As Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi continue to wrack in millions thanks to their new film adaptation of Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, “Wuthering Heights,” the movie has inspired a whole lot of discourse surrounding Elordi’s character, Heathcliff. Specifically, his portrayal has fans online asking: was the character supposed to be Black in the first place?
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Yes, you read that right. One of the largest bits of discourse surrounding this film is whether or not the racial and ethnic background of Heathcliff—the infamous, vengeful Wuthering Heights occupant-turned-landlord—is of African descent. While this question isn’t new, as scholars and various academics have long debated this very notion, if we’re keeping things completely honest, the question still holds a supreme amount of validity to this day, especially when you consider his description in the book.
At one point, Heathcliff is described in the book as a “dark-skinned gypsy in aspect” and later, when speaking of his looks as a young one—a “dirty, ragged, black-haired child.” Elsewhere in the book, it’s said that he was “as dark almost as if it came from the devil.” So if we are to take these descriptors as literal, then there’s a solid case for Heathcliff to have African blood running through his bones.
This argument is given even more substance when you factor in the research done by the The Brontë Parsonage Museum, a place dedicated to life and work of the Brontë sisters and their history in the UK. Per their site, the events of “Wuthering Heights,” specifically when the orphan Heathcliff is brought in from Liverpool to stay with the Earnshaw family, takes place in 1771. The British slave trade wasn’t abolished until 1807 and Liverpool was home to one of the major stops with it controlling “80% of Britain’s trade in enslaved people”—most of which came from Africa and the Caribbean.
Given how Heathcliff was also described as having no “owner” and that he didn’t “belong” to anyone, that language also supports the theory that he may have had some ties to the slave trade and thusly been of African descent. His mistreatment by the Earnshaws in the book, both physical and verbal, also point to deep level of discrimination that could very well have been based off both his skin color and social class.
By all accounts though, it’s clear from the source material that Heathcliff was a person of color and not a white, European man, despite how racially ambiguous he was described. And by ambiguous, we mean that he’s later called a “lascar,” a term used to describe an Indian sailor and later likened to that of a moor, a word derived from the Moors—Muslims in North Africa. Taking all of this into account, it would explain why the 2011 film adaptation of the movie showcases a Black actor in the role (looking at you James Howson).
So it begs yet another question of why Elordi was cast in the first place since he’s in such contrast to the original work and why the story is so whitewashed? And believe us, we’re not the only ones taking issue with it.
One user on Threads wrote: “So in 1770 Mr Earnshaw finds a dark skinned boy in Liverpool [an 1800s slave trading port’, speaking an unknown language, in a book written by an abolitionist…’let’s cast Jacob Elordi.’”
Added another user in part: “To be clear: I don’t even fw wuthering heights like that and I never did.But I am sitting here with a masters degree in English literature tearing my hair out at these reductionist takes that we should just enjoy this white washed adaptation and not engage with it critically.”
One other user said, “Wuthering Heights without a Black Heathcliff misses the whole point. The character was always written as an outsider racially ambiguous, othered, treated like he didn’t belong. That tension is the engine of the story. If you sand that down and make him just another brooding white dude, you don’t get depth… you get cosplay with better lighting. You can’t whitewash the conflict and expect the message to still punch. It won’t.”
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