I watched a BBC police procedural the other night---Unforgotten--about a team who investigates cold cases.
In one sitting, I watched all six episodes of season 4 (because that's the one I ran across). In this season, Phaldut Sharma, a British Indian actor, plays a dark, handsome, and damaged suspect.
Hey, he could play Heathcliff, I thought.
Emily Bronte described Heathcliff as a Lascar (Indian sailor in the British Navy), or a gypsy.
In Wuthering Heights (1847), Catherine Earnshaw's father found the child Heathcliff wandering homeless in Liverpool--"a world centre for slave-trading during the period in which the novel is set.
. . . The novel is set in 1801, when Liverpool handled most of Britain’s transatlantic trade in enslaved people."
––Article [I fixed this wrong link], "Was Heathcliff Black?"
10 comments:
The “Was H Black?” link goes elsewhere.
Whatever H is, he is, in the world of the novel, other.
Darn—I’ll fix the link—thanks for telling me.
Yeah, he’s very much other!
Does it really matter what colour Heathcliff was? The story would still be good wouldn't it?
I think you are spot on.
Was Wuthering Heights perhaps a social study of the race and class issues of the times?
We loved "Unforgotten"!
RIVER: Heathcliff's color matters *in* the story itself--it's mentioned several times and is one of the things some the other characters hold against him.
(Also, he is an outsider, a powerless, penniless orphan.)
It's interesting to try to envision what characters look like, and since Heathcliff's usually portrayed by white actors, I enjoyed finding an actor who looks more like the way the author, Emily Bronte, described her character.
GZ: Good to know.
CROW: I sure do wonder what Emily Bronte intended... I'm not sure anyone knows? She died at thirty, shortly after her only novel was published, she having had little contact with others outside her family circle.
Have you read Wuthering Heights?
I thought it was authentically and surprisingly weird---sort of like the twisted trees that grow on the moors, bent into strange shapes by the wind.
STEVE: I've started season one now and am liking it a lot.
RIVER: P.S. The story would be good no matter what color Heathcliff was, you're right, but Bronte adding his color adds a layer of complexity, like a teaspoon of vanilla in a cake.
I should probably read the story, but tried another of Bronte's years ago and found it didn't suit me. Too long-winded I think, my brain is not zippy enough to take all that in and digest it.
RIVER: Well, honestly, I wouldn't exactly recommend Wuthering Height... It's a good story, but it's almost entirely about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things.
Emily Bronte only wrote this one novel--maybe you tried her sister Charlotte's novel Jane Eyre?
I love that book, but I can imagine it might be a bit hard to follow, written in the mid-1800s...
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