{"id":465461,"date":"2026-02-13T03:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T03:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/465461\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T03:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T03:40:08","slug":"is-heathcliff-black-his-race-in-the-book-has-been-debated-for-decades","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/465461\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Heathcliff Black? His race in the book has been debated for decades."},"content":{"rendered":"

Since the 2024 announcement of the casting of Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi in Emerald Fennell\u2019s buzzy adaptation of Emily Bront\u00eb\u2019s Wuthering Heights, invested parties online have condemned the filmmaker\u2019s choice of Elordi, a white (and very tall) Australian actor, for the role of Heathcliff, the adopted brother of the Earnshaw family who, through their mistreatment and his separation from his beloved adopted sister Cathy, becomes implacably vengeful and cruel. \u201cWhy are we, in the year of our lord 2024, casting Heathcliff with a white actor????\u201d reads a representative line in a LitHub piece<\/a> that sums up the tenor of much of the controversy. X users have spent the better part of a year calling each other idiots for declaring that, based on their enlightened readings of the 1847 novel, Heathcliff is obviously supposed to be white\u2014or not. Things descended to a point where I saw people arguing over whether Elordi\u2019s father\u2019s Basque origins<\/a> could qualify the actor for the role, if you squint. Fans have suggested other actors as candidates for a Heathcliff who\u2019d be a little less pale, from Dev Patel to Shazad Latif (who plays Edgar Linton, the other side of the love triangle, in Fennell\u2019s version). As the movie releases just in time for Valentine\u2019s Day, that contentious question will be top of mind for at least some book-minded readers: Is Heathcliff supposed to be a man of color?<\/p>\n

This new round of discourse is especially fiery given that Emerald Fennell is a director who attracts<\/a> dissent<\/a>. She inflamed people even more in this case when she explained her casting choice<\/a> by saying that she had made the movie she imagined while she was reading the book, because she was \u201cfocusing on the pseudo-masochistic elements of it.\u201d But the debate over Heathcliff\u2019s race has been ongoing since at least the 1990s. Scholars, novelists, filmmakers, documentarians<\/a>, and artists have parsed the scraps of information Bront\u00eb offers in the book\u2014Heathcliff could be Romani, Spanish, Indian, Asian\u2014and made new arguments for those and other possibilities. Who is Heathcliff? It\u2019s a question that has a lot more answers than \u201cJacob Elordi.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also a question that cannot quite be answered just by turning to the source text, though that\u2019s where everyone starts\u2014and so shall I. The little boy Mr.\u00a0Earnshaw brings to Wuthering Heights from Liverpool in 1771 is, in Earnshaw\u2019s introductory description, \u201cas dark almost as if it came from the devil.\u201d Many times, another character refers to Heathcliff as a \u201cgypsy.\u201d \u201cHe\u2019s exactly like the son of the fortune-teller that stole my tame pheasant,\u201d declares Isabella Linton, the daughter of the local gentry, when she first meets him in his teens. \u201cHe is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman,\u201d says the traveler Lockwood, who encounters Heathcliff in his middle age. This is the reference many previous filmed adaptations of the story\u2014the ones that star white British actors<\/a> armed with a smolder<\/a> and some dark hair dye<\/a>\u2014tend to play up, maybe because, for 20th-century viewers, the idea that he\u2019s Romani in origin could give the character of Heathcliff a big-R Romantic flavor, a savor of the lonely moors, without getting too far into contemporary politics.<\/p>\n

