'Has she even read the book, people asked. The question is: have they?'

A columnist from The Standard writes 'In defence of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff'.

So far, so good. But news that Elordi had been cast as the great hero of Emily Brontë’s novel, in an adaptation by Emerald Fennell, caused outrage. “He’s too young! Too hot! Too Australian!” people clamoured. Most of all, he’s “too white”.

It is impossible to address this last point without revealing a theory about the plot which constitutes a massive spoiler. So, be warned. It is believed by some critics that Heathcliff is the illegitimate son of his “adoptive” father, the result of a liaison with a woman from overseas. But his ethnicity and origin are kept ambiguous. One character describes him as "a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway” (a Lascar is a dated and pejorative term for a sailor from Southeast Asia, and not a word we’d recommend using now). At other points, he is called a gypsy (ditto). We also know that he is “dark skinned”.

Heathcliff has been played in the past by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes and Tom Hardy. Who are all, it goes without saying, very white. But that was then and this is now, and the matter of Heathcliff’s race clearly trumps all other points of discussion. Ethnic accuracy is paramount, and Fennell is clearly a monster who should have cast Dev Patel.

Has she even read the book, people asked. The question is: have they? Elordi is of Spanish descent (his father is Basque): do they realise this is one of Heathcliff’s possible origins? And while you could counter-argue that the Victorian inability to tell American, Spanish and Southeast Asian ethnicities apart (as per the quote from the novel above) is appalling – and we should not base our interpretation of character on such racist ideals – isn’t that exactly what puritan readers are suggesting we do? That we stay true, to a fault, to what Emily Brontë wrote?

Elordi is an exceptional actor, capable of unbelievably powerful performances, and far from just a pretty face (read: the hottest man currently roaming the earth).

This is no different to people being up in arms about “miscasting” Golda Rosheuvel as Queen Charlotte in Bridgerton, Halle Bailey in the live action remake of the Little Mermaid or Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein, which required makeup artists to – how can I put this? – exaggerate his nose. We need to allow artistic licence where reasonable, and casting a hunky Australian whose English accent is on par with Gwyneth Paltrow’s, in an era where makeup artists can age an actor with remarkable verisimilitude, seems reasonable enough. (Although the accent he’ll need to pull off for Heathcliff is quite different from the one he mastered for Felix, it must be said.)

None of this even begins to address the single most important point: that Elordi is an exceptional actor, capable of unbelievably powerful performances, and far from just a pretty face (read: the hottest man currently roaming the earth).

As far as Heathcliff’s otherness is concerned: yes, it is an important part of his character. But the beauty of art – and of a 177-year-old tale of pure fiction – is that the creator (in this case, Fennell) can (and should) be afforded freedom to express that otherness as they see fit. The answer to the Elordi-not-being-a-gypsy conundrum might be found in what former Heathcliff Tom Hardy did with Bane in The Dark Knight Rises. “Bane, quintessentially, is Latinx in origin and I’m not,” Hardy told Wired when the Christopher Nolan film came out in 2012. “So I looked at the concept of Latin and found a man called Bartley Gorman, who’s a Romani gypsy. The king of the gypsies, in inverted commas, and a bare-knuckle fighter and a boxer.” He remoulded the movie’s villain to fit an image that he could pull off, and his accent and portrayal garnered plaudits.

The truth is, had Fennell chosen a Southeast Asian actor to play Heathcliff, people would still be up in arms that she hadn't cast one of Roma origin. And vice versa. I think the idea of Margot Robbie as Cathy is just plain silly – not because she’s too old, as some have suggested, but because she’s too Hollywood. Too perfect, too symmetrical, too Bottega. That, and the fact that her production company is behind the film, which suggests the sort of unfair monopoly on par with Google paying Apple $20bn to make them the default search engine on the iPhone.

But as for the outrage over Elordi: this is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. My advice to Fennell: ignore the backlash. And get Kate Bush to do the soundtrack. (William Hosie)

A contributor to Plough discusses Jane Eyre and free will.

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me; I am a free human being, with an independent will.”

These are words spoken by Jane Eyre in the midst of a climactic moment in the novel that bears her name.

Stripped from their context, the words – written nearly two centuries ago – still resound. They are bold. Brave. Strong. Compassionating. But within the context of the narrative, the words – spoken to the man Jane loves but will give up in order to choose her own integrity over love – are even more astonishing.

In the world of Jane Eyre (published by Charlotte Brontë in 1847), the titular character is as helpless, powerless, and socially inconsequential as a person in her world could be. In this context, it is no less than revolutionary for a poor, friendless, servant – and a woman, no less – to claim for herself, as she does with the words above, her freedom, identity, and sheer sense of self. (Truth be told, such is still revolutionary in some spaces in the world today.) Orphaned, rejected by her few known relations, and utterly alone in the world, Jane rejects the man who loves her, woos her, and betrays her – despite the fact that Rochester’s power as Jane’s employer, protector, and social superior could give much of what she lacks and needs.

At this point in the narrative, we have journeyed with Jane through the physical and emotional abuse she endured as a small child living in the home of her cruel aunt and equally cruel cousins. We have witnessed the despicable hypocrisy of the Christian overseers and funders of the charity school where Jane is sent as a child, an institution run so poorly that some of its students die from illness and neglect. We have cheered Jane as she manages to survive and, even more miraculously, encounters for the first time in her life real agape love, twice, in fact, in the forms of a friend and a kind teacher. (Karen Swallow Prior) (Read more)

The Minnesota Star Tribune also has a letter from a reader on how Jane Eyre is still relevant.

‘Jane Eyre,’ unrelatable? Since when?

Eva Lockhart says that she would never teach “Jane Eyre” or “Pride and Prejudice” to 16-year-olds (”Kids can still get hooked on the classics,” Strib Voices, Sept. 27). I read “Jane Eyre” in sixth grade (at age 11). That story of the unloved, unwanted, bullied little girl who was far from beautiful resonated more with me than anything else I had ever read. Sixty years later it is still the book I love the best. “Not a universal text”? “Particular to a limited audience”? I don’t agree.

Elaine Murray, Minneapolis

Anyway, it's October now, the time for all things spooky, and so there's a column on 'The unseen ghost in Rebecca' on MovieJawn.

Maxim resembles Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre, the 1847 classic by Charlotte Brontë, which Rebecca parallels. Some regard du Maurier’s novel as an adaptation of Brontë’s, though the author disagrees. She did not intend to invoke Jane Eyre, in which a young orphan finds out that the rich older man who proposed to her already has a sham marriage with a psychotic woman living in the attic. Oopsie! (Or did she  actually suffer from exploitation, not mental illness? See Jean Rhys’s 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea and the 1993 movie adaptation.) Rebecca is like a spectral retelling of Jane Eyre where the madwoman in the attic becomes the ghost of the first Mrs. de Winter.

From echoes of Jane Eyre to Hitchcock’s only gay woman, there is a lot going on in Rebecca. It keeps the movie interesting nearly 85 years after its release. If you have not seen it yet, give it a watch! Let me know what you think of Mrs. Danvers, how the protagonist compares with Jane Eyre, and how her romance with Maxim measures up in the twenty-first century. (Melissa Strong)