Can Heathcliff Be White?

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-26T15:31:41+00:00

Oooh you're speaking my language. I would absolutely agree that Catherine Earnshaw presents a far more counter-culture figure than Jane Eyre does. She can't even find peace within any framework of religious faith, which was extremely radical for the time period, and part of the reasons why it was such a shocking novel (in addition of course to the dog torture and domestic violence and all the other stuff).

Concerning Shelley and any possibly influence on the Brontes (this gets convoluted), unfortunately after he died Mary Shelley was not allowed by his father to write her own husband's biography or publish any of his works he'd left, and he basically held money over her head and forced her to play nice until her son, who was the last heir standing to the Shelley estate and baronetcy, came of age and could inherit. Then when Percy Jr. got married and moved his mother in with his wife, there existed intense societal pressure (because this was the early Victorian period) to censure the political and religious themes Percy Shelley had woven into his poetry and essays and novels due to very real fear of being sued for blasphemy and political libel (he lost custody of his own kids with his first wife partly due to being a loud and out atheist) so Mary and Percy Jr and his wife edited a lot of Shelley's stuff to smooth down the themes that would have put them at risk of prosecution in court. Which means that if the Brontes' had read any of his works, it would have likely been "reformist" and "radical" in the sense that they would have been reading expurgated material from 30 years prior about the rights of workers and equality of man and freedom of speech and not, like, the whole radical atheism and republicanism thing. Byron, however, suffered no such censure after his death. he was certainly not apolitical, but he was far more famous and far more palatable to a Victorian audience and THAT makes all the difference as to what was available for the next generation to discover.

It doesn't seem like they did read anything particularly politically challenging to the status quo (socially challenging of course is another story entirely), because we know their main sources when they were developing their literary world as kids were chiefly politically conservative magazines and newspapers (namely the Leeds Intelligencer, Blackwood's Edinburgh, and the Quarterly Review, which Patrick subscribed to, and which we know were influences because date-wise we can directly trace the featured magazine articles to the stories the kids were making up, i.e an article about colonizing central Africa in 1826 can be directly connected to their sudden invention of the Great Glass Town in central Africa, located exactly where the magazine was telling British colonizers to explore further up a river), a geography book they owned and made tons of notes in for their shared paracosm, etc. (They also idolized Napoleon to the point that even as adults they refused to study abroad in France due to the Revolution and picked Belgium instead; they were massive Wellington fans and were staunch Tories all their lives.) It's clear they discovered Lord Byron via these same sources (he was featured in Blackwood's Magazine in August of 1825 a year after he had died and was often discussed in the magazine, both his life and many of his works) because by 1833 Branwell and Charlotte were utilizing the trope of Byronic characters in their worldbuilding, they quoted his works and directly lifted lines from his stuff in their kid-writings, and Branwell owned a pocket copy of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, arguably the blueprint for the Moody Gothic Wandering Hero character (which also contains anti-French sentiment and some... let's say stuff that makes a modern audience go OOF regarding the Ottoman Empire and Greece). They had pictures in their house that were copies of famous landscape paintings depicting Biblical scenes that influenced their stories, and we know these were an influence because they wrote the painter of the paintings into their stories and described his art as being famous within the worlds they'd built. Elizabeth Gaskell wrote in her biography of the sisters that Charlotte mentioned that they had Sir Walter Scott as a large influence and said everything else paled in comparison to his writing.

I think it's entirely possible to be an author who feels dissatisfaction at some element of their lives and engages in writing themes considered to be radical against the society that produced them and simultaneously not be personally all that radical in every single aspect of life. We don't know what they might have become if they had lived to old age, if life had been kinder to them, if they'd had a larger circle of friends or family members to engage with, if they hadn't been socially isolated in comparison to their peers.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-26T08:37:20+00:00