At other times in the novel, characters suggest that Heathcliff could be Asian, Indian, or Spanish. Mr.\u00a0Linton, when he first meets Heathcliff in his teens, calls him \u201cthat strange acquisition my late neighbour made, in his journey to Liverpool\u2014a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway.\u201d (A lascar was a name for a sailor from the Indian subcontinent or from Asia<\/a>, employed by British shipping companies and sometimes stranded in Britain for months between voyages, therefore known to British citizens.) In a more tender moment, the servant Ellen \u201cNelly\u201d Dean, who narrates most of the novel, recalls an exchange in which Heathcliff laments to her that Cathy is developing feelings for Edgar Linton, wishing that he, too, had \u201clight hair and a fair skin.\u201d Nelly tries to console him with the thought that \u201ca good heart will help you to a bonny face\u00a0\u2026 if you were a regular black\u201d\u2014a reference you could read to mean that Heathcliff is not a \u201cregular black\u201d but some other thing. Nelly posits that Heathcliff may be a \u201cprince in disguise,\u201d trying to talk him into a better mood: \u201cWho knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week\u2019s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together?\u201d she wonders. \u201cAnd you were kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England. Were I in your place I would frame high notions of my birth,\u201d she adds, attempting to cheer him up.<\/p>\n

In the 1990s, literary scholars suggested<\/a> that perhaps Heathcliff\u2019s origins in Liverpool could be interpreted as a reference to an origin in Africa. Writing in 1995<\/a>, academic Maja-Lisa von Sneidern saw it as a near certainty that the little boy Earnshaw brought back from Liverpool, in what would have been 1771, at a time when the city still played host to many vessels engaged in the triangular trade, would have been a racial other, and might very well have been Black. Literary theorist Terry Eagleton, on the other hand, wondered if the Liverpool connection could mean that Heathcliff is Irish. Eagleton suggested, in his 1996 book Heathcliff and the Great Hunger<\/a>, that the Bront\u00eb family may have read about starving Irish people landing in the port of Liverpool around the time Emily was writing the novel\u2014including in the magazine Illustrated London News, which might have portrayed the children of these arrivals as having dirt-blackened faces and big black eyes, like Heathcliff upon his arrival at Wuthering Heights. (In a hilariously confident footnote, Eagleton wrote: \u201cI have indicated already that Heathcliff may not of course be Irish, and that even if he is, the chronology is awry as far as the Famine goes. But in this essay Heathcliff is Irish, and the chronology is not awry.\u201d)<\/p>\n

\n Heathcliff is a creation of his environment, a person thrust into a social context that rejects him violently, who then refracts that violence back, becoming violent beyond\u00a0belief.\n<\/p>\n

Any definite interpretations are complicated by the fact that Bront\u00eb uses color in intertwining literal and metaphorical ways\u2014not just to detail Heathcliff\u2019s hair, face, and eyes, but to describe the dirt he always has on his face and body, and to capture the dark, unforgiving nature of his soul, his turn toward violence and domination. Nelly sees his darkness increase throughout the time he\u2019s at the Heights, as when Cathy\u2019s first absence at the Grange leads him to forgo washing, and \u201cthe surface of his face and hands [is] dismally beclouded,\u201d so that he looks like \u201ca forbidding young blackguard.\u201d Heathcliff\u2019s otherness increases as time goes on and he\u2019s exiled, first from the hearth at Wuthering Heights, then from Cathy\u2019s side. He becomes something of a mythical creature, acquiring almost supernatural powers of cruelty and endurance, living on even as Cathy, Isabella, Hindley, and Edgar all die young. As Emily\u2019s sister Charlotte Bront\u00eb wrote in an 1850 forward to a new edition of the novel, if it were not for Heathcliff\u2019s occasional grudging regard for the characters of Hareton and Nelly, \u201cwe should say he was child neither of lascar nor gipsy, but a man\u2019s shape animated by demon life\u2014a Ghoul\u2014an Afreet<\/a>.\u201d Like Victor Frankenstein\u2019s monster, played by Elordi just last year <\/a>in an unprecedentedly romantic mode, Heathcliff is a creation of his environment, a person thrust into a social context that rejects him violently, who then refracts that violence back, becoming violent beyond belief.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important that Heathcliff not fit any of the categories that govern the ordinary world\u2014because that\u2019s how gothics and romances work,\u201d said Dan Stout, a professor of English at the University of Mississippi, to whom I posed the question of this Byronic hero\u2019s heritage. \u201cBut I think it\u2019s not important that we know exactly what Heathcliff \u2018really\u2019 is\u2014racially or otherwise\u2014his history is a cuckoo\u2019s, as the novel says. In fact, if we were to know what he \u2018really\u2019 is, it would mean (obviously) that we have categories to understand the otherness. But the novel doesn\u2019t want that\u2014or if it wants that, it does a really bad job of getting what it wants.\u201d Even with all the oddness of Wuthering Heights, it feels safe to say that isn\u2019t quite a crime we can accuse Emily Bront\u00eb of committing.<\/p>\n

