Professor Reacts To Jacob Elordi’s Wuthering Heights Casting

Oscar-winning filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s decision to cast Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff in her new adaptation of Wuthering Heights movie has proven controversial since it was first announced.

Some have accused the director of “whitewashing” the character, who is alternately speculated to have Romani, Spanish, Indian, and American heritage in the original book.

In the novel, Heathcliff is described as “dark-skinned”, and whatever his actual ethnicity may be, his background is constantly discussed in the novel.

Responding to the backlash, Fennell recently shared that she picked Elordi for the role because “he looked exactly like the illustration of Heathcliff on the first book that I read”, adding in another interview: “You can only ever kind of make the movie that you sort of imagined yourself when you read it”.

After the controversy, I read the book to see for myself how race appeared in the novel, and was struck by just how often it was brought up. So, I asked nineteenth-century literature professor, Dr Josephine McDonagh, for her thoughts on the casting controversy.

But Dr McDonagh thinks this is unlikely.

“The novel is highly invested in racial differences, and the text makes clear that the possibilities of human darkness for Brontë far exceed the commonplace idea that Brontë just meant a variation of whiteness,” she told HuffPost UK (it should also be noted that the Roma can be considered their own ethnic group).

“Race is a huge preoccupation in the novel (and all the Brontës’ novels, for that matter),” she added.

Even as girls, the professor pointed out, the Brontë sisters played games based on an imagined world set in West Africa.

“In their imaginations, they divided up the continent between the four of them, and had their own colonies, with some native people in them. It’s really not right to claim that they weren’t thinking about race in quite sophisticated ways.”

This does not, however, mean that we definitely know what Heathcliff’s race was “meant” to be. His perceived racial identity shifts often in the novel: he’s othered along racial lines, but that “otherness” isn’t ever strictly given one name.

So, Dr McDonagh told us this in the novel, his race is “undecidable”.

Is he definitely non-white? “Maybe, maybe not. That’s the way novels work! But the suggestion is definitely there.”

Of course, movie adaptations don’t have to be faithful to the source material, and Fennell has said she deliberately put the title of her film in quotation marks on the poster and promo materials because she “couldn’t ever hope to make anything that could even encompass the greatness of this book”.

For her part, the professor told us: “I don’t think that the new movie should have cast Heathcliff as Black, but I do think it would be a loss if it doesn’t negotiate the question of race in some way.

“Especially these days, when race is discussed so frequently and so explicitly.”

She added that, personally, she’s not the biggest fan of what she’s seen from the movie’s trailer. The literature professor added that she thinks Andrea Arnold’s 2011 film adaptation of the novel, which cast James Howson as Heathcliff in one of the rare cases a Black actor has portrayed the character on screen, is “terrific – when I first saw it, the casting was a surprise, and it was really impressive”.

Incidentally, months before the new Wuthering Heights cast and director were announced, Vulture described the 2011 flick as “the horny, twisted romance Saltburn [another Fennell project] wishes it was”.

“I think it unlikely that the new adaptation will dislodge Arnold’s movie,” Professor McDonagh continued.