Nature and the non-human in Andrea Arnold's Wuthering Heights

This article examines the representation of the natural environment and its non-human inhabitants in Andrea Arnold's 2011 film version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Arnold's ‘post-heritage’ adaptation, I argue, offers a post-humanist distribution of attention that, in its expansive interest in flora and fauna, exceeds the perspectives of its human protagonists, challenges popular ideas about the novel and subverts the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema. The film's intensely ecological and environmental orientation functions not only to divide our attention across human and non-human realms but also to counter nostalgic and ultimately ideological idealisations of ‘white’ and ‘English’ natural landscapes and rural lifestyles. Such idealisations have been extrapolated from Brontë’s novel, have informed earlier film adaptations and continue to have a material impact on the geographical region popularly known as ‘Brontë country’.