There are other ways to see Wuthering Heights as being \u201cabout\u201d race-based discrimination and systems of bondage, even if Bront\u00eb resists giving Heathcliff a definite origin. Every person in the story fights one another, tooth and claw, to establish a place inside the tiny local hierarchy, made up entirely of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. As poet and novelist Patricia Lockwood<\/a> said on a London Review of Books podcast episode about the book<\/a>, it\u2019s almost as if Wuthering Heights is set in the world of dogs, not only because of the many references to dog bites and dogfights, but also because of the perpetual conflict between people in this little world. (In classic Lockwood fashion, she describes Heathcliff as a \u201cmastiff,\u201d \u201ca dog standing on hind legs.\u201d) Readers of Wuthering Heights can come to feel oppressed by the great number of similar names\u2014the mononymous Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, and Edgar Linton; then, in the next generation, Hareton Earnshaw, Linton Heathcliff, and Catherine Linton\u2014but this repetitiveness serves to emphasize how small and incestuous this little world is, how isolated and miserable.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a social ecosystem that changes everyone in it for the worse. Heathcliff becomes a \u201cgoblin,\u201d a \u201cdevil,\u201d with \u201ccannibal teeth,\u201d fueled by endless animosity. Most adaptations, including Fennell\u2019s, would prefer to present the bad deeds Heathcliff commits as part of his excessive love for Cathy, but in the novel, after his return to the Heights as a rich man and Cathy\u2019s marriage and death, he\u2019s a fire hose of punishment and manipulation, his animus touching almost every character. He deceives, marries, and abuses Isabella, hangs Isabella\u2019s pet dog (dogs again!), deprives his nephew Hareton of education, maybe-probably<\/a> kills his adopted brother Hindley, holds multiple characters against their will, and relentlessly squeezes his tenants for money.<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s not alone\u2014the other characters also commit bad deeds out of their desire for control and dominance. After his father\u2019s death, Hindley oppresses Heathcliff out of pure spite, angry at his father\u2019s affection for this orphan who may or may not be an illegitimate brother, but also in order to restore hierarchy in the house by putting Heathcliff in his \u201cplace.\u201d As Hindley\u2019s plan unfolds, Cathy (who is not some admirable heroine\u2014don\u2019t get too entranced by Margot Robbie\u2019s face) taunts Heathcliff for his uninteresting conversation and for not being able to read. She develops a taste for luxury, ultimately setting Heathcliff aside long enough to marry Edgar. Edgar and Isabella, for their part, are kind to Cathy, but they are deluded at best and cruel at worst when it comes to Heathcliff.<\/p>\n

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At the time of its publication, readers received these degenerate deeds with shock, believing the book to be totally amoral. In a roundup of critical responses<\/a> to the novel over the years, writer and critic Henry Oliver finds an anonymous 1848 review that sums up the story as having \u201ca rough, shaggy, uncouth power that turns up the dark side of human nature, and deals with unbridled passions and hideous inhumanities\u201d; an 1850 review called it \u201cone of the most repellent books we ever read.\u201d But later scholars, like von Sneidern, suggest that we could read in Wuthering Heights a quiet analogy with another type of agricultural location shaped by cruelty, imposed in the name of hierarchy: the plantation. The Heights, she wrote, might be considered a little plantation colony \u201cin the heart of Yorkshire.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the time Bront\u00eb was writing in the 1840s, British abolitionists had been arguing for decades that the institution of slavery corrupts both enslaver and enslaved\u2014just as Hindley\u2019s oppression of Heathcliff, which goes largely uncontested by anyone inside or outside the Heights, ruins everything for two generations. In this world, Heathcliff\u2019s presence, as Nelly puts it, \u201cbrings bad feeling.\u201d And Heathcliff\u2019s eventual triumph over Earnshaws and Lintons alike shows that a bent for domination is not the sole province of the white and wealthy. In this reading, Wuthering Heights could be a reminder that, as von Sneidern wrote, \u201call are capable of infinite brutality and falling victim to the addictive pleasure of possessing another human being.\u201d<\/p>\n

