A black Heathcliff?

I just watched and was horribly diasappointed. He was not Heathcliff, looks wise dark does not mean black. So when ever I read WH I picture a dark skinned guy who is either Romanian or Greek or even middle Eastern. Personality wise I agree with the OP the actor was sweet and sweet is not Heathcliff.

Hindly and Edgar were amazing but one should not watch WH and be taken with supporting characters and have zero investment in Heathcliff and Cathy.

Side note 20 in 1771 was different from 20 in 2012, often I look at old photos or painted portraita and am shocked at how "young" the people are. So age be damned, Clive Owen that is what I see when I think Heathcliff, he has dark hair and eyes and a dark skin tone. Also he is brooding, dominant, he can pull off cruelty. I'll take an actor who is "too old" who makes me believe he is Heathcliff over an actor who is 20 and looks like some guy in period costume. JMO

I just heard the review on Filmspotting top10 so i was looking foreward to a novel treatment (no pun intended) of this classic.

Instead i saw the poster frame for the trailer & was instantly revolted by the callow cynical casting choice of a negro to play a feral Yorkshireman :(

The ridiculous presumption that enervates so much of contemporary tv/theatre/film that the negro (or the arab or the muslim) is somehow the only choice to represent the agony/angst/ennui/etc of the human condition is just as emotionally facile as it is intellectually flaccid.

What was a refreshing frisson in a Benetton advert 20 years ago does not make for authentic casting today; it is, rather, just derivative & it detracts from the integrity of the author's work.

sigh.

What's next? — Romeo is gay & Juliet a hermaphrodite? (which might be entirely fascinating though it certainly wouldnt be "shakespeare" qua Shakespeare).

There is so only much innovation that a classic (especially from The Cannon) can afford before it is estranged from itself; if an artist wishes to make such adaptations then he should dispense with the pretense of the original text & instead simply declare that his work is "inspired by" the classic — and as such contains so much that is original that it is judged as a unique work of art which should stand on its own, and not on the shoulders of giants.

urbisoler-1: I absolutely agree with you.

well said

We have
Ch.1 John Lockwood: "His black eyes withdraw"
Ch.4 Nelly Dean: "A dirty, ragged, black haired child"
Ch.7 Cathrine Earnshaw: "How very black and cross you look"
Heathcliff:"I wish I had light hair and a fair skin"
Nelly Dean:"A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad,if you were a regular black; and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly."
Ch.10 Nelly Dean:"I distinguished a tall man dressed in dark clothes with dark face and hair...A ray fell on his features; the cheeks were sallow, and half covered with black whiskers; the brows lowering, the eyes deep-set and singular. I remembered the eyes." (Note that she is looking at Heathcliff by the light of a rising moon, full or near full ie. a yellow/white light)
and again:"He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man; beside whom my master seemed quite slender and youth-like...His countenance was much older in expression and decision of feature than Mr. Linton’s; it looked intelligent, and retained no marks of former degradation. A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified: quite divested of roughness, though stern for grace."
Nelly Dean again:"‘God forbid that he should try!’ answered the black villain."

Ch.16 Nelly Dean:"on examination, I ascertained to have been taken from a locket hung round Catherine’s neck. Heathcliff had opened the trinket and cast out its contents, replacing them by a black lock of his own. I twisted the two, and enclosed them together."

Ch.17 Isabella Heathcliff: "the casement behind me was banged on to the floor by a blow, and his black countenance looked blightingly through. The stanchions stood too close to suffer his shoulders to follow, and I smiled, exulting in my fancied security. His hair and clothes were whitened with snow, and his sharp cannibal teeth, revealed by cold and wrath, gleamed through the dark."

Ch.20 Linton Heathcliff and Nelly Dean "‘Black hair and eyes!’ mused Linton. ‘I can’t fancy him. Then I am not like him, am I?’

