such conceptualization spotlights the desire and longing for the exploration
of what remains continually and unremittingly unattainable. The window-scape
becomes a space of conjunction and differentiation, a moment of complex self-other,
material-spiritual, here-there accrual and diffraction:
The window is the seam, or junction, of the body’s internal space. It turns inward and out-
ward. Insighting both transitive vision and obstruction, it is faultline, the point of tension. At
its intersection, trauma, crisis, and epiphany occur. Opposites meet at the window. It is the
place where contradictions are posed, where the boundary is unsafe. The window’s changing
perspectives create an uneven relation between the gazing subject and the world […] and
ensure that there is never a wholly protected one-way movement of vision. (Armstrong 115)
Whatever our technologies of looking at the Victorians, they are full of uncertainties,
longings and desires. Today, after the excess of spectacle in many a heritage film, after
the disjointing of time in steam-punk inspired adaptations (Sherlock Holmes 2009, Sherlock
Holmes. A Game of Shadows 2011, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen 2003), is the ‘cer-
ebral restraint’ a new aesthetics to embrace the Victorians, and our position towards
them? Time will show. As it is, Fukunaga’s and Arnold’s exercises in moderation throw
into relief our desires and yearnings: our incessant craving for Victorian (texts of) pas-
sions and an unrestrained access to them, our persistent need for the obscene spectacle
of violent emotions served on the silver screen.

Notes
1
For various interpretations of window-scapes and narrative framings in Brontë’s novels see van Ghent
1952, Shannon 1959, Sonstroem 1971 and Matthews 1985.
2
For a selection of views see: Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, Neumann 2008, Joyce 2008, Kohlke 2008,
2008a, Munford and Young 2009, Krueger 2002.

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