Raquel Souza

Few films announce their intentions so loudly. “Wuthering Heights” directed by Emerald Fennell and starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi was released to a furor. My use of inverted commas around the title hints that this is less an adaptation than a challenge to Emily Brontë’s original 1847 novel.

In this 2026 adaptation, love begins with domestication. Mr. Earnshaw (Martin Clunes) announces to Catherine (Margot Robbie) that he has adopted a young boy who will be transformed into her “pet.” Indeed, in other moments of the film, even as a grown man, Heathcliff (Jacob Elordi) continues to be reduced to an animal by Catherine’s father: “You’re still just her pet. You’ll only ever be her pet.” As for Catherine, she becomes a decorative ornament, arranged in beautiful gowns yet confined by rigid domestic control. She is herself a doll, controlled by others and meant to be displayed (Figure 1) – not least because she embodies the promise of a wealthy marriage, one that could rescue the Earnshaw family from ruin.

If Catherine is a doll, then Wuthering Heights emerges as her dollhouse – a space that contains, displays, and confines her. Therefore, we might wonder, if Catherine is a doll, she likely does not act freely but is instead positioned. Much of this control is imposed not only by her father but also by her maid, Nelly (Hong Chau). Catherine is a prisoner in a house where family, social expectations and class pressures suffocate her. She is not a mere inhabitant; she is an object of display, reinforcing the idea that the “female body stands as fetishized object, land of conquest and control” (Merz 97).

Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is probably the adaptation that invites most discussion of this aestheticization of Catherine as a doll, because the film persistently emphasizes beauty, whether in the choice of its protagonist or in its cinematography, including the camera’s frequent dwelling on figurines. An important fact to note is that dolls are often replicas of real human bodies. That being said, although there is a literal figurine of Catherine, we can understand Catherine as already a replica of herself, a version shaped by others. The only moments when she is freed from her strings are with Heathcliff. He humanizes her by bringing to the surface Catherine’s carnal desires and hidden emotions. However, as the film progresses, even he tries to use the feelings and sexual tension he arouses in Catherine to manipulate her.

Dolls are something we love, because we create a bond with them. They are controllable and safe. If love arises from domestication, as mentioned before, then the film’s aestheticization of Catherine can be understood as the process through which she becomes an object of love: beautified, controlled, and made safe for consumption. In other words, we can assume Catherine can only be loved if she sets apart her unruly and free nature. As Jacques Derrida explains, domestication is a very important form of control. We tend to perceive as monstruous anything we are not able to understand or control. Consequently, “as soon as one perceives a monster in a monster, one begins to domesticate it” (Derrida 386). Thus, Catherine can be seen as monstrous as she resists comprehension and refuses to fit into the stable categories of that society. The aesthetic framing of her as a doll then operates as a mechanism of domestication, reducing her complexity into a controlled and visually consumable figure, and therefore no longer monstrous, no longer uncontrollable.

The dynamics of domestication and control are reinforced by spatial limitations as well.  As a doll, Catherine is confined to her dollhouse, or in this case, Wuthering Heights. When the Lintons arrive in the neighborhood Catherine is eager to make acquaintance with them, but she is reprimanded by her maid, who claims her presence outside the house would threaten the social order. The house, as a result, becomes a site of containment, a space designed to regulate her movements and limit her exposure to alternative influences. Nevertheless, Catherine challenges these orders – and it is when she leaves her house and goes to the Lintons’ that she finds, instead of a metaphorical dollhouse, a real one.

A House Within a House

According to Etymonline the word ‘house’ derives from the old English and Proto-Germanic hus, which means dwelling or shelter. It is also believed the word house shares the same root with the word hide. In this sense, it suggests a space not only of shelter but of concealment. On that account, the domestic space functions to hide Catherine, containing and obscuring what might otherwise disrupt social order. She is both exhibited as in a display and also hidden, visible yet controlled. When Catherine moves to the Lintons’ household, this logic is intensified as the house becomes a refined space for hiding, where she must suppress her true nature and conform to the expectations of class, femininity and decorum.

The term doll, in turn, originates in the 1550s as a nickname for the proper name Dorothy. In the early seventeenth century, the noun acquired an additional meaning, referring to a sweetheart, mistress, or paramour. Only in the eighteenth century did it become associated with a child’s toy, and by the end of that century it had taken on a more derogatory sense, referring to pretty but foolish women. The semantic evolution of the word doll resonates with Catherine, as she embodies these overlapping meanings. She is, at the same time, the object of desire (a sweetheart and a paramour) and a toy, valued for her beauty while also dismissed as a fool and excessive.

In Linton’s property she finds a dollhouse, a faithful miniature of the mansion, owned by Isabella Linton (Alison Oliver), the ward of her husband-to-be. When we think of dollhouses, we immediately associate them with children. However, as Nicola Lisle explains, “originally they were showpieces for adults to display their collections of valuable, finely crafted miniatures that boasted of their wealth and social status” (5). Like any real building, dollhouses share beauty but also hide secrets. Beyond their aesthetic appeal, miniature houses were objects of discipline, used to educate young women on how to properly manage a household (Lisle 11-13). This rationale seems to apply to Isabella Linton, as her dollhouse is both an object she admires and proudly displays and a means through which she exercises control.

