#though don't get me wrong i'm still stewing about ''wuthering heights by emily brontë'' too

[sea-changed]

Amidst all the many and varied things that were almost gratuitously bad about Emily (2022), I do think one that has stuck with me as particularly troubling was the absence of a servant in the Brontë household. Emily clears the table and washes the dishes and dusts and cleans and bakes a cake and hangs laundry; she holds hands with a man over the dirty dishwater and has a farewell scene with Branwell at the clothesline; and during all of these tasks she's alone, or occasionally guided by her aunt.

I know a pretty average amount about the Brontës, so I did double-check Wikipedia and, yes, the Brontës did have a least one long-term servant named Tabitha (Tabby) Aykroyd, who, according to a line cited to page 27 of Karen Smith Kenyon's 2002 biography of the family, recounted local Yorkshire legends to the children while preparing their meals. While the movie divorced itself so completely from history that I can barely muster indignation about the elision of an individual historical figure, what I do find troubling is the elision of the role of servants, while romanticizing or aestheticizing labor that they would've carried out entirely or in part.

I'm not saying Emily Brontë never cleaned or washed dishes or baked a cake--I'm sure she did do these things--but the sheer amount of labor required to keep up a house of any size in the 19th century necessitated servants, and simply because the Brontës weren't wealthy didn't mean they could carry out the labor of it alone (even if it very likely did mean that they would've participated to some extent in that labor). And it's that greater untruth about history, rather than any particular anachronism in and of itself, that's continued to bother me.