Photo-illustration: Vulture; Photos: Getty, Warner Bros.

At the L.A. premiere of Wuthering Heights last month, Emerald Fennell responded to widespread criticism concerning her choice to cast the Basque Australian Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in lieu of a person of color. The director — who seems to have strategically preempted judgment about the film’s faithfulness to its source text by cushioning the title with scare quotes — dug herself into a bit of a hole: “Everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it, and so you can only kind of ever make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it.” 

Fennell’s answer was lighter fluid to English majors’ fire, one that has raged online ever since Elordi was announced to play Emily Brontë’s Byronic hero in 2024. In the novel, Heathcliff is described within the first few pages as a “dark-skinned gypsy in aspect.” A director choosing to imagine away racial clues? In this economy? Many Wuthering Heights fans are adamant that they know Heathcliff’s true identity, even if they’re often reaching different conclusions; some of the most common claims are that he’s Black or of Romani origin. Others believe he could be Irish. 

If Fennell is whitewashing Heathcliff, she certainly wouldn't be the first. Onscreen, Heathcliff has been represented over the years as a hunky-if-uncouth white man played by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, and Ralph Fiennes. It wasn’t until Andrea Arnold’s 2011 take that an English-language adaptation gave us a Black Heathcliff, played as an adult by James Howson, who is biracial. Fennell has chosen people of color to play other Wuthering Heights characters who, in the book, are pretty unambiguously white: Edgar Linton (Shazad Latif) and Nelly Dean (Hong Chau). But even if the director is participating in a fantastical, Bridgerton-esque approach to colorblind casting — or else purposefully disrupting canonical characters’ identities despite the importance of race in the original plot — her two leads remain, quite notably, white.

Talk to people who study and teach Victorian literature about this debate and they’ll say, “Welcome to the club. We’ve been at it for nearly a century already.” If Brontë scholars have indeed spilled that much ink over the mystery of Heathcliff’s origins, there probably isn’t one correct answer — so why are we still so worked up about it?

Heathcliff’s origin story goes like this: Upon his return from a journey to Liverpool, Mr. Earnshaw (father to Cathy and Hindley) brings back a “dirty, ragged, black-haired child” speaking “some gibberish that nobody could understand.” He tells his family that he found the child “starving, and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner.” While his wife is ready to throw “the gypsy brat” out, Heathcliff — named for their dead son — becomes Mr. Earnshaw’s favorite. 

Throughout the novel, Heathcliff is variously described as “exactly like the son of the fortune-teller that stole my tame pheasant,” “a little Lascar or an American or Spanish castaway,” a lad “who looks an out-and-outer,” “as dark almost as if it came from the devil,” and, when frightened, “as white as the wall behind him.” He’s also described in negative terms: Per the servant Nelly, he’s not “a regular Black.” As a teenager, Heathcliff's close relationship with Cathy is threatened when they encounter the fair-skinned, wealthier Lintons, who live across the moors, and she spends five weeks in their home recovering from an injury. When Heathcliff registers her admiration for Edgar, he admits to Nelly that he wishes for “Edgar Linton’s great blue eyes and even forehead.” Nelly comforts him by way of fantasy: What if his father was “Emperor of China” and his mother “an Indian queen”?

Cathy returns from the Lintons’ more of a lady; she comments on Heathcliff’s dirtiness and worries that he will soil her dress. Could Heathcliff’s “blackness” be more metaphorical, then? Confusingly, Brontë does explicitly use darkness as a metaphor to describe the character’s tempestuous moods and “black countenance.” At times, the distinction between mood and physical description blurs After Cathy dies midway through the novel, Heathcliff is inconsolable: “The longer he stood, the plainer his reflections revealed their blackness through his features.” 

Heathcliff, the Earnshaws, and the Lintons each occupy a specific place in Brontë’s spectrum of darkness and class. The Earnshaws are an older family, darker-haired than the flaxen Lintons, into whose family both Cathy and Heathcliff eventually marry. Despite this, Heathcliff is an outsider among them both in manner and appearance — though he does undergo a meaningful transformation. After spending three years away from the moors, he returns with a small fortune of unknown provenance, looking almost a gentlemen: “A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified: quite divested of roughness, though too stern for grace.” Newly dreamy, he takes the besotted Isabella Linton as a wife. Their son is the image of his blonde mother. “Where is my share in thee?” Heathcliff asks him gruffly. “Don’t wince and color up! Though it is something to see you have not white blood.” 

