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The idea of transposing Wuthering Heights for the screen originated from scriptwriters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, one of the most prestigious writing teams of Hollywood in the 30s. Around 1936, they decided to write a transposition of Wuthering Heights, with the hope of

interesting a producer. Their script was passed from one studio to the other till Samuel Goldwyn agreed to buy it, only because his rival Jack Warner had shown interest in it (Madsen 129). Like in the case of 1920s Ideal Productions, best sellers and modern classic novels habitually provided source material for Hollywood: in the 30s and 40s, it was usual to open movies by opening the first page of the book in which they were based (i.e. Leave her to Heaven, 1945; Jane Eyre, 1943). On the one hand, transposing a text that was already popular with readers was a safer investment. On the other, it was exhibited and promoted as a sign of excellence: a Metro Goldwyn Mayer promotional trailer from the 30s proudly shows the backs of the books already adapted by the studio and announces that more will follow (When the Lion Roars). Film transpositions of a prestigious literary work would soon be considered a cinematic genre in their own right. For the smaller production companies, these films were considered “quality products” with which they would be able to compete with the Big Five (Nacache 68). When Samuel Goldwyn thought about changing the title of the Wuthering Heights transposition, studio publicists discouraged him with the argument that “based on a modern classic” would help to sell the movie (Berg 293). However, what does “modern classic” mean?

In the traditional sense of the term, a “classic” work of art is one from or belonging in style to the ancient Greece or Rome. The word can also be applied to any other work of art that is widely considered representative or the most famous of its form (Young 159). When we refer to authors like Shakespeare or Chaucer as “classics of English literature”, we mean that we expect their texts to provide us with models to establish what English literature is. The classics are considered authoritative works, whose mission is to make culture understandable and spread ideology and societal norms. In contrast to the “old” classic period, the term “modern classic” specifically refers to nineteenth-century novels (especially British ones) and to Hollywood films following the coming of sound in 1920s and ending with the breakdown of the studio system in 1950s. According to Young, this notion is paradoxical, because fiction and film “are by nature non-classics” (159). Old classic texts are associated to high culture forms like the lyric, the tragedy or the epic. They follow “the conventions, themes and rhetorical rhythms defined by Aristotle’s classifying Poetics” (159). On the contrary, modern classics reflect “the tastes and concerns of popular culture”: fiction novels are products of middle-class print, while films are products of media culture. Why, then, a novel like Wuthering Heights or its 1939 transposition are understood as

“classics”? Because of their wish to “‘imitate’ the particularities of modern life” (159), such texts portray a reality with which readers and audiences worldwide can feel easily identified. They aim to represent life “as a whole, linear and understandable” and embrace “middle-class ideals”, focusing their representation “on the characters, motivation and details of everyday middle-class

experience” (160). The dilemma of Wuthering Heights’ characters, trapped between their personal desires and the pressures of the society to which they belong, is common to any culture.

Classic texts are collected into what it is known as “the canon”, whose corpus is constantly updated. The notion of “canon” is quite problematic and politicized. Who has the authority to decide what is “representative” of a culture and what is not? One of the most recurrent criticisms is that the criterion of selection of the canon does not attempt to offer an equal diversity of perspectives. On the contrary, it reflects the social practices of the governing ideology, whose status is determined by economic power (Young 160). Becoming “the most famous instance” of an art form (159) usually depends on having enough economic power to spread their views or enough political power to impose them. It is not casual that the old classics derive from Rome and Greece, the most powerful nations of the ancient world. It is also not casual that nineteenth century novels were produced at the time of the British Empire, or that the period between 1920s- 1950s was also when Hollywood had monopoly over film industries over the world. In his seminal study Orientalism, Said describes a period of European ascendency starting in the late Renaissance (which also brought in a renewed enthusiasm for Greek and Latin antiquity, 51). By the ending of the eighteenth century, the West had acquired hegemony over the Orient, which allowed

Westerners to be placed in a position of superiority (7). Said denounces a tendency to analyse the East from the perspective of “a sovereign Western consciousness” (8), a projection of their own desires and repressions, from which the Orient emerges as a uniform, unchanging and exotic “other” (98). Then, the canon is organized according to a hierarchical perception of culture, which reflects the power relations sanctioned by capitalistic patriarchal society. It could be argued that the works included mainly represent a white Western middle-class male heterosexual point of view. Such texts are then classified as the norm, the dominant mode of representation. They become the filter through which universal values, with which everybody is supposed to identify, are received. On the other hand, the texts deviating in any way from those patterns are classified as “the other” and relegated to the margins. Culture is then categorized according to notions of superiority and inferiority: we have seen in the first chapter how it took a long time for Wuthering Heights to be accepted inside the canon. Despite having been written in the 1840s, it was not appreciated as a representative text until the ending of the century, when critics were finally able to identify the

influence of several literary traditions on the novel. Its acceptance did not depend on the intrinsic quality of the text, but in how it related to the values of the dominant ideology.

Classic texts also become cultural icons, acquiring an external consideration that is as important as the story they tell. Even if they had not actually read Emily Brontë’s novel, audiences had a general idea of what the story was about. Monty Phyton’s TV parody of the novel (a four minutes segment included in Season 2, Episode 2: The Spanish Inquisition, broadcasted on 22th September 1970) plays with this idea:

“Voice over: And now from the very first time on the silver screen comes the film from two books which once shocked a generation. From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and from the

International Guide to Semaphore Code, Twentieth Century Vole presents The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights!”

The sketch features Heathcliff and Catherine, each one on top of a hill, talking through flags. On the one hand, it parodies the universality of Wuthering Heights, which can be adapted to any language, even to semaphore code. On the other, it ironically exposes the similarities

between being a classic and being a reference book: everybody knows about it, but this knowledge derives more from external references rather than from having read it. Modern Classics, then, become part of the folklore (using the term in its etymological meaning of “popular wisdom”). The general image that people have of Wuthering Heights derives more from the 1939 film than from the original novel, as Stoneman ([1996] 129) points out. Hughes (1992) adds that “subsequent dramatizations owe more to this film than to the book”. This is directly related to the positioning of Hollywood as dominant mode of film representation.