Outwitted by Emily Brontë

The Guardian has an article on 'cinema’s long love affair with Wuthering Heights'.

When Andrea Arnold imagined the opening shots of her film of Wuthering Heights, she saw heavy mists ­swirling around the outline of a misshapen creature as it scaled a hillside. The figure would slowly be revealed as a climbing man, his back laden with dead rabbits for skinning.

On the day of the shoot, however, it was bright and sunny – and there were only three rabbits. “People keep saying one day I will come to like it,” she said later of her 2011 screen version. “It was a difficult experience making it, for various reasons. I find it hard to look at it.”

Arnold is not alone in feeling outwitted by Emily Brontë’s stirring 1847 novel. Wuthering Heights does that to directors. It is a gothic story that roams so wildly in the minds of readers that putting it out into the real world can seem diminishing, or even crass. It is not just the ferocity of the storytelling required, or the tricky handling of supernatural forces, but the central relationship itself. For modern film-makers, the question has become whether this violent narrative is now too dark to deal with, and whether its bullying romantic lead, Heathcliff, is too hot to handle. [...]

Many complained that Robbie, who has lately stalked the globe as Barbie, is not right to play the raven-haired teenager [Cathy's hair is brown, 'brown ringlets'] of the book and that Elordi is too conventionally good-looking for Heathcliff. Some were also angry that he is not the right ethnicity to play a character described in the book as “a dark-skinned Gypsy” who looks like a “lascar” (a slang term for a south Asian sailor), “or an American or Spanish castaway”.

A decade ago, Arnold dodged these accusations of “white-washing” by casting the first non-white actor, James Howson, in the role. In contrast, screenwriter Peter Bowker, who wrote his TV film of the book in 2009, felt the term “Gypsy” was more likely a 19th-century stereotype for an outsider, rather than being meant as a literal characteristic. “There was certainly a growing fear of the ‘other’ in Victorian England and a number of urban myths about ‘cuckoos in the nest’ – strays or orphans that were brought into the family who then consumed it,” he said.

The Brontë expert Sharon Wright is actively enjoying the new fuss. “I think it is brilliant that people are still talking about this book – and with as much intensity as they were 200 yeas ago. Reviewers back then attacked its ‘brutal cruelty and unnatural love’ and looked down on its ‘vulgar depravity’. Poor Emily never saw a good review.”

Wright’s own new book, The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar, about the buildings described in the novels written by Emily and her two literary sisters Charlotte and Anne, comes out next year and was written together with Ann Dinsdale, who works at the trust now run from the three sisters’ former parsonage home in Haworth.

The characters in Wuthering Heights, Wright believes, will always be much harder to represent on film than the houses Brontë described or the wind-blown Yorkshire landscape: “Heathcliff really is a creation that lives only in the reader’s mind’s eye. Brontë is deliberately ambiguous about him.”

But Heathcliff is unlikely to be Fennell’s only problem. She will also need to decide how much of the rain-lashed saga to tell. Several earlier screen versions cut off the story before it gets too self-reflective. But, as Bowker admitted after his version was released, no matter how bravely you take a scythe to the lengthy text, there are certain key lines that a film-maker ought not to sidestep. “At first I thought this is going to be such an easy gig, because the language is so wonderful,” he told fans of the novel. “But then I started writing it out and realised very little of it works as dialogue because it is so heightened and poetic. So I wanted to preserve some of that quality, and there are classic lines, such as Cathy’s ‘I am Heathcliff’, which really you cannot lose.” Only Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky’s 1992 version, starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, gets credit from Brontë enthusiasts for telling the whole unruly tale.

The tragedy of Wuthering Heights, for those still wondering what Kate Bush has been singing about all this time, revolves around the bootless love between Catherine and her Heathcliff, an adopted orphan boy found starving on the streets of Liverpool. The destructive relationship between these two, who find no way to express or fulfil their yearnings, is its gloomy core. For Bowker the point of the story was this “impossible passion”. “I don’t know my Freud well enough to speculate,” he said, “but there is something very fixed and unchanging about their passion which is both entrancing and terrifying.”

