Filming Bront毛's "Ghostly absence" : Kosminsky's "Wuthering heights" as a cinefantastic text

Abstract

If there is anything in Wuthering Heights that looms unfilmably in the film adaptor's mind, it is arguably its paranormal suggestions, or what J. Hillis Miller calls its "enigmatic signs" (86). It is quite understandable to assume, in fact, that Lockwood's second nightmare would present any filmmaker with seemingly insurmountable difficulties since most of its suggestive ambiguity concerning Catherine's ghost would most probably be lost, especially if the latter is filmically shown. This paper attempts to demonstrate however that Peter Kosminsky's underrated film version succeeds in creating what Mark Nash defines in Todorovian terms as a "cinefantastic text" (30) by visually enticing the viewer into the novel's chronic hesitation regarding the reality of spectral manifestations while actually showing Catherine's phantom. But what enables Kosminsky to keep us hesitating about the nature of Catherine's apparition is evidently his adoption of essential Brontean strategies. Significantly, though Kosminsky substitutes the adult Catherine's phantom for her ghost-child, he astutely roots the Lockwood incident in Bronte's gothic dream-frame.