Later adaptations have played with these interpretations, explicitly naming Heathcliff as Black. Peter Forster\u2019s wood engravings of <\/a>Wuthering Heights<\/a>, published in a Folio Society edition of the novel in 1991, represent Heathcliff as exaggeratedly Black, trying, the artist said, to \u201cvex the Tory gentry,\u201d and to present a modern equivalent of the \u201cgypsy,\u201d in order to illustrate how Heathcliff was \u201ca social outcast in a conservative country district.\u201d Windward Heights<\/a>, a 1995 novel by Maryse Cond\u00e9, transplants the entire story to the Caribbean. The Lost Child<\/a>, a guttingly bleak 2015 novel by Caryl Phillips, imagines Heathcliff\u2019s mother as a formerly enslaved woman kept\u2014then discarded\u2014by Mr.\u00a0Earnshaw in Liverpool (making Heathcliff Cathy\u2019s half brother). An interpretation of the story of Heathcliff\u2019s mother can also be found in Ill Will<\/a>, Michael Stewart\u2019s astonishingly bloody 2018 novel. In Wuthering Heights, Edgar Linton semimockingly asks whether Heathcliff has come into an \u201cinheritance\u201d when he returns to the Grange after his absence, dressed as a gentleman. But, in classic Bront\u00eb fashion, we never get to know for sure how Heathcliff got his money. Stewart answers this question with gouts of gore. His Heathcliff discovers that his mother was an enslaved woman whom Earnshaw had repeatedly raped in Liverpool. At the end of his investigation into his origins, Heathcliff brutally murders the two men most responsible, then takes their money back to the Heights to continue his revenge.<\/p>\n

Andrea Arnold\u2019s 2011 film adaptation<\/a> of Wuthering Heights cast James Howson as a Black Heathcliff and is shot in a strikingly different way from other on-screen versions of the novel. This is an extremely lonely movie, framed mostly from Heathcliff\u2019s point of view. Rather than calling Heathcliff a \u201cgypsy,\u201d Hindley uses the N-word on him with brutal liberality. After the death of Mr.\u00a0Earnshaw and his exile from the house, Heathcliff haunts the moors, the stable, the courtyard, listening and watching for glimpses of Cathy around the corners of doors and windows. Arnold chooses to emphasize the bareness of the house, the wildness of the landscape, and the misery of Heathcliff\u2019s situation. Those dissatisfied with Emerald Fennell\u2019s treatment of Heathcliff\u2019s story should try this one.<\/p>\n

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None of this is going to resolve any online drama; there\u2019s no way to scour history or past adaptations and \u201cfind out\u201d what Heathcliff\u2019s actual race or ethnicity might have been. Fennell wrote in an introduction to a new edition<\/a> of Wuthering Heights, published as a companion to the movie: \u201cPart of its pleasure-pain is that it is a maddeningly strange book\u2014more easily intuited than understood\u2014and frustrates all attempts to pin it down. No matter how many times I return to it I find whole passages I swear I have never read before. \u2026 It is not so much a book as a Rorschach test.\u201d In this, at least, she is correct. Two weeks ago, I set out to simply reread the novel, to answer this question of Heathcliff\u2019s origins, and ended up down a hole of adaptations and interpretations, mind utterly dominated by Wuthering Heights, like so many before me. Bront\u00eb has set up a story that\u2019s prime territory for rethinking. Emerald Fennell isn\u2019t the first to try re-creating its slippery depths in her own vision, and she won\u2019t be the last.<\/p>\n

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