Emily Brontë in Her Smut Era

When Warner Bros. released the poster for Emerald Fennell’s upcoming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, the visual language was unmistakable. Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw and Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff are locked in a tempestuous, back-arched embrace. Her head is thrown back, and he is gazing down at her upturned mouth. This pose—known colloquially as “the clinch”—is not merely a promotional still, but, also, a genre signal. For decades, this clinch posture visually identified mass-market romance novels known as “bodice rippers” of the 1970s and ’80s: promised readers explicit passion, historical spectacle, and a very specific fantasy of male dominance and female surrender. Cementing this 19^th-century gothic novel pivoting into the genre of a commercial “bodice ripper,” the new Wuthering Heights poster is also the cover image for the movie tie-in editions of the novel; Brontë’s text, therefore, is literally wrapped with the visual markers of mass-market erotic romance.