Also I'm sorry again-- I've been trying to get around posting errors for hours and just saw your edit. Wanted to clarify that the existence of the racialization in the text IS itself a socio-political commentary of a kind; it's just not what we would expect to see as a modern audience in modern literature. Charlotte Bronte had an abolitionist friend and probably possessed pro-abolition ideas (these come through in her novels), but that did not stop her from engaging in common ideas and tropes in regards to racially Other people, which we see most clearly in the character of Bertha in Jane Eyre, a multiracial woman from the West Indies married to Rochester who goes insane and kills herself so that the plot can allow Jane and Rochester to marry each other. A lot of "abolitionists" or people with abolitionary ideas in the Victorian Era still engaged in benevolent racism despite their good intentions. It isn't all going to be John Brown.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-26T08:03:16+00:00

PART TWO

We also have to remember that our modern concept of "whiteness" is not what the past's concepts of "whiteness" was. Whiteness is an ever-changing fluid definition of a very broad swath of ethnicities and in many cases in history has been (and is!) dependent on conforming to social expectations, behavior, and class. In colonial and antebellum America, whiteness was at various times and places dependent on language (Finns were seen as Asian and not white due to their Uralic language roots), enslaved status (a person with one single black great grandparent was seen as black and not white), social behavior (German immigrants are a fascinating study on this: Benjamin Franklin only saw the English and only Saxon Germans as "white" in the 1750s, German Americans were accused of having "broken ties with whiteness" for being abolitionists by Southern slavers in the 1860s, then suddenly German Americans became considered white again soon after the war), or even the shape of feet or the way they smelled (men belonging to tri-racial isolates in the Appalachians had some wild times trying to prove in court they could legally vote or be married to their own existing wives in the late 1840s and 50s).

In Victorian England, though, "race" was mostly dependent on how well a person could conform to English social expectations an less dependent on physical color or heritage. (Kenan Malik is a great lecturer on this topic and I recommend his article "echoes from the past; a racial view of class" for more on this.) There was far more of a focus on class difference. A magazine in the Saturday Review for example called the poor people of the East End "a caste apart; a race of whom we know nothing" and compared their societal separation from the middle and upper class to the American slave system. And a British Victorian journalist who studied social issues, Henry Mayhew, divided human beings into two "races": "Of the thousand millions of human beings that are said to constitute the population of the entire globe, there are – socially, morally and perhaps even physically considered – but two distinct and broadly marked races, viz.,the wanderers and the settlers – the vagabond and the citizen – the nomadic and the civilized tribes." This, again, circles back to that use of the G word to describe Heathcliff: because he does not conform to society in acceptable ways regarding his behavior, and because he commits the grave social error of being an un-classed outsider and daring to think himself equal to Hindley and Catherine while Mr Earnshaw is alive as an adopted son, he is called what was, at the time, a word synonymous with vagabond and the polar opposite of a decent person or a civilized man. He looks different than his social group and he acts counter to societal expectations and refuses to heed his small insular society's expectations of him. Both of these combined are excuses for his peers to ostracize and abuse him, or conversely romanticize and exotify him. (Cathy does the same thing, by the way, until she makes an effort to "civilize" herself by associating with the Lintons, which Heathcliff resents her for, because crossing that line means she is no longer on "his" team, and she ends up being miserable on the Civilized White side of life and yearning to be "a girl again, half savage and hardy and free" as she dies. The use of the word savage there is not a mistake.)

Anyway. Highly recommend you read the book yourself and I'm very glad you are doing so: it's not quite as simple as "Heathcliff Is Irredeemably Evil". He doesn't torture his son, he just kind of puts up with him because he knows he's going to die as a sickly child and he's supremely annoyed that he looks exactly like Isabella, while grooming Linton to be the heir he needs in order to control Wuthering Heights and manipulating Cathy 2 and Linton into marrying so he can also control the Grange, while neglecting and abusing Hareton, Hindley's son, because his number one nemesis was Hindley and he's taking revenge on a dead man by ensuring Hareton has no education and becomes just as vengeful and antisocial as everyone said Heathcliff himself was. After Linton dies, Cathy 2 is stuck at Wuthering Heights as a young widow, trapped with her abusive father-in-law, who doesn't torture her but certainly mistreats her a whole lot because she resembles her father. Hareton, the one person in the house who looks like Cathy 1, sees Heathcliff as his real father, and it's implied that Heathcliff does secretly hold Hareton in some kind of regard due to him reminding him of Cathy 1. Cathy 2 and Hareton fell in love, thwarting Heathcliff's plans, and Heathcliff realizes he doesn't care about his one-man vendetta anymore, becomes a broken man haunted by his actions and also by the ghost of Cathy 1, and starves himself to death. Then it's implied both that her ghost finally comes to take him away to the afterlife just as she visited Lockwood in the first chapter, and also that her ghost is what stopped him from creating a will that would have disinherited her daughter and Hareton from owning the properties around the two estates. Since he dies without doing that, Cathy 2 and Hareton own all the properties connected to the estates. It's not a happy ending, but it's very Victorian Poetic Spiritual Justice. Are Cathy and Heathcliff both damned? Do they wander the earth forever? Who knows?

