My Gripe with Film and Television’s Refusal to Explore Heathcliff’s Racialisation (Not Just in the Latest Adaptation)
Side note: Fanon is one of the greatest minds who ever lived, run and read his stuff (if you haven’t already).
So as a character, Heathcliff can be read productively through Frantz Fanon’s racial-epidermal schema ( even though Wuthering Heights predates Fanon by about a century).
Fanon argues that racialisation operates as a totalising system in which the body becomes the site onto which danger, moral corruption, and othering are projected, particularly within Christian and colonial epistemologies. He first outlines a historical racial schema, in which racialised subjects acquire their sense of self under the white gaze within a white-dominated world. Racist discourses shape not only how racialised bodies are perceived, but how they are lived, rendering racialised existence inseparable from the long histories of slavery, colonialism, and structural exclusion that produce a condition of persistent alienation.
From this, Fanon develops the epidermal racial schema, which describes the specifically embodied experience of self-alienation under racism. Here, the racialised subject is compelled to adopt the white gaze, coming to experience themselves as an object constituted by racist fantasy and fear. By centring the epidermis, Fanon emphasises that racism is not only ideological or discursive, but phenomenological and affective, lived through the body itself. It is within this framework that Heathcliff can be understood: as a figure whose racialisation renders his body the site of moral judgement, theological condemnation, and social exclusion throughout the novel.
From the moment Heathcliff enters the narrative, his body is marked as suspect. His dark features are immediately commented on, foregrounding his racialised appearance as the primary register through which he is read. Indeed, although Brontë is evasive about Heathcliff’s exact origin, his being found in Liverpool does a lot of heavy lifting. At this point, Liverpool, as a major port city, historically deeply enmeshed in Atlantic trade and colonial enterprises. The text does not need to say “slave” or “indentured servitude” explicitly for the implication to resonate. A dark-skinned child abandoned on the streets of a major imperial port is not an abstract orphan, because he is narratively framed by a place that evokes the global economy of extraction, displacement, and exploitation (indeed, the fact of abandonment itself implies prior use). Thus Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights as a remainder, a surplus body discarded once value has been extracted (who is later unfairly cast as a servant once his protector dies).
Then within the Protestant world of the Heights, Heathcliff is racialised not only as foreign but as damned. His darkness is repeatedly associated with hell, the devil, impurity, and animality, reflecting a Protestant cosmology in which whiteness, civility, and salvation are tacitly aligned. In Fanonian terms, his epidermis becomes destiny: he is perceived as already fallen, already corrupted, and therefore deserving of discipline, exclusion, and degradation. Hindley’s violence toward him is socially sanctioned precisely because Heathcliff is not fully legible as a child who can be wronged.
Crucially, Heathcliff internalises this schema, and at one point he expresses a wish that he were light haired and fair skinned like Edgar Linton. This is the colonised subject who comes to desire whiteness as a means of escape from ontological negation. In this moment, Heathcliff understands that within this milieu love, inheritance, and legitimacy are racially gated. Cathy’s assertion that it would “degrade” her to marry him operates on this same axis. While class and wealth are the overt justifications for her consternation, racialisation also factors in, because Heathcliff is not simply a servant; he is unassimilable.
Furthermore, Nelly Dean’s attempt to soften Heathcliff’s origins by suggesting he imagine himself the son of “the emperor of China” or an “Indian queen ” is especially revealing. This fantasy does not challenge racial hierarchy; instead, it uses nobility as a means to launder difference into a degree of acceptability, because racialisation with pedigree or social capital is not quite as intolerable as foreignness by itself. The gesture mirrors colonial logics in which some elite non-white figures are selectively humanised (particularly if they help prop up the system), while the mass of racialised bodies remain abject.
All of this is what makes the repeated failure of adaptations (not just the upcoming one) so telling. The racialised dehumanisation and othering is not subtext or something you must “read between the lines”; Brontë hits us over the head with it, (even having Heathcliff referred to as “it” when he first arrives). Yet adaptations consistently collapse Heathcliff into a romantic archetype: the brooding outsider, the wronged lover, the Byronic anti-hero. In doing so, they strip away the racial logic that gives his rage coherence and flatten his later behaviour, rather than treating it as a disturbing study of how people who are abused can become abusers, and how a dehumanising system detaches everyone within it from their humanