frustrating levels of discourse continue happening on twt ugh https://x.com/lara_e_brown/status/1839303817256645101
Lol yeah, I've honestly just given up on reading takes like that because once you've seen one, you've seen 'em all.
It's an extremely shallow reading, using things like "pale", which you can in fact be while having a darker complexion, with both examples relating less to a physical appearance and more to his aspect in the moment (his face is "white" because he's scared; he's "pale and effeminate" because he's in a wan and weakened state). And I say "both" because you tend to come up with faaaar fewer examples of the text relating Heathcliff as pale than... not.
I also find it funny that this user uses Heathcliff marrying Isabella as an example of why he MUST be white, when Heathcliff and Isabella literally run away together because nobody wants them to be together, PARTICULARLY her brother, and this rips the Linton family asunder. Almost as if.......... it was............... breaking a taboo......................
Like, yeah! 18th century Yorkshire wouldn't have accepted that marriage. And if there's one thing we know about Heathcliff—if it's not accepted, he's not gonna do it.
One of the entire points of his character is that he lives against law and taboo and societal norms (while at the same time being deeply aware of the fact that his existence doesn't gel with them). In that thread, that user references the Byronic hero, with the name drawing from Lord Byron and his own literary fascinations. Byron was obsessed with taboo, lived to break them (most famously the taboo of sleeping with people of the same sex, and probably the taboo of incest as well... COME TO MY TED TALK TO DISCUSS HOW THAT COULD RELATE TO HEATHCLIFF, ALSO). One of the reasons why more recent scholarship (and I don't even mean super recent) surrounding Wuthering Heights has come to terms with the interpretation of Heathcliff as a man of color is that he does embody the taboo even more.
And obviously... some taboos (the incest one) exist for a reason. But the book also seems interested in questioning how much we really gain by treating someone (someone like Heathcliff) as other and wrong simply for existing. Again, we go into the cycle of abuse.
I also find it rather belittling of people to refer to general 18th and 19th century values when discussing how people "would have" seen Heathcliff, or interpreted the text. Because, for one thing—yeah! A lot of contemporary readers did not in fact Get It. Perhaps in part because they did have the biases that people like that user seem to believe would have prevented the author from exploring Heathcliff as a man of color.
... But if Emily Bronte thought exactly as the detractors of her novel (who condemned it as wicked and aberrant) did, she never would have written the book, I think. Who's to say, though? It's difficult for EITHER side to make leaps about what Emily knew or thought, because she is someone who didn't live very long, has been portrayed as an eccentric (and perhaps even maligned by Elizabeth Gaskell's portrayal of her) and definitely had something of an offbeat upbringing. We just don't have much directly from HER. So it's a bit rich to me to make assumptions about the kind of limited worldview she may have had on topics like race, when we really do not have a lot of definitive information about her worldview, but DO know that the book she wrote, which some theorize to be about a man of color, REALLY upset some conventional readers.
Like... why would you contextualize that book within a purely conventional reading when the entire reason why Wuthering Heights matters is that it defies convention?
I do shy away from using the word "canonical" to describe Heathcliff's race, because while I know what people mean when they say it (and I'm sure I've said it at some point) it's just a word choice that people like that user will latch on to. Like I've said before, there is no way to prove with 100% certainty Heathcliff's race either way. Which isn't to say that you have to do so to state that he's a man of color. It's just the kind of pedantic strategy people will use in threads like these.
And I'll notice, too, that she omits Nelly's line wherein she speculates that Heathcliff's mother could be Chinese or Indian. I mean, what's her take on that specificity combined with the lascar speculation? No mention of Liverpool relating to people... not... from America or Spain...?
I do worry sometimes that people see someone's major concentration (say, if someone has a BA in English or something, which for the record I don't) and go "Damn, that's end-all, be-all" A) it's not, there's more to research than getting a degree B) you could also use literal wikipedia footnotes to kickstart your own deeper dive into this, there are tons of people who've made careers discussing books like WH debating the issue C) having a degree of any level never kicks your bias.
To go back to my own degree... I knew old art historians who saw nothing gay at all in Michelangelo's work. You can know a lot about a lot, and it doesn't mean you have an open mind.
I think anyone can read WH, do some research about the era and Emily, and drawn their own conclusions. And you are just going to have to make your conclusions based on your own assessment. There is no smoking gun here, and there never will be because the smoking gun would be a living Emily Bronte willingly telling you what she meant.
And I didn't read Heathcliff as a person of color from the jump, for the record. I was thirteen when I read that book for the first time; I'm white; I picked that book in the context of it being a Great English Classic, and as far as I knew, those were all about white people. Because... that's what you were taught about WH at the time, at least where I was.
But when I was first introduced to that interpretation some time later, it was a literal "OH!" moment. Because like... yeah. There isn't a smoking gun for Dorian Gray's sexuality (and yes, we know a lot more about Oscar Wilde than we do about Emily Bronte; but the absence of knowledge of Emily's interests and attitudes doesn't mean we can assume she DIDN'T have an interest in writing Heathcliff as a person of color) but The Picture of Dorian Gray makes way more sense when you interpret his queerness for what it is. Wuthering Heights makes way more sense when you interpret Heathcliff's race for what it is.
People really don’t understand how modern the whole notion of racism is, and how many of the shitty racist ideas we take for granted today were still being formed in Brontë’s time.
Yes, bigotry existed, and it was often vicious and violent. But the whole American thing of strict segregation of the races didn’t exist in Europe. There’s that one guy who tried to replicate Jim Crow in Germany, but that’s about it.
And, as I pointed out elsewhere, saying that Heathcliff could be a Spanish or American “castaway” is saying he could be an escaped slave from the US or one of the Spanish colonies that still had chattel slavery. Just so that’s clear.
Exactly. By “American castaway” she certainly hadn’t meant that he was some white American lol, and since “Spanish” is juxtaposed with “American” it likely means someone from Spanish colonies, not someone from Spain. I did say “he wasn’t Black” on Twitter because people who are against Heathcliff being anything other than white pretend that we definitively say that he was African to more easily argue against us, but this line can be read as pointing to possible African ancestry.
And a lot of this discourse on Twitter has actually been people not getting that 18th-19th century England wasn’t as racist as they think it was. For example, interracial marriage was legal in England: Frowned-upon, but legal.
Also, reading Heathcliff as “not white” is not recent. Charlotte Bronte called him “the black gipsy cub” in a letter while Emily was still alive and I doubt that Charlotte would define an Irishman like this, being half-Irish herself. And this is how Emily Bronte’s first biographer in 1883 described Heathcliff.
Exactly! That’s why I say racism is more modern than people think. There has always been bigotry and prejudice and hatred, but the system as we know it did not always exist.
Black and Indian people were very common in the larger cities in England and Scotland in this time period, particularly the port cities. One of the things that opened my eyes to this was reading the diaries of an American visitor to England, Benjamin Silliman. He was shocked to see so many Black and Indian people in London who were middle-class or even upper-class and compared it to Philadelphia.
The excerpts are below. TW: Archaic racial language (not THE N-word, but the similar one that has now been discarded except in the name of a college fund).
I would need to read the book again since I haven’t read it in decades, but his origin story is super murky by design. I suspect there are a few clues in there that would have been more obvious to readers at the time, but we’ve lost the cultural context needed to interpret them.
Add in the racial censorship of the later Victorian Era on both sides of the Atlantic, and you have a mess when it comes to figuring the mystery out.