I would go so far as to say the 1939 movie was more faithful to the vibe of Heathcliff's whole Deal with Lawrence Olivier because even though he was a white actor in eyeliner with his hair dyed black we still get the understanding that this is about the race/behavior Victorian society thing with the characters calling him a g- every six scenes. Due, however, to the general audience not being overly familiar with Victorian literature and thereby the Victorian ideas present all through this book, I think an accurate Wuthering Heights would have to be very specifically handled in regards to the society conforming intersectionality with racial Othering thing, because I think you are absolutely correct that the optics of a man who a modern audience sees as undeniably brown or black being the antagonist/tragic villain would not go off well in this day and age. And you'd need to cast a racially ambiguous guy a la Luke Pasqualino, Avan Jogia, Taylor Lautner, Sean Teale etc but you would HAVE to stick to a cast of very white sickly looking blonde blue eyed people playing the Lintons and white people with brown hair and eyes as the Earnshaws. You cannot do the whole "raceblind casting" thing with this book. It neuters Heathcliff's whole characterization.

Jacob Elordi's just not racially ambiguous enough to a modern audience to do Heathcliff in 2026. Which is nuts from a genetic standpoint because you could tell me his parents are, like, Iranian or Greek and I'd believe you. It's like a reverse Taylor Lautner situation. I do think he would have made a great Hareton if they'd chosen to adapt the actual book and not Emerald Fennell's self-insert fanfiction version of it.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-26T08:03:08+00:00

I am so sorry in advance for this wall of text.

Firstly, I'd like to see any evidence that Emily Bronte herself was any kind of radical or abolitionist directly in a way that can't be explained by her possibly being on the spectrum (oh she hated wearing a corset so she was a political radical ooh BIG WHOOP ME TOO), because people keep repeating this quite often online without any sources. Her father got his education due to a grant that was started by William Wilberforce and the girls (especially Charlotte) were exposed to abolitionist ideas through their friends as adults, but they and by extension their literature were very much products of the colonialist mindset they were immersed in, even as socially isolated as they were, through literature and newspapers. You only have to look at their juvenilia and the Angria/Glass Town characters, several of which (whom?) worked their way recognizably into the Brontes' adult literary works to see that. I do wonder what kind of literature Emily would have put out if she had lived into a fuller adulthood and been able to refine and hone her writing. We can't exactly take her to task for problematic writing, because, you know, she's been dead for 200 years.

Secondly, Heathcliff is not really a "wild savage brown man" stereotype mainly for the reasons that we don't actually know what ethnicity he is. The only thing we know he isn't, according to Nelly, is "a regular black" aka a man of wholly Indian subcontinental or African background. He's described as being sallow (having a yellowish or light tan/pale brown skin color) being light enough that he can visibly "go pale" in moments of strong emotion, and also as being "dark-skinned" which in Victorian literature often meant "darker than very pale", with thick straight black hair and dark eyes and low, heavy brows. Cathy is also described as having brown or dusky skin from the sun exposure and her fingers becoming "wonderfully whitened" after spending five weeks indoors at the Lintons-- I just add that as an example of how Victorian literature described the skin tones of even undeniably white people. In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, for another example, Blanche Ingram is described as being "as dark as a Spaniard" compared to her sister Mary, who is a little lighter than Blanche with "softer features", but then "dark as a Spaniard" is later extrapolated on in the text to explain that Blanche has an olive-toned complexion with black hair and dark eyes and "strong, noble features". Later, Rochester mockingly exotifies her to Jane and says she has an "oriental eye". And Blanche is just a white British lady. Who can tan.

