Domestic vs Wild Spaces

Determining Characterization in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Andrea Arnold’s Film Adaptation

Abstract

This essay explores space as a narrative presence in literature, further expressed through film, and examines how settings act as living presences that shape the inner worlds and conflicts of their characters. In Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Andrea Arnold’s film adaptation, the domestic spaces of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange embody and construct identity, which is reinforced or challenged by the moor. Perspectives from spatiality like bell hooks’s “The Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Michel Foucalt’s concept of heterotopia and Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space explain how environments reflect psychological depth, social position, and emotional confinement. The contrast between the rugged Heights and the refined Grange reflect oppositions of passion and civility, which are central to characterization. Arnold’s adaptation reinterprets these spatial dynamics through a realist view that utilizes physical texture, weather, and isolation.