The discourse on race / ethnicity stinks to high heaven.
A new movie version of Wuthering Heights will be released next month, and not for the first time there's controversy over the casting of Heathcliff. It has been more than a decade since I last read the book, and I'm in no hurry to do it again, but as I remember, Heathcliff was a man of mystery, of ambiguous and unknown ancestry. The discussion I saw on Twitter/X today agreed, but people were still trying to pin him down, while others tried to impose "modern" Foucauldianism on the story. For example, dismissals of "people who interpret everything through contemporary American racial dynamics," or "But Heathcliff is supposed to be possibly-not-fully-white by the standards of late 18th C Yorkshire, which is not the same thing as being clearly nonwhite by modern standards... He isn't clearly described as nonwhite, but as someone who raises suspicions because of an ambiguous appearance and background."
Whose modern standards? Which modern standards? The new movie is a US-UK production. British racial dynamics are different than US racial dynamics, and both sets are complex and incoherent, even leaving "mixed-race" people out of it. Jacob Elordi, who plays Heathcliffe in this version, is Australian with a Basque father. Judging by this publicity photo, I think he looks suitably ambiguous by modern standards.
"White" and "non-white" aren't clear categories, and never have been. As I've pointed out before, in English usage "black" is applied to human beings along a continuum from black hair to being sub-Saharan African. Here's how Heathcliff made his first appearance to the Earnshaw family:
We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy’s head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk: indeed, its face looked older than Catherine’s; yet when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs. Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house, when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad? The master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there: because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it. Well, the conclusion was, that my mistress grumbled herself calm; and Mr. Earnshaw told me to wash it, and give it clean things, and let it sleep with the children.
Children, even little blue-eyed blond-haired rosy-cheeked English children, were commonly called "it" in English well into the twentieth century, so this passage shouldn't be assumed to be racist. Heathcliff is referred to as a "gipsy," a "a little Lascar [i.e. South Asian], or an American or Spanish castaway" by other characters in the novel. Whatever the racial dynamics of late 18th-century Yorkshire were, they weren't clear. Numerous people have pointed out that Liverpool was a terminus of the Atlantic slave trade, and speculated that Heathcliff might have been a slave or the child of a slave. It's less often noted that the reader has at best only Mr. Earnshaw's word for it that he found the boy in Liverpool; what was he going to say, though, "This is my son by a slave wench"? I don't assume that Emily Bronte had a clear picture of Heathcliff's ancestry in mind, nor that she could have explained herself clearly if pressed. Intentionally or not, she gave an accurate picture of the racial dynamic in her day by showing that Yorkshire folk just threw around a salad of labels for the boy. They didn't care much what he was, only that he was Other. (I couldn't resist thinking of the various answers the Twelve gave when Jesus asked "Who do men say that I am?" "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.")
On "gipsy," Roma are not a single "racial" group: see the 1993 musical / documentary Latcho Drom, which ranges from India across Europe to Spain. If Heathcliff could have been "a Spanish castaway, he could have been Basque; he still wouldn't have been white. Complaints about the casting of Elordi that call him white are as inadvertently entertaining as the complaints that Neo in The Matrix was played by a white actor. (Keanu Reeves is multiethnic, to put it gently.) The gatekeepers are as ignorant as their opponents, and contribute little or nothing to improving the discourse.
Are Hispanics white? Hey, remember the right-wing think-tanker who thought that Spanish speakers are a "race"? But he wants you to know that he's not a racist. Remember the liberal queer diversity educators who insisted that Sunni and Shi'a are ethnicities? Jon Schwarz likes to remind us that Benjamin Franklin said that Germans are "swarthy," that is, dark-skinned:
Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind.
You see, it's okay for a Basque to play Heathcliff: they aren't white! And I remember that light-skinned African-Americans sometimes passed, or were mistaken for Mexicans or or Latins.
A similar casting dilemma affects Shakespeare's Othello. What is a Moor, in Elizabethan racial dynamics? Othello is called "black" by some characters, and he might have been African, but probably not. Numerous commenters in those threads mentioned that in more recent adaptations, Othello has been played by black African actors. Laurence Olivier (who also played Heathcliff in a film version of Wuthering Heights) played Othello in blackface in a 1965 movie performance. (My goodness, the whole thing is on YouTube.) Like this:
Then there was Andrea Arnold's 2011 version of Wuthering Heights, in which Heathcliff was played by an Afro-British actor. I found it uneven but interesting, partly because the dialogue included some F-bombs. Was that "authentic"? "Correct"? Bronte couldn't have published the novel with such language, and I have no idea whether she knew the word, but probably she did, and the expletives were in character for Heathcliff. The English were notorious for their foul language: Joan of Arc called them "goddens," or "goddamns."
I don't intend to see the new version; I'll see how the reviews are. But I don't love the book, so why bother? The anxiety and confusion over the casting - there's also an actor in it with an Arabic name, and a Chinese as well - drew my attention to it, that's all. Is there even any point in trying to sort out the tangled web of race / ethnic discourse? I don't think it can be done.