‘Not much,’ I answered: not a morsel, I thought, surveying with regret the white complexion and slim frame of my companion, and his large languid eyes—his mother’s eyes"

Ch.33 Nelly Dean:"Heathcliff’s black eyes flashed;"
Heathcliff: "I ought to, and probably shall, remain above ground till there is scarcely a black hair on my head."
Nelly Dean: "unnatural appearance of joy under his black brows"

To recap: Every description of Heathcliff's physical appearance refers to his high forehead, prominant black eyebrows, sunken black eyes, long black hair, dark/dusky/black complexion, tall athletic build, physical strength and sharp white teeth. The single word most often used to describe Heathcliff is: BLACK.

But Bronte is nuanced: he is not a *regular* black - Nelly compares him to Lascars (a term given originally to describe Muslims from the East Indian British colonies, impressed by the Navy or serving in the British Merchant Marine, although it had gained common use as a description for any black sailor, or ex-sailor, or dark skinned Briton, by 1800 or so.- and there were many black sailors, servants, free men and slaves in Liverpool in the last half of the eighteenth century)
Gypsy (the word being a corruption of 'Egyptian', which was the nationality the English ascribed to the Roma, although by the 1800's the term was used even more loosely to describe the troops of itinerant unemployed that roamed the countryside ostensibly looking for work- including many dark skinned peoples other than Romany from all over the British Empire, -and in 1783, when Heathcliff returns, the 'gypsies' also might include the American-born loyalists ex-soliders/runaway slaves (depending on if you see it from Clinton's or Washington's point of veiw) that had fought for Britain in the War of Independence and emigrated after.
Bronte puts many Orientalist suggestions for Heathcliff's heritage in the novel, although all are speculative, for instance when Nelly consoles Heathcliff with "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?" It is quite clear that Emily Bronte intended her anti-hero to be a half-caste black, muslim or kaffir, in the mold of Byron's heros (eg. Salim in Bride of Abydos, or Conrad in the Corsair).

In the novel, Heathcliff's actual origins are never explicitly revealed,but there are clues as well as mystery: he is found in Liverpool, at the age of seven, in the year 1771, by Mr Ernshaw, a farmer from Yorkshire who has walked sixty miles there and back for unexplained business, at the start of the harvest, busiest time of year for a farmer. At the time, any destitute woman with child was required by law to name the sire of her child to the midwife in order to receive parish assistance. The parish was legally responsible for the maintenance of the 'impotent' poor (ie. People unable to work) of the parish, but as the parish committees that managed the care usually included the parish rate-payers that contributed most to the poor-tax, every means of avoiding unnecessary burden to the public purse was explored. So the mother would be expected to work off her parish assistance as soon as she could get on her feet again, and the father was pursued for the maintenance of the child. If neither of them were members of the parish the pregnant woman was in, they could be moved on to their home parish. If the father did not offer the name of an alternative putative father, and would not pay, he could be put in the stocks. The parish would typically demand the cost of raising the child for its first seven years (the cost was typically not great- about twenty shillings a year, at a time when a working man could expect to earn about that much in a week. But it had to be paid up front, and the 'care' that it purchased was not great- if you google up 'An earnest appeal for mercy to the children of the poor' by Jonas Hanway, you can read for yourself how bad). If the child survived to the age of seven, it would be apprenticed out to any tradesman that would provide it with food and board, unless someone in its family came to collect it. Again there are records of appalling abuse (eg. Elizabeth Brownrigg - and this was not an isolated case).
This, and the ages of Mr Earnshaw's legitimate children, and the naming of Heathcliff after the Earnshaws' dead child, implies that Heathcliff might be the bastard son of Mr Earnshaw.