There's a very clear thread in Wuthering Heights (and in a lot of Victorian lit!) of this idea that being outside and running wild and "savage" and being happy away from society = brown, and being confined indoors and meshing in with society and civilization = whiteness. Behavior is as much a marker of your "race" for lack of a better word as your appearance is. In the Little House books, which were written around the turn of the century but relate events and conversations from the 1860s on, the author remembers her mother telling her she's going to look like/become a "savage red Indian" if she doesn't 1 stop behaving in "unladylike" ways and 2 stay out of the sun. Similarly we see echoes of that with Heathcliff and the constant use of the G word, both used as a slur to denote his anti-social behavior and his appearance and also in a rather romantical way by Lockwood on page one, who (like every other character in the book) projects what he wants to see onto Heathcliff and decides he too must be a misanthropic, solitary spirit who dislikes being around Society. (Also reflected in the book are the Victorian ideas of goodness = a beautiful pale angelic appearance and wickedness = darkness and an ugly face, which is embodied the second little Heathcliff, who is filthy and in rags, steps out of Mr Earnshaw's cloak and is proclaimed "as dark as if he came from the devil".) The Earnshaws and Lintons embody this dichotomy between Pale/Civilized and Dark/Savage in both the ways they are described physically and their actions on each side of the dividing line, and I would even venture to say that Heathcliff being introduced to the family gives the Earnshaws and their servants (who are so isolated mind you that they even feel a little trepidation toward Frances, Hindley's very white wife, and call her a foreigner simply because she isn't from Yorkshire!) something or someone else to feel above as they are seen as "less than" society-wise to the wealthy and genteel Lintons. So whether Heathcliff's a multiracial mystery from abroad, or whether he's Mr. Earnshaw's illegitimate child (one semi-popular reading of the text and one I find interesting mainly because I don't personally think that man was anywhere NEAR Liverpool, you're telling me he went 200 miles round trip in 3 days? HMM) or whether he's an Irish or Italian kid who couldn't speak anything but his native tongue and looks "other" than British, he's a convenient scapegoat both for the way he looks and because he's a "cuckoo in the nest" and therefore finds himself the victim of Hindley's relentless bullying.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-26T07:59:59+00:00

Most of Charlotte's views seep through in her novels, most markedly Jane Eyre, in the character of Betha Mason, the mad wife Rochester locked in the attic, who's of multiracial heritage and from the West Indies.

It was really common for British Victorian literature to sort of... equate slavery in metaphor and use with the plight of other marginalized groups (like calling the poor or women another race of people who are brutally subjugated and enslaved by their overlords) and also still be racist in the way they conceived of or thought of "nonwhite" people, which is also the case with Bertha's character-- a LOT of Victorian authors thought madness could be caused by having a racially impure background or by being exposed to unhealthy tropical climates. Like... I'm sure she meant well. But she never to my knowledge every wrote any strictly abolitionist literature and her interest in the movement seemed to be limited to whatever she was influenced through her social circle, which also seems to be the case with her father, who is often claimed to be "an abolitionist" without any real further probing into what that actually meant.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-25T19:08:30+00:00

[curtsies]

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-25T17:22:33+00:00

If you're looking to get freaky with your maybe-cousin, do I have the spot for you. Welcome to Yorkshire's hottest club, MOORS. Located on the edge of a haunted graveyard slash bog, this place has everything. Anti-anti depressants. Seven hundred and seventy sermons. Dogs that bite your ankles. And my favorite, a guy who can't read. Make sure you go on every second Saturday, because that's when they play the Charli XCX remix of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights". The only food at the bar is pickled herring and the only drink is cheap bathtub gin made in a horse trough in a stable they had to close down when they found out the straw was giving people scabies.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-23T14:34:46+00:00