“The discussion is surprisingly old,” says Sally Shuttleworth, a professor of English at Oxford. The idea that Heathcliff might be of African descent first entered academic discussion in the 1950s and gained momentum as postcolonial studies became more popular in the ’80s and ’90s. Scholars have argued that the proximity of Liverpool — one of the biggest slave ports at the time in which Wuthering Heights is set — to the Brontës’ home in Haworth cannot be overlooked. 

Even so, Shuttleworth says the public’s belief that Heathcliff is a Black character has “become a truism that's trotted out now without much examination.” Arnold’s film seems to have a long tail in the collective consciousness, supported by Caryl Phillips’s 2015 novelistic reimaging of Heathcliff as Mr. Earnshaw’s love child with a formerly enslaved Black woman from the West Indies. But, says Corinne Fowler, honorary professor of colonialism and heritage at the University of Leicester, “the name Heathcliff serves as a forename and a surname — that would be exactly as people's names were recorded on plantation records.” Without a surname, you’d have no claim to patrilineal inheritance. So if Heathcliff wasn’t the fruit of an affair but an enslaved Black child, I asked Fowler, would taking him home be considered stealing? “To quote the novel, Mr. Earnshaw inquired for ‘its owner,’ so he probably was anxious that he wasn't stealing somebody else's servant or so-called property,” she says. Fowler also highlighted more evidence to support the reading of Heathcliff as a formerly enslaved child fallen into destitution: Once Heathcliff is embedded with the Earnshaws, it is suggested that the child was “hardened, perhaps, to ill-treatment.” 

Fowler co-curated the recently opened exhibition “The Colonial Brontës” at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, which presents new evidence in the debate. Her team looked at the missionary writings, newspapers, periodicals, textbooks, and colonial news and propaganda to which the young Brontës were exposed to determine how these materials influenced their juvenalia (the siblings were prolific even as children, inventing an imaginary colony called the Glass Town Federation) and subsequent work. “Heathcliff was almost certainly based on a character invented by Charlotte Brontë called Quashia Quamina, who is basically a colonial composite,” Fowler says. “He is both based on the boy of an Indian ruler who'd been orphaned because of the East India Company battles. But he's also based on an Ashanti warrior's son.” 

Whether or not Heathcliff is supposed to be Black in the novel, it’s historically viable for him to have been. “He had many real-life counterparts in people of African descent,” says Fowler, referring to a handful of Black people found in Yorkshire archives during Emily Brontë’s lifetime, including farmhands, servants, and child mill workers. Although there’s no evidence in letters or biographical documents to suggest that Emily Brontë encountered them directly, she almost certainly would have read about them, including the escape of one man from a big slave-owning family who lived across the road from the Brontës’ school. Emily also would have been acquainted with debates around abolition; Frederick Douglass spoke in Liverpool in 1846, the year she was completing her book.

The Victorian-literature specialist Catherine Robson has another theory: “The feeling that he should be of African heritage, I think that is interference coming in from her sister's book. Because we do know that in Jane Eyre, Bertha Rochester is born in Jamaica.” (The subject of Bertha’s Creoleness has been taken up by many writers, including postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak and Wide Sargasso Sea author Jean Rhys.) 

But there’s another prevalent interpretation in the scholarship: that Heathcliff was possibly Irish. Emily began writing Wuthering Heights in the autumn of 1845, only weeks after her substance-abusing brother, Branwell, had returned from a trip to Liverpool. This was at the very beginning of the famine, when the Irish started coming down to England in search of work, so Branwell could have plausibly encountered them. In her biography of Emily Brontë, Winifred Gérin comments that “Their image, and especially that of the children, was unforgettably depicted in the Illustrated London News — starving scarecrows with a few rags on them and an animal growth of black hair almost obscuring their features.” This is, to an extent, fitting with the description we have of Heathcliff. Furthermore, the Irish may have been “symbolically dark” because they were associated with “dirty work or digging,” Fowler says. 

