Emerald Fennell’s new film adaptation of Wuthering Heights lands in a culture finally ready to name the “toxic boyfriend” for what he is. As The Washington Post’s feature “Wuthering Heights and the birth of the toxic boyfriend” suggests, Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel didn’t just give us brooding romance – it helped codify an archetype pop culture has been remixing ever since.


A dark, moody landscape evoking Wuthering Heights with a lone figure on the moors
Promotional imagery evoking the stormy Gothic mood of Wuthering Heights. Image © The Washington Post / publisher.

Why We’re Still Talking About Heathcliff in 2026

In an era shaped by conversations about consent, trauma, and “red flag” relationships, revisiting Catherine and Heathcliff feels both unsettling and overdue. Fennell’s adaptation – and the Post’s framing of Heathcliff as a proto–toxic boyfriend – pushes us to ask: when does a grand love story stop being romantic and start being harmful, and why have we been so slow to draw that line?


From Victorian Storm Clouds to Modern Red Flags

Wuthering Heights has always been the strange cousin of 19th-century literature. Where Austen gives us social comedy and controlled longing, Brontë gives us Yorkshire moors, ghosts, and emotions turned up to eleven. When it was first published in 1847, critics were unsettled by the sheer intensity of it all – the revenge, the cruelty, the way love and violence blur together.


That discomfort never really went away. What changed is the lens. Where earlier generations romanticized Heathcliff as a tragic hero, contemporary audiences are more likely to clock him as a walking bundle of unresolved trauma and controlling behavior. The Washington Post’s piece taps into that shift, arguing that Heathcliff isn’t just a character – he’s a template for every brooding, boundary‑stomping love interest that followed.


Heathcliff: The Original Toxic Boyfriend?

Calling Heathcliff the “original toxic boyfriend” is catchy, but it’s also pointed. The Washington Post’s argument hinges on how thoroughly he embodies unhealthy romantic tropes that still circulate today: obsessive attachment, possessiveness, emotional manipulation, the idea that suffering is proof of love.


  • Idealization and obsession: Heathcliff and Catherine repeatedly frame each other as more than human – almost metaphysical extensions of the self.
  • Control through pain: His pursuit of revenge on everyone around Catherine becomes a twisted way of staying bound to her.
  • Romanticized suffering: Their story treats pain as not just inevitable but meaningful – as if genuine love has to scar.

“If, at any point in your life, you have ever believed that women say they want nice guys but really want bad guys, or that love has to hurt to be real, or that romance and stalking are basically the same, you have, in some way, been living in Heathcliff’s shadow.”

That “shadow” is what the Post is really diagnosing: a cultural script that equates intensity with authenticity. Heathcliff is less a person than a story template, one that keeps being copied into teen dramas, prestige TV, and pop music alike.


Emerald Fennell’s Feminist Reframing

Emerald Fennell has already built a career interrogating gendered violence and desire – from Promising Young Woman to her wickedly baroque thriller Saltburn. A Fennell‑directed Wuthering Heights is less a surprise than an inevitability: she’s drawn to beautiful surfaces hiding deep rot.


An actress on a film set standing in front of a monitor, representing a director’s perspective
Feminist filmmakers like Emerald Fennell bring a contemporary lens to classic Gothic material.

According to the Post’s framing, Fennell’s adaptation leans directly into what it calls the “Catherine and Heathcliff Problem”: how do you honor the intensity of this relationship while refusing to romanticize its damage? The result, by all accounts, isn’t a tidy moral lesson but a kind of cinematic argument with the source material.


A feminist take here doesn’t mean flattening Heathcliff into a cartoon villain or turning Catherine into a modern‑day heroine who simply “makes better choices.” It means:

  • Foregrounding Catherine’s perspective as more than a romantic object.
  • Emphasizing the material and social constraints that shape their choices.
  • Making visible the collateral damage of their obsession – especially on other women and younger generations.

Fennell’s real subject isn’t just Heathcliff’s darkness, but the cultural machinery that keeps mistaking that darkness for depth.

