Is Heathcliff black?

The Conversation wonders whether Heathcliff is black.

Did Emily Brontё envisage her most famous fictional protagonist, Heathcliff, as a black man? In recent years there has been extensive debate about whether Heathcliff is supposed to be black. Much of this discussion centres on the proximity of the action in her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights, to Liverpool – which was a world centre for slave-trading during the period in which the novel is set.
Critics have also focused on the way in which Heathcliff is portrayed in Brontё’s novel. Much has been made of the words of the novel’s main narrator, Nelly, to Heathcliff: “If you were a regular black …” she says. There has been a great deal of discussion of what this might mean.
The novel’s most famous action takes place on the moorlands surrounding the quaint Yorkshire village of Haworth – and moorlands are traditionally associated with uncivilised regions. Heathcliff embodies this idea – he is depicted as the quintessential “savage” whose foreignness establishes his position at civilisation’s periphery.
But historians have found abundant evidence to suggest that Heathcliff’s foreignness is not merely symbolic – it makes historical sense. The novel is set in 1801, when Liverpool handled most of Britain’s transatlantic trade in enslaved people. Evidence of this terrible trade could be seen everywhere – the Brontё critic Humphrey Gawthrop records that: “[William] Wilberforce’s colleague, Thomas Clarkson … saw in the windows of a Liverpool shop leg-shackles, handcuffs, thumbscrews and mouth-openers for force-feeding used on board the slavers.”
So if Heathcliff was not a black African or descendant of one, historians have comprehensively demonstrated that he very easily might have been. And while the recurrent critical question has been whether Brontё meant him to be black, research on Yorkshire’s black histories makes it more pertinent to ask why was he not depicted as black until as recently as 2012? (Corinne Fowler) (Read more)

Los Angeles Times argues that studying 'English Lit to acquire 'marketable' skills' is a 'bad argument'.

The only thing you’ll get in a class on the Victorian novel that you won’t get anywhere else is an education in the Victorian novel. If we want students to choose an English degree over other programs equally able to improve their soft skills, we need to make our best case for that specific experience — not just for the value of studying “Bleak House,” “Jane Eyre” or “Middlemarch,” of course, but for the importance of engaging with our vast, diverse, vexing and exhilarating literary culture, from “Beowulf” to the Beat poets, from Tennyson to Toni Morrison. The utilitarian defense we’ve been relying on tacitly concedes the fundamental irrelevance of our actual subject. No wonder we’re demoralized. No wonder it sometimes seems as if our own students — or, more to the point, our prospective students — don’t know what we have to offer. (Rohan Maitzen)

Still on school matters, iNews argues that school reports are not really that meaningful and may 'miss the talents that matter'.

Certainly, the young Winston Churchill was no leading scholar, with one school report noting that he “has no ambition”. Yet his leadership now is revered. And while Charlotte Brontë is one of the great creative writers of 19th century, her school report was more concerned that she “knows little of grammar”. (Tom Ravenscroft)

Times Higher Education comments on

a pair of books exploring aspects of Jewish identity, [in which] Devorah Baum reflects on Jewishness and the human condition. She talks about turning uncomfortable ‘Jewish feelings’ such as guilt into something positive, and how humour is a way of coping with life’s trials [...]
All of this is accompanied by some striking moments of personal revelation, such as when Baum describes her tendency for “nervous laughter”, which sometimes “loses any discernible connection to a source of amusement, and ends, invariably, in equally inexplicable tears”. This happened to her, for instance, when rereading Jane Eyre: hardly a novel known for its broad humour. (Matthew Reisz)

Entertainment Weekly features Alexa Donne's YA debut novel, Brightly Burning, described as

a gothic, romantic mystery with hints of Jane Eyre, Marissa Meyer, and Kiera Cass. (David Canfield)

Daily O (India) has an article on the 'importance of naming and shaming sexual harassers online' by author Priyamvada Gopal.

I've always loathed the Jane-Rochester romance even while loving it as a young woman, so too Heathcliff-Cathy with all the violence built into it. Yet, I know how powerful this idea is that love and romance means pain, cheating and abuse; all perfectly consensual.

We can certainly see how Heathcliff and Cathy's relationship can be seen (because it actually is) abusive, but we fail to see Jane and Rochester that way. After all, Jane leaves him when what he offers her is not good enough for her and won't bow down to him.

Film Journal features the film God's Own Country.

This primitive Yorkshire terrain previously provided a properly stormy backdrop for Wuthering Heights, so Lee agrees that it has a certain geographical kinship with God’s Own Country (although Joshua James Richards’ unflinching photography of the latter seems a planet away from Gregg Toland’s glamorization for William Wyler). “The moors where the Bronte sisters would go out and not meet men and write about meeting men is where I go walking every day, so it’s a subliminal influence.” (Harry Haun)

The Mary Sue reviews The Carmilla Movie.

We get to see some of Carmilla’s victims, in the forms of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, played by Cara Gee and Grace Lynn Kung respectfully [sic] (Princess Weekes)

The News & Observer thinks that Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights belongs on 'your ultimate Halloween party playlist' and Pretty 52 recalls the time (back in 2011) when Noel Fielding did a Kate Bush (singing Wuthering Heights) parody of it for BBC's Just Dance For Comic Relief .