“You really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book,” says Kharmel Cochrane, casting director of the new Emerald Fennell adaptation of “Wuthering Heights.”
Except, it isn’t just a book. This “book” is a world-renowned inter-racial love story, one of the first of its kind in the West. Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, “Wuthering Heights,” is a story rooted in societal identity, exploring otherness in a world that rejects the very notion of it.
The male protagonist, Heathcliff, is defined by his identity, especially his race. Upon inspecting his handsome visage, the narrator, Nelly Dean, comments on his appearance.
“Your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen,” she says.
Check yourself if you truly believe these characteristics to insinuate a white Australian male like Jacob Elordi, who is the actor of Heathcliff in the film.
And this is not the only instance where the idea of his whiteness is extinguished. Perhaps if the former quote did not persuade you, this will in the clearest manner.
“He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect,” says Nelly.
“Gipsy”—an outdated term—to mean Romani, “in aspect” to mean appearance. It is the most blatant description of his race. Why people debate it, I will never understand.
Call me woke, or whatever other insult you call people on the correct side of history, but through the casting of a white actor, Fennell is erasing the very thing that made the original novel meaningful.
What was once commentary on radicalized exclusion now becomes another cliche story about a tortured white male who finds love with a white, wealthy heiress.
This decision insinuates that his race is interchangeable, yet in the novel, the story is explicitly tied to his identity. Heathcliff is harassed, insulted and dehumanized because he is assumed to be racially and culturally foreign.
He is constantly referred to as “it” rather than “he,” removing him from any aspects of humanity. His character is formed by the relentless rejections.
To recast him when many other actors of color were right there, waiting for an opportunity like this, reframes Heathcliff’s suffering as purely internal. It removes all social commentary, making it so that Heathcliff is no longer a product of England’s obsession with race and purity.
This is a comfortable choice for a director as small-minded as Fennell. Now she does not have to tackle topics she is underprepared for; a coward’s decision.
And to those who say “adaptations are allowed to interpret,” I say this:
You are not wrong. But that is not what this is. This is deliberate dilution of racial representation. An adaptation that truly respected “Wuthering Heights” and all that it meant would grapple with the uncomfortable topics of the novel, not ignore them.
What we are seeing is a familiar example of Hollywood’s reflex to drain classics of their weight while maintaining their aesthetic prestige.
To insist that Heathcliff’s race is not essential is to contend with the novel itself. He is made monstrous because that is how the world already sees him, not because he is some angry, sad white boy.
So no, it is not “just a book” It is a story that placed a person of color at the center of a legendary love story and then refused to assimilate him.
To erase that now is not progressive, it is regressive. It is a quiet insistence that stories about racialized suffering and love are not worth telling if they cannot be written around whiteness.
Dee Cohen is a senior majoring in English literature and minoring in French
