The Quiet Erasure Inside Adaptation

Some stories are not meant to be polished.

Wuthering Heights is one of them.

It is messy, obsessive, uncomfortable; a book about class, otherness, and the kind of love that refuses to resolve. That discomfort is the point. So when adaptation choices begin to smooth those edges, it does not feel like reinterpretation. It feels like something essential being stripped away.

As someone who loves the original book, the conversation around this adaptation does not feel nitpicky. It feels like recognition. Like watching a story built on tension slowly lose the things that made it powerful.

Heathcliff Was Never Just Brooding

Heathcliff’s identity matters. His racial ambiguity, his outsider status, the way he is treated as something foreign from the moment he arrives; all of it shapes the story’s emotional gravity.

When that otherness disappears visually, the narrative shifts. His anger risks being read as personality instead of response. His cruelty becomes character trait instead of consequence. The story moves closer to toxic romance and further from what Brontë was actually exploring; what it means to be denied belonging and what that denial creates.

That change does not feel neutral to readers.

It feels like erasure.

The Ghost Is Not Optional

Catherine’s presence after death is not a stylistic detail. It is the emotional through line of the entire novel. The haunting keeps the story alive.

Without that, the story becomes easier to watch. It also becomes less honest.

Wuthering Heights is not about moving on. It is about what happens when you cannot. Catherine lingering is the consequence of that kind of connection. Remove the haunting and Heathcliff’s obsession risks reading as melodrama instead of devastation.

The book was never subtle about its ghosts.

They are the point.

Representation Conversations Shape How Stories Land

Part of the frustration readers are expressing exists within a larger cultural shift. Audiences pay attention now to how identity is handled, especially when stories rely on marginalization as narrative fuel.

We have seen moments where actors acknowledge that tension publicly; Odessa A’zion recently apologized for participating in a casting decision many felt should have gone to a Mexican actress. That did not undo the situation, but it showed awareness. It showed that these conversations matter.

So when similar concerns arise and Jacob Elordi is silent, people notice. Not because actors are solely responsible, but because engagement signals understanding. Silence can make choices feel purely aesthetic when the story itself was never just aesthetic.

These conversations are not about blame.

They are about intention.

Why “Classless” Feels Like the Right Word

Calling this adaptation classless is not about quality. It is about structure. Wuthering Heights is built on hierarchy; who belongs, who does not, who gets to move through spaces without being questioned.

Flatten that framework and the story loses its friction. It becomes more consumable, but less distinctive. The discomfort that made the novel endure starts to fade.

Readers feel that immediately. Not as resistance to change, but as the sense that something jagged has been softened into something safe.

And Wuthering Heights was never meant to be safe.

Loving a Story Means Protecting Its Edges

No adaptation will ever replicate a novel exactly. That is not the expectation. What readers hope for is recognition; evidence that the creators understand why the story mattered in the first place.

Heathcliff’s otherness, Catherine’s haunting, the brutal attention to class; these are not details you can swap out without shifting meaning. They are the architecture.

When they disappear, the house still stands.

It just does not feel haunted anymore.

And for a story like Wuthering Heights, the haunting is everything.

Not our graphic.