The Construction of the Supernatural in Two Screen Adaptations of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

• Autor(a) principal: Barbudo, Maria Isabel
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/27919
• topic: Supernatural; Cultural critique; Cinema; Television

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë is one of the favourite Victorian novels for screen adaptation, with a long list of versions that started in 1920 with a British silent film directed by A. V. Bramble, and includes several recent adaptations. With both British and American productions, the list alternates between cinema and television films or serials, this being a reason why I have chosen one adaptation made for the cinema — the classic Hollywood version directed by William Wyler and released in 1939 — and one British TV film, directed by David Skynner and released in 1998. The long time span between these versions — of about sixty years — as well as the fact that one was made in the United States and the other in Britain, one for the cinema and the other for television, may allow for a cultural critique based on the acknowledgement of different temporal, social and geographic contexts of production. The presence of the supernatural is one feature which, being central in the novel, has notwithstanding been mostly neglected in the analysis of film adaptations. This paper will, therefore, focus on the construction of the supernatural in both films, relating the different approaches to their respective cultural contexts.