It goes without saying that the place where the dollhouse is located also contains symbolic importance. The miniature is set in Mr. Linton’s dining room and easily accessible not only by members of the family but also by any guests (Figure 2). According to the Encyclopedia of Archetypes, the dining room is much more than a mere room: it represents a stage on which the private drama of a family is played out. Much more than the food itself, what really matters are the social mechanics surrounding how the meals are served – the truths, the secrets, the feelings and the hierarchical dynamics that are ritually delivered. Like dollhouses, dining rooms bring to surface the intrinsic human need for control, for systematizing and creating order. If the dining room provides a container of predictability, where “family” performances can be staged, dollhouses are a vessel through which such performances are rehearsed and normalized. Echoing the logic of the dollhouse, dining rooms are not just functional, they are meant to be seen. They showcase family wealth, taste and refinement. Everything is arranged, controlled, visible and contains a purpose.

Moreover, Isabella Linton’s dollhouse presents a peculiarity: it is such a faithful replica of the original house that it contains, in its dining room, a dollhouse: much like a Russian Matryoshka doll, a house is nested within a house. Through this structural arrangement, each layer contains a smaller version of the same form. Whether the house, the dining room, or the doll house, they all reproduce the same logic of order, visibility, and control. These spaces do not diversify but repeat, as if each level encloses and reproduce the same structures of discipline.

Catherine, and even Isabella, are not outside of this structure: they are trapped within it. This logic also points to the reproduction of female roles, as Isabella is the owner of the dollhouse and the only female figure of influence in the Lintons’ property. However, she is displaced from this position once Catherine becomes the mistress of the real Linton house. Despite the different hierarchical dynamics, both women reproduce the same logic of femininity, control, and visibility, suggesting that these roles are less individual positions than variations inside a system of containment. Catherine must obey, behave, and be complacent as a wife, just as Isabella has to as Edgar’s ward.

The freedom Catherine longed to reach by leaving Wuthering Heights is never fully obtained. Although Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) is a loving husband, he transforms Catherine into a living ornament, not an inhabitant of the house. Catherine is visually echoed within it, as if the space itself has adopted her features: the walls of her bedroom are adorned in her cheeks’ color and freckles, reinforcing her transformation from subject to decorative object.

Such transformation is enhanced by Isabella’s dolls. The young woman has miniatures of the inhabitants of the house, and when Catherine becomes Mrs. Linton, she also gains her own miniature. The presence of multiple dolls inside the dollhouse transforms it into a miniature social world, where real-life relationships and hierarchies can be arranged and controlled. At first sight, Isabella’s attitude may seem childish; however, through these figures, she assumes a position of authority, staging and rehearsing an idealized version of domestic life according to her own will. As journalist Simon Garfield pointed out in an article for The Guardian,

the miniature world embraces control. The toys we enjoy as children invest us with a rare power at a young age, conferring the potency of adults, and possibly giants. Toy cars and dolls and plastic construction kits are not merely pliable in our hands; they render us conquerors. We may never have such dominion over the world again. (par. 6)

Garfield’s observation reinforces the idea that Isabella’s engagement with the dollhouse is not merely playful, but a means of exercising control. Through the manipulation of her miniature figures, she is able to construct and dominate a version of reality that remains otherwise inaccessible to her.

The aim of control becomes particularly noticeable when Isabella uses her dolls and the dollhouse to externalize her jealousy over Heathcliff’s affection. The young woman breaks the figurine of Catherine, which anticipates the violence and competition that will emerge between them. This link between dolls and violence evokes Frances Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, composite crime scene models recreated on a tiny scale (see Bush). Lee is still acknowledged today as the “Godmother of Crime Scene Investigation.” She was introduced to the world of death investigation in the early twentieth century by a family friend, George McGrath, who was one of the only medical examiners at the time. Lee went on to become so influential on the topic that she provided training to the police by explaining how to examine each detail of a crime scene, including a corpse. In her lectures, she used miniatures of the rooms where murders had been committed as well as tiny dolls of the victims in their death bed. Lee used the Nutshell Studies to illustrate forensic techniques that were mostly unknown at the time. In the film, Isabella recreates this logic when she transforms her dollhouse into a controlled scenario where she can perform aggression and violence safely, before her rage erupts on a larger scale, affecting the real house and the real Catherine.

In this sense, the dollhouse can operate as a space of rehearsal, where violence is staged and contained for a while, but never completely neutralized. The miniature scale creates a false sense of control, but what it truly does is reveal the thin line between simulation and reality. While Lee’s models trained observers to interpret scenes of violence, Isabella’s dollhouse trains us to anticipate them. We move from mere audience to participants, witnessing and waiting for what is not yet fully expressed. Wuthering Heights’ dollhouse does not shatter…it simply holds still. In the film, the dollhouse shifts from curated object to contested territory, generating architectural dread as domestic order fractures from within. Catherine is never fully free from the house, from being a doll, from restraints, from domestication – and above all, she is never free from love. A love that consumes, inebriates and hurts.

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Works Cited

Bush, Erin N. Death in Diorama: The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death. Digital Project.

Derrida, Jacques. Points…: Interviews, 1974–1994. Edited by Elisabeth Weber. Stanford University Press, 1995.

Garfield, Simon. “Small World: Why We Love Tiny Things.” The Guardian, 4 November 2018.

Lisle, Nicola. Life in Miniature. Pen & Sword History, 2025.

Merz, Noemi Crain. “The Great Devourer.” Annie Chartres Vivanti: Transnational Politics, Identity, and Culture, edited by Sharon Wood and Erica Moretti, Fairleigh Dickinson, 2016, pp 166-78.

Wuthering Heights. Directed by Emerald Fennell, Warner Bros, 2026.