As my previous blog post was about race and “diverse casting” in period dramas, let’s talk about Heathcliff: what is his race/ ethnicity?
This is how Heathcliff is described by Mr Lockwood, a stranger and the first narrator of Wuthering Heights:
“He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is, as much a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure; and rather morose.” (ch.1)
When Heathcliff returns after a three years’ absence, Nelly Dean also describes him as having “dark face and hair” (ch.10). The word “gipsy” appears 6 times throughout the novel—said by Mr Lockwood, Mrs Earnshaw, Hindley, Mrs Linton, Joseph, and Edgar Linton—6 different characters. Some of these characters however also use different terms throughout the story.
In one scene, to cheer up little Heathcliff, Nelly Dean says:
““A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad,” I continued, “if you were a regular black; and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly. And now that we’ve done washing, and combing, and sulking—tell me whether you don’t think yourself rather handsome? I’ll tell you, I do. You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together? And you were kidnapped by wicked sailors and brought to England. Were I in your place, I would frame high notions of my birth; and the thoughts of what I was should give me courage and dignity to support the oppressions of a little farmer!”” (ch.7)
I have come across some readers who naively think this means Heathcliff is half Indian half Chinese, but all this means is that Nelly Dean—and therefore we—cannot tell Heathcliff’s parentage and origin. It might mean that she doesn’t know what Indian and Chinese people look like (who look too different to be mixed up); or we can read that speech as Nelly Dean babbling some nonsense to cheer up an upset child.
Emily Bronte complicates matters. Mrs Linton for example says:
“I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbour made, in his journey to Liverpool—a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway.” (ch.6)
The term “Lascar” is used for sailors from India or South Asia.
All these different terms mean that Heathcliff is racially ambiguous, and that it’s Emily Bronte’s intention that his ethnicity is uncertain—the main point is that he is clearly an outsider—he is an outside force that brings destruction upon the Earnshaw family (and the Linton family) and harmony is restored only when he’s gone. I don’t think Heathcliff is simply a white guy with darker skin and dark hair, like Italian or Spanish; but I also don’t think he’s black, as depicted in the 2011 film, because he would be called a “mulatto” and there would be no ambiguity. My guess is that Heathcliff is mixed race—his father is Mr Earnshaw and his mother is either “Gypsy” or Indian. If we look at the cast of the 2026 film, Heathcliff in my head would not look like Jacob Elordi but perhaps more like Shazad Latif, an actor of mixed English, Scottish, and Pakistani descent, who for some odd reason is cast as the pale and blond Edgar Linton.
I would say though that Heathcliff’s racial ambiguity is important and Emily Bronte can maintain and emphasise the uncertainty because this is a novel—a screen adaptation has to commit to one interpretation or another—I personally think Heathcliff is mixed race.
What do you think?
I agree. Brontë clearly intended it to be equivocal in the specifics, using what seems to me extremely clever phrasing when approaching Heathcliff’s race. I do not think Nelly literally fails to understand that there is a wide range of appearance between an Indian sailor and an Emperor of China; that kind of ignorance strikes me as too far-fetched for the period. “Chinese” and “Indian” were already distinct categories in British public culture, with distinct visual and narrative conventions, even when those conventions were distorted and racist. In fact, especially considering “Chinese” and its conflation with “Mongolians,” these distortions were all the sharper for it. Nelly would need only half a lifetime of regular engagement with print media, even in the 1770s, to understand that difference. It is worth considering as well that, while Brontë could not have seriously expected the reader to believe Nelly had physically met a Chinese person, an Indian person was hardly more remote from her social context than a Black African person. Nelly’s ambiguous, Romantic imagery for Heathcliff’s origins seems to me characteristic of her Romantic imagination, and I think she probably means it metaphorically. Its prominent purpose, though, is certainly narratological: Brontë wants to emphasize his otherness, his racial ambiguity centered in a “non-white, non-British” context.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I think Brontë was very much imagining Heathcliff, at least politically, as racially Black in some sense. That's admittedly based of nothing too substantial and certainly nothing I could point to as a direct source but it's an idea I find hard to shake. Not only because of the specificity of naming Liverpool, but because the language around Heathcliff’s race and appearance, his “otherness,” and the social complexities it creates are deeply formulated around, and centered on, the exact way Blackness was talked about at the time. When Nelly berates Catherine by telling her that Heathcliff would deserve dignity even if he were a “regular black,” that is probably the least racially ambiguous phrasing we get, because positioning Heathcliff anywhere near Blackness was not, to my knowledge, something Brontë could have naturally expected the reader to wave off in the same way as the other descriptors. I would almost say that is where Brontë lets the mask slip a bit, but that does her a disservice. While I do believe that something like the common and popular “tragic mulatta” figure was the conceptual origin of Heathcliff, I think Brontë’s genius in this instance was her intentional vagueness, which allowed Heathcliff, his relations, his actions, the way he saw people, and the way people saw him to become a powerful and flexible motif.
Whoops got a bit carried away in my own thoughts that I totally misstated the context of Nelly's speech, even though you literally mentioned it. I swear I can read! I think I started writing "berates Healthcliff" and don't know what happened with the rest haha. Sorry, just wanted to clear that up.
DeleteHi,
DeleteSorry, I don't know why I forgot to reply to you.
I think I need to read a bit about races in the late 18th, early 19th century to comment on this at length.
I know what you mean about Liverpool, but I imagine it's also a place where Mr Earnshaw would have met lots of Indians too. As you find the idea of a black Heathcliff hard to shake, I find it hard to shake that there's nothing ambiguous if Heathcliff is just half black. Someone half Indian on the other hand would have that ambiguous "what's his ethnicity?" look.
But again, we have all this ambiguity in the book because it's a book. In a film, we would have to commit to one reading or another, and the ambiguity would be more or less lost.