There is even less information provided about Heathcliff's mother - although if we posit Earnshaw as the father, Heathcliff must have got his dark complexion (although not necessarily his dark eyes) from her. That Heathcliff was found in Liverpool is also a clue. At the time of Heathcliff's birth, Liverpool was the largest slave-trading port in Britain, and had the largest number of black Britons outside of London. (The Somerset case, that had the effect of converting chattel slaves to servants or free people, in England and Scotland, did not take place until 1772, and the abolition of the slave trade was six years after the end of the novel, in 1808. Of course, by the time Emily wrote the book, chattel slavery was illegal throughout the British Empire, although not absolutely eradicated in all parts of the empire, and still very much a way of life in the USA.) Like most docks, Liverpool had women of all races finding a living in prostitution (which was legal), or taking in washing, as chars and as bar maids, all the way along it.
Emily Bronte shunned all publicity and refused to reveal her identity even when her publisher was attempting to pass off Anne's work as Charlotte's, and claiming that she also was Charlotte. So we have no record of Emily writing about Wuthering Heights (although she did have a word or two to say about its publisher), or discussed it with a journalist or biographer, although her sister Charlotte did, and unambiguously described Heathcliff as 'the black' when she did.
While Emily Bronte also uses black figuratively (eg: Black night, black soul, black looks), it is clear that she also meant Heathcliff to stand out and be ostracised by his foreign appearance and dark complexion.
The real wonder is that for so many of the 164 years since the novel was first published, people have insisted on Heathcliff being white, and that in the 72 years that movies have been made of Wuthering Heights, it has been traditional to have Heathcliff played by a white man painted orange, or a white man who had played Othello, because a Black Briton is somehow a literary impossibility, in spite of being historical reality.

"If Emily Bronte had meant for Heathcliff to be black, she would have told us so in no uncertain terms. It took 175 years for someone to read WH and decide he should be black."

Uh? Bronte did tell us in every possible way that Heathcliff was a "foreigner" (swarthy, Lascar, moor, black eyes, dark skin, etc), and there's a debate among Bronte academics and social historians about Heathcliff's actual ethnicity. This debate has been going for almost 150 years.

Most however agree on one thing: Heathcliff isn't white. There's no doubt about this.

The question mark is over his actual ethnicity. African, Indian, Romani, Egyptian, Arab, mixed race...nobody really knows, but the fact remains: he isn't white. The answer makes no difference, anyway, because he's still seen as a "dark, dangerous" foreigner by people who aren't used to seeing people like him, even though there were black English-born people living in England at the time. There just wasn't enough for non-white English-born people to be a familiar sight for the majority.

Either way, I do think the director made a good call on the casting because considering today's audience, it's possibly the only way to make the audience understand what it's like to be seen as a 'foreigner' at the time. At the time when English people viewed French/German/anyotherEuropean people with suspicion and mild hostility.

That said, I think it's very odd that people generally don't say anything when a non-white character becomes white in a film, but make a fuss when it's reversed.

Do you have the same objection to all the white Heathcliffs? It seems if your point is to be true to EB's work, you would have.

If she specified he looked 'gypsy' or 'Lascar', then she was trying to tell you he was of uncertain, not entirely Caucasian parentage. In other words, brown.

Seems the casting fits, to me.

I did read the book actually, as have many people who I have talked to who also believed he was white. We mustn't have picked that up. Also "a man of colour" could be someone with olive skin if I am not mistaken....

When the director decided to cast an African-heritage black man as Heathcliff, it became her Wuthering Heights instead of Emily Bronte's. Go see it in that understanding. I'll go to see it, but not expecting anything like a worthwhile translation of the great book I've read.


"The value of an idea has nothing to do with the honesty of the man expressing it."--Oscar Wilde

^ This.

I won't be seeing this movie.

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This simply is not true.

Hethcliff's ethnicity is largely debated in the literary community and you are ignoring they. Whether you BELIEVE he was white is one thing, but to say that Hethcliff was white with absolute certainty is immature and ignorant. No one knows exactly what Charlotte Bronte meant when she described him as dark skinned and it is open to interpretation.

This is stupid.