Branwell and his siblings would have been all the more sensitive to Irish stereotypes and struggles given that their father, Patrick Brontë, né Brunty, was an Irishman who had remade himself, by name and education, into someone who was “not identifiably Irish,” as Elsie Michie, who has written about racist depictions of Irish people in Victorian times, puts it. (The Marxist scholar Terry Eagleton stated it differently: that Patrick “obediently” reinforced the “English stereotype of the feckless Mick.”) “The whole world is being conceived in terms of racial difference in this moment as of the British Empire,” says Michie, so the Irish would have been considered darker than the British. So would the ethnically distinct Irish Travellers and Romani people, with whom the Irish might be lumped.

There’s a crucial element of the book we haven’t yet discussed: the lack of omniscient narration. Wuthering Heights is technically narrated by Mr. Lockwood, an outsider to the community. But a good majority of the book is him listening to the servant Nelly recounting two generations’ worth of story with the stray letter thrown in. Shuttleworth believes that the narrative complexity of the book isn’t often taken into account in the Heathcliff debate and that “everything is being mediated by narrators who have vested interests in one form or another.” Nelly, for example, is a servant who was brought up as a quasi-sibling to the Earnshaws. She weeps when one of Heathcliff’s rivals, Hindley, dies “as for a blood relation.” Surely she wouldn’t be rooting for the strange, villainous Heathcliff?

“The point about Heathcliff is he is so different from the community he comes into, which is very homogenous. Liverpool is a port city, so anybody could be coming in from anywhere,” says Robson. “Emily Brontë is interested in sameness and difference, so the huge thing is why Cathy says, ‘I am Heathcliff.’” Scholars have long answered that question with class analysis: Illegitimate men and women shared an inferior status given that neither had access to property or ownership. We can hope, at the very least, that Cathy’s sense of identification with Heathcliff, which becomes romantic love as she grows older, isn’t due to their secretly being half-siblings. 

So is Heathcliff white? By Victorian standards, he’s definitely not white — and likely by ours as well. Is Heathcliff Black? Maybe! It is both historically and textually viable, but he isn’t necessarily Black. 

What every scholar I spoke agreed on is that you can’t prove one reading over another. Will they be seeing the film? Yes. Are they worried? Also yes. “Certainly on the basis of Saltburn, Fennell doesn't seem a terribly sensitive reader of history and class, so that's what makes me slightly nervous,” says Robson. “But, you know, it's her fever dream.”

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By Jack Denton

The meeting of the men, a roundtable discussion about “the state of masculinity in contemporary literature” held at 92NY late last month, began with a moment of vulnerability. “This seemed like such a good idea when we first thought of it,” the novelist and moderator Andrew Lipstein admitted, his brow furrowed. “When I started to think about what I wanted to ask and how I wanted this conversation to go, I got a little bit scared.” To take on masculinity and literature — in an hour-long panel, no less — was like trying to address fiction and feminism or socialism and writing. Masculinity was a concept like “equality or freedom or Zionism,” Lipstein said. “A lot can live inside of that term.” 

He gestured to his fellow panelists as proof of the point, each writer’s work an illustration of “concrete ways to grapple with masculinity that are so different from each other, both the grappling and the idea of masculinity.” Onstage were Phil Klay, whose fiction — including 2014’s National Book Award–winning short-story collection Redeployment — interrogates the psychologies of the American men involved in this century’s forever wars; Sean Thor Conroe, whose much-discoursed 2022 novel, Fuccboi, is written in an abbreviated bro patois and whose protagonist suffers a debilitating infection whose ultimate source might be toxic masculinity itself; and Daniel Lefferts, whose debut novel, Ways and Means (2024), moves between the male worlds of finance, right-wing politics, and gay life. Lipstein’s most recent book, last year’s Something Rotten, features a former NPR host who, disgraced for a Toobin-esque moment of Zoom-cast cunnilingus, begins to embrace his manhood after fleeing to Denmark.

And what is the trouble with men? (“This deathless debate,” in the words of the critic Parul Sehgal, “simultaneously so bloated and thin.”) If you believe the newspaper articles, Substack posts, and social-media discourse, they aren't reading — fiction especially. One oft-repeated, if dubious, statistic has it that men account for only 20 percent of fiction sales. But even exaggerated numbers seem to point to a real gender divide in reading. Was it podcasts’ fault? Publishing-industry assumptions? Wokeness? When the tight-lipped Flesh won last year’s Booker prize, the Guardian ran an editorial celebrating it for “putting masculinity back at the centre of literary fiction … a genre many thought closed to men.”