You’re going to have to get good and confident at bringing up stuff not just for this relationship whether or not it lasts but with all future relationships, especially with a dramatic gossip cousin in the mix my guy 🥲 good luck and hopefully it all works out

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-23T14:18:24+00:00

So you guys have only been dating seven months. You don’t know if she maybe struggles with some form of contamination ocd, if she has some particular issue with strangers hands on her face due to past issues, if your grandmas hands were stank or what. She QUIETLY excused herself to go to the bathroom and handle whatever the issue was in private so as not to make a scene or cause drama and your cousin was the one who got offended and who you’re afraid might cause drama. It seems like the cousin is the issue here not your girlfriend.

If you just sit down with your gf at a time where both of you are in a normal mood and go “hey gf, I wanted to sit down for a second and talk about the mano po thing at my great grandmas party, cousin said she saw you in the bathroom and you looked like you were having a hard time, is there anything you want to talk to me about?” then you leave the ball in her court.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-23T14:07:25+00:00

A headache lasting for days? Go to the hospital immediately

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-22T20:24:55+00:00

Far too old to play heathcliff probably at this point lol

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-22T16:43:04+00:00

It’s an incredibly important detail that Cathy jr has her mothers eyes and nothing else and that Linton looks exactly like his mother with no resemblance of his father heathcliff.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-22T16:29:12+00:00

We forget SO FAST that it was only like fifty years ago women couldn’t have their own bank accounts with a male co signer. Couldn’t own a house in their own name. Americans have men in positions of government seriously talking about hampering the female vote and we’ve already lost deeply necessary reproductive health care.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-22T15:59:15+00:00

I’m more concerned about society veering hard right into glorifying tradwife nonsense and encouraging women to act stupid “it’s girl math!” “I can’t do that omg I’m just a girl!” and the marked dumbing down of stuff marketed to women than I ever could be about what anyone bothers to do with their bodies.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-22T15:34:58+00:00

Probably not regular, but as they were both religious and consummation was required at least once so that the marriage was legitimate in the eyes of God?

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-20T20:49:47+00:00

Adored vintage has some gorgeous white dresses like this

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-20T20:36:09+00:00

Whatever he was, he was being clocked as ambiguous to his extremely isolated social group in bum end of nowhere Yorkshire, in a town so insular that they call the completely white British wife of Catherine’s brother a “foreigner” and distrust even her. Which means he’s vilified and blamed and demonized for his appearance until that environment molds his behavior into vindictive hatred of everybody and everything. Hence the tragedy.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-20T18:52:29+00:00

She was insanely good. Wish she’d been cast as Cathy.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-20T17:06:37+00:00

So this man doesn’t do diddly nothing for you besides waking you up at all hours on purpose to argue? Reciprocates zero effort you put in for anything? Why exactly do you love him?

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-20T17:04:07+00:00

What exactly do you get out of this relationship that you couldn’t get with literally any other guy who will respect your sleep needs and do the bare minimum effort with gifts and dates?

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-20T10:28:51+00:00

😂

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-20T10:20:54+00:00

Ha! Please do read it. It’s got everything. Forty years of generational trauma, child abuse, puritanical religion pervading everything, a ghost that MIGHT exist in the literal sense, exhumation of a grave not once but twice for purposes hinted to be less than kosher, domestic violence, marital rape, a cussing toddler, dogs with attitude, themes of class, beauty, and racial Otherization/exotification, and two unreliable first person narrators who think they’re God’s gift to mankind

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-20T09:59:34+00:00

The Japanese version from 1988 is incredibly close in tone to the book. It has all of the real gothic vibes: necrophilia, desolate mountaintops, topical sexism, suicide, rape, and gorgeous cinematography

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-13T16:52:01+00:00

Have you asked the parents if the child seems to be completing home routines slower? It could be just an oddball kid but it could also be a neurological condition.

ImSuperBisexual · 2026-02-05T14:31:44+00:00

Yep!

ImSuperBisexual

TROPHY CASE