All the Wuthering Heights quotes about Heathcliff’s race, as director responds to ‘whitewashing’

Though I’m hesitant to call it an adaptation, considering the huge changes to Heathcliff and Cathy’s story, Emerald Fennell’s take on Wuthering Heights dropped on Galentine’s Day.

The rework of Emily Brontë’s classic work has been an utter car crash from start to finish. When the film was first announced, with Saltburn’s Emerald and Margot Robbie attached, people were excited. Then Jacob Elordi was cast as the male lead, Heathcliff, and eyebrows started to raise about Wuthering Heights.

You see, in the classic work of literature, which was written in 1847, the physical description of Heathcliff is starkly different to Jacob. Though his race is ambiguous and prone to varying interpretations, the simplest description of him is “other.” It’s like the whole point of the story, which is why accusations of “whitewashing” were raised when Jacob, a white Australian, was cast.

Admittedly, Emily Brontë seemed to write deliberately ambiguously about Heathcliff’s race. Though his background is not definitively stated throughout the novel, numerous lines point (scream, in fact) to him being a man of colour.

Here are a few lines from the book:

• He’s described as a “dark skinned gypsy, in aspect.”
• “A little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway.”
• “It’s a gypsy brat.”
• “You’re fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?”
• Various uses of the words “dark” and “black.”

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Then, there are less overt references to Heathcliff’s race. He was initially discovered in Liverpool, a reference to a major port in the transatlantic slave trade, and characters often refer to him with racialised language that would have allowed readers to connect the dots at the time. Things like calling him a “heathen”, or speaking “different from the others.”

Credit: Warner Bros

Wuthering Heights’ director on the Heathcliff casting

At the film’s premiere, Emerald Fennell was outright asked about the casting of Jacob Elordi in what is obviously supposed to be a role for a man of colour.

“I think the thing is everyone who loves this book has such a personal connection to it and so you can only ever kind of make the movie that that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it,” she responded. “I don’t know, I think I was sort of focusing on the kind of sado-masochistic elements of it… that’s the great thing about this movie is that it could be made every year and it would still be so moving and so interesting.”

You have to question her reading skills if she read Wuthering Heights and dreamt of Heathcliff as a white man.

This isn’t even a particularly new issue, because in each of the attempted car crash adaptations over the years, Heathcliff has been played by a wide variety of racial backgrounds.

Only one thing is painfully clear: Wuthering Heights’ Heathcliff is not white, and in 2026, it’s exhausting.

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Featured image credit: Warner Bros