Maybe the problem was how men were reading: too “performatively,” or to attract a mate like some kind of literati pickup artist. Or the issue was what they were reading, as with the “brodernists,” who fetishize austere and formally challenging literature in translation, such as the novels of last year’s Nobel winner László Krasznahorkai. I won’t even get into the highly controversial debate, led by Richard Reeves, on whether men are struggling in society at large and why they swung to the right in the 2024 election. Or the fact that reading itself seems to be on the wane for everyone.

The panel, however, touched on none of that. Instead, the first half tended toward a game of “Are you my mother?” for masculinity. Lipstein would bring up scenes, plotlines, even entire books of the authors’ writing and ask: Is this about masculinity? This went rather predictably, though occasionally it prompted more interesting moments, like Lefferts’s discussion of his interest in writing about “masculinity as a performance among other types of performances, like a class performance, for example.” He went on, “Because I write about gay men, there’s a special lens on it. For that kind of man, the object of his desire is also the same as his own subjectivity. And there's a way in which gay men often try to become something like the objects of their desire.”

Lefferts noted that literary fiction tends toward depictions of men “who are paralytically self-conscious about being a man” — the 92NY event and its writers’ work were decidedly not beating that allegation — and as such he sometimes longs for a male character who is a “garden-variety asshole.” He had adored Paula Bomer’s Stalker for this reason. But, he wondered, could a man have written that character? Would one?

Perhaps not Klay, who stated his own approach to fiction while discussing a story about sexual violence in Redeployment. “I wrote that to grapple most directly with some of the truly horrific things that you encounter that people take a certain delight in,” he said. “You actually name the thing and talk about it in order to be able for yourself to think morally about, What kind of man do I want to be?”

The panel featured almost no discussion of literary form or language (sorry to the brodernists in attendance), favoring plot, theme, and character analysis. A large chunk of the conversation veered away from fiction and toward “men’s group”–style take-slinging about masculinity and manhood. There was talk about whether contemporary American masculinity’s toxicity is the result of a lack of troop-heavy ground wars. “A lot of what's going on in this country right now stems from an attempt to make masculinity necessary again. The mark of a functioning society is that masculine virtues become less important,” Lefferts said. “But if you contrive wars and economic crises and ambient environments of hostility and alarm, those versions become necessary.”

As Conroe put it, “You have this energy bubbling and no use or domain or arena in which to exercise that,” though he later added, “If more men are vulnerable and crying all the time, everything would be better.” He was wearing a blazer, a mildly surprising upgrade from the undershirts he sported during the press blitz around Fuccboi. “I've been reading a lot of Jung, so I'm very into this shadow thing,” he said during one of several hard-to-follow detours into “unconscious urges” and masculinity as imposing logos outside the “city walls.” At a few points during the panel I longed for the novels themselves rather than the authors’ garbled explications. (For the record, Fuccboi is good.)

The auditorium was not quite half-full, made up of lots of (but not only) 30-something white guys who had trekked uptown despite the Arctic weather. Fresh Off the Boat’s Eddie Huang and the boxing coach and novelist Harold Rogers were there to support Conroe, their main “friend who reads,” and a gaggle of boys from the Regis High School debate team sat in front of me. When I asked a few about their favorite literature, a sophomore told me he’d recently read “this book called Abundance by Ezra Klein.” Another, a senior, launched into a passionate exegesis of Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin.

After the event finished, I debriefed with two women who had been sitting in my row. Emily, a 23-year-old, had brought along her friend Maggie, a 25-year-old who doesn’t usually “pay much attention to non-female-identifying people or what they think.” They were displeased with the discussion — though Maggie admitted it made her curious to read Fuccboi. “We just listened to some bullllshiiiiiit,” Emily told me. “This was probably just not a good idea right now given everything that's going on with the Trump administration. Women and men don't like each other right now.”

Before they headed out, I asked them what they were reading. Emily was working her way through Infinite Jest. 

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