From the Moors to Modern Screens: The Toxic Boyfriend in Pop Culture

One reason the Post’s “toxic boyfriend” framing lands is that Heathcliff has so many cultural descendants. You can trace a line from the Yorkshire moors to contemporary TV and film:


  • Byronic antiheroes in prestige drama – the charismatic men we know are bad for us, but the narrative keeps centering anyway.
  • YA and fantasy love interests whose stalker‑adjacent behavior is framed as devotion.
  • Streaming‑era thrillers built around the question: how did we mistake this man’s intensity for love?

A person sitting alone on a couch at night watching a glowing TV screen
Gothic romance has quietly shaped our expectations of what “intense” love should look like on screen.

The Post’s piece connects this to a set of persistent myths:

  1. “Nice guys finish last”: As if basic respect is somehow incompatible with desire.
  2. “If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not real”: Suffering reframed as an emotional receipt.
  3. “You can fix him”: The idea that a woman’s love is a rehab center for broken men.

Wuthering Heights didn’t invent all of these, but it binds them into a single, haunting narrative that has proved incredibly durable – especially in genres marketed to women and teens. That’s part of why re‑examining it now matters; these scripts still circulate in subtler forms.


What This New Take Gets Right (and Where It Risks Overcorrection)

The Post’s treatment of Fennell’s film and Brontë’s legacy has some clear strengths. It refuses to indulge nostalgic swooning over Heathcliff and Catherine, and instead places them in a lineage of harmful romantic tropes. It also takes seriously the idea that feminism can and should interrogate beloved texts, not just celebrate “strong female characters.”


Vintage copy of Wuthering Heights open on a wooden table with a cup of tea
Classic novels like Wuthering Heights aren’t museum pieces; each new adaptation reshapes how we read them.

At the same time, there’s always a risk in over‑psychologizing 19th‑century characters through 21st‑century buzzwords. Labeling Heathcliff simply “toxic” can flatten what’s strange and specific about him – his racialization in some adaptations, his class resentment, the way he’s both victim and perpetrator within the novel’s brutal social hierarchy.


The sweet spot – which Fennell seems interested in – is to:

  • Acknowledge the structural violence (colonialism, class, patriarchy) that shapes these characters’ lives.
  • Refuse to turn that into a free pass for cruelty.
  • Let the discomfort stand, instead of resolving it into a simple redemption arc.

Why Gothic Revivals Keep Coming Back

From a film‑industry perspective, this new Wuthering Heights also fits into a broader trend: dark, psychologically charged literary adaptations that can be marketed as both prestige and genre. Studios get a recognizable IP; directors like Fennell get room to interrogate it.


A movie theater with red seats and a large screen before the film begins
Gothic classics remain reliable IP for studios, especially when paired with buzzy auteur directors.

Gothic revivals also dovetail neatly with streaming economics. A moody, conversation‑starting adaptation of a literary classic is perfect for platforms hungry for “binge‑able but respectable” content – the kind of thing you can recommend in a group chat and quote in a think piece.



Key Visuals and Media

While trailers and official stills for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights are doing the rounds on social platforms and entertainment sites, the real signature image remains the same: a lone figure on a windswept moor, dwarfed by the landscape, stubbornly refusing to move on.


A solitary person walking across windswept hills under a stormy sky
The moors are more than a backdrop – they externalize the emotional weather of Catherine and Heathcliff.
Brontë’s stormy imagery still shapes how we picture Gothic love stories – rain‑streaked windows and all.

As trailers circulate, expect marketing to lean hard into this visual language: candlelit corridors, gusts of wind through broken windows, and tight close‑ups of faces on the verge of tears or violence. It’s a familiar Gothic grammar, now being used to question the very fantasies it once helped construct.


To situate this latest adaptation and The Washington Post’s argument in a broader context, it’s worth exploring how critics and creators have approached Wuthering Heights over time.



Why Heathcliff Still Haunts Us

The renewed attention sparked by Emerald Fennell’s film and The Washington Post’s feature isn’t just about revisiting a syllabus staple. It’s about acknowledging how deeply stories like Wuthering Heights have infiltrated our understanding of romance – for better and, often, for worse.


The Catherine and Heathcliff Problem isn’t whether their love is “real.” It’s whether we’re finally willing to stop confusing drama with depth, damage with devotion. In 2026, that feels like the real Gothic twist: not a ghost at the window, but a culture learning to walk away from the storm.