Heathcliff in the Post-Racial World: A Transformation of Filmic Identity

Abstract

The racial identity of Heathcliff in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights hasn’t been concretely constructed. She calls him ‘a Lascar’ and a ‘dark-skinned gipsy in aspect’ leaving the character’s ethnicity open to debate. In his introduction to Wuthering Heights, Christopher Heywood calls Heathcliff ‘a child of Africa’, and says that while Heathcliff is ‘[m]isread as a Gypsy, Lascar, castaway, and prince of India and China’ he is a ‘son of Ham’. In Heathcliff and the Great Hunger, Terry Eagleton considers Heathcliff as ‘quite possibly’ Irish, but also says that he ‘may be a gypsy, or (like Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre) a Creole, or any kind of alien. It is hard to know how black he is, or rather how much of the blackness is pigmentation and how much of it is grime and bile’.