Perhaps the most glamorous portrayal of these central lovers is a black-and-white 1939 screen version. A tousle-haired young Laurence Olivier plays the wayward Heathcliff and the striking Hollywood pin-up Merle Oberon is Cathy. While it does have its longueurs, this film is probably the reason that a string of other film-makers have repeatedly hoped to rise to the challenge. It created a turbulent visual template that is hard to forget, even for those who do not know the book.

The other screen outing on the wild and windy moor that remains popular with audiences today is one that starred a pre-007 Timothy Dalton as Heathcliff and Anna Calder-Marshall as Cathy. Made in 1970, it was a box-office success and still has ardent admirers, although it also stops halfway through the original plot and leaves out two pivotal scenes: first, the devastating moment when Heathcliff overhears Cathy dismissing him, and then her later ghostly manifestation at his window.

An uncomplicated pleasure of Brontë’s enduring love story is the clever character names she chose. “Heathcliff” is so evocative, as is the name of the home that gives the book its title. And the three Brontë sisters had reason to understand the importance of a name. Not only is Charlotte’s plain Jane Eyre the perfect foil to her roistering Mr Rochester, but the authors themselves had to invent male names for themselves to avoid embarrassing their family and to pass muster in the wider world of publishing. So Charlotte temporarily became Currer Bell, Anne was Acton Bell and Emily, Ellis Bell.

Wright is also someone who recognises the value of using the right name. Last week she celebrated the success of her campaign to get the spelling of the Brontës’ surname corrected in Westminster Abbey, where a wall plaque in Poets’ Corner commemorates the three writers’ lives. Their surnames had been carved in stone without the two dots over the “e”, known as a diaeresis, that denote the emphasis they placed on the final vowel.

Contemplating the amended memorial this weekend, Wright is sure of one thing: “I do think Emily would be absolutely delighted that we are still trying to figure out Heathcliff. We all have our own vision in our heads and I am really looking forward to seeing Emerald Fennell’s.” (Vanessa Thorpe)

We are enjoying the fact that X's dime-a-dozen experts are now being replaced by people who actually know what it's all about, which in this particular case is 'no one really knows'. A contributor to UnHerd makes the same point--that Heathcliff is left to the reader's imagination.

It is a revelation to me that the rigid consensus around the “race” and ethnic origins of Heathcliff, the Byronic protagonist of Emily Brontë’s legendary Yorkshire Gothic tale, Wuthering Heights, was that he was definitely a “person of colour” — meaning someone of non-European descent, most likely black Sub-Saharan African.

Whenever I’ve read the novel, first at school, and multiple times since, my interpretation has been that Heathcliff was something closer to Romani gypsy origin, and thus would’ve looked more like a saturnine Mediterranean than a Sub-Saharan African or a “half-caste”, to use the arcane 19th century term.

The backlash to the casting of Australian actor Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in Emerald Fennell’s upcoming adaptation from critics on social media demonstrates how firm this consensus is. Volleys of “she obviously hasn’t read the book” and “the story is being whitewashed” have been launched toward Fennell. In the background is clearly the issue of representation of “ethnic minorities” in classical literature. This is why period dramas now are increasingly cast to make the England of the past look like the multiethnic England of present. While understandable, there is a tendency for this to spill over into absolutist claims which ironically become rather racially essentialist — like “Heathcliff is black”.

Despite describing him as having dark skin, dark eyes and dark hair, Bronte leaves Heathcliff’s precise racial and ethnic background rather vague and ambiguous. There is speculation that he might be “a little Lascar, or American or Spanish castaway”. However, it is never stated plainly where he is from, other than that he was a foundling discovered in Liverpool by Mr. Earnshaw, who raised him. Indeed, the enigmatic origins are precisely part of the point of Heathcliff as a character. It enhances his mystique as a wild and exotic Byronic hero, a tortured soul who is “mad, bad and dangerous to know”.

