I will be the first to admit that when I read Wuthering Heights on the syllabus for my British literature course, I had to suppress a surge of disappointment. Like most who have attended public high school in the U.S., I read Wuthering Heights during my senior year. At seventeen, I did not have an interest in a novel that was full of difficult dialect and reminded me of a soap opera. At seventeen, I did not have the patience for this novel.
Now, in my senior year of college, I have come to appreciate Wuthering Heights. Rereading this novel for the first time in years, I noticed how many significant social and cultural barriers Emily Brontë was breaking when she wrote the hauntingly intense love story. Our class discussions fueled curiosity regarding Heathcliff’s race, an aspect of the novel that was left unexplored in my high school AP literature class.
Heathcliff is non-white, presumably African, which in unheard of as a main character, let alone a love interest, in a Victorian age novel. However, the evidence is glaring. Brontë describes Heathcliff as a “dark-skinned gypsy” and he is told by one of the other characters that he is not a “regular black.”
Although, in the novel, Heathcliff is speculated to be “a little Lascar, or an American, or Spanish castaway,” he is brought to Wuthering Heights from Liverpool, which was “a world centre for slave-trading during the period in which the novel is set” (according to an article by Corinne Fowler). Despite the historical evidence, Heathcliff has been portrayed as a white man until a 2012 film version of Wuthering Heights (directed by Andrea Arnold).
(Young Heathcliff portrayed by Solomon Glave)
It absolutely baffles me that this is not a topic that was openly discussed in my high school literature class. Once again, I find myself questioning the education of my high school years. Maybe if we had actually taken the time to try and understand the social and cultural commentary embedded in Wuthering Heights instead of memorizing plot to pass a quiz, I wouldn’t have approached the novel with such disdain the second time around. As usual, I am grateful for my college education, and the courses that allow me to revisit and expand on classic literature.