This means, naturally, there is a scope of interpretation for Heathcliff’s “identity”. The theory that he is black or a “person of colour” stems from the fact that throughout the 18th century Liverpool was among the biggest slave trading ports within the British empire. So, Heathcliff might have been the product of an illicit interracial dalliance — possibly involving Mr. Earnshaw himself — and then thrown out onto the streets. Thus, the hostility and exclusion he endures is basically racism.

It’s plausible. But if he was canonically black then I suspect his enemies, given the era, would’ve gleefully stressed his “negro” origins.

It’s not outrageous that Jacob Elordi (who has Basque ancestry on his father’s side) would be cast as Heathcliff. Neither was it wrong for the 2011 adaptation to have a mixed-race Heathcliff, because it leans into the ambiguity and fits in with contemporary understanding of difference — it still exemplified the “otherness” of the character. Shakespeare’s works have been “race blended” like this many times, and few blink an eye because what is important is not the precise race of the actor, but the role they fulfil.

As a “person of colour”, it doesn’t offend me that Emily Brontë probably had in mind someone who looked more like Russell Brand or Colin Farrell than myself when imagining Heathcliff. I don’t feel “excluded”, because I feel connected to these characters irrespective of race or phenotype.

Regrettably, our culture labours under the condescending misapprehension that in order for ethnic minorities to connect with the classics of the English canon, they necessarily have to see themselves represented in the story by people who “look like them”. This treats literature not as a humanist enterprise — where we enter into a universal conversation through characters that are very much not “like us” — but more a form of ancestor worship. It is a regrettable development in modern culture, and one that should be resisted. (Ralph Leonard)

Reader's Digest recommends '35 Inspiring Biographies Everyone Should Read' and one of them is

The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects by Deborah Lutz

For fans of: A Memoir of Jane Austen: And Other Family Recollections by James Edward Austen-Leigh

Perhaps three of the most famous sisters in literary history, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë have delighted and awed readers with their collective works for nearly 200 years. That fascination continues in this 2015 biography by Deborah Lutz, which comes recommended by biographer Natalie Dykstra, emerita professor of English at Hope College and the author of Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner.

“The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects brilliantly reveals the inner lives of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë by taking up, in detail, nine objects in their household, including tiny handmade books, needlework items and a bracelet of entwined hair,” Dykstra says. “Lutz’s plunge into the ‘private lives of objects’ brings the sisters incredibly close through the things they touched and used in their daily lives. So we get to see Charlotte reciting poetry while her fingers are busy with a patchwork quilt; Emily, whom Charlotte described as ‘a solitude-loving raven,’ out on her beloved Yorkshire moors with her walking stick; Anne writing poetry on her portable desk that carried papers, letters, seals, ink and writing pens. Lutz’s unforgettable account is a reminder that objects can also resurrect the ‘daily living and breathing’ of biographical subjects.” (Tria Wen)

While Town and Country recommends the '20 Best Gothic Novels to Read on a Gloomy Autumn Night' and two of them are

Wuthering Heights

Set on the bleak Yorkshire moors, Wuthering Heights follows the love story of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. Emily Brontë infuses her storytelling with many gothic elements, including the supernatural, aristocrats, and the gloomy aesthetic. Plus, there's currently a Wuthering Heights adaptation in the works, so now is the perfect time to read (or re-read) the classic. [...]

Jane Eyre

"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day" begins Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, a novel that is firmly in the gothic tradition. Jane Eyre follows the story of Jane, from her perspective, as she grows up and falls for the mysterious Rochester. (Emily Burack)

BBC Radio Leeds invited Martina Devlin to speak about her novel, Charlotte. AnneBrontë.org discusses 'Aunt Branwell And The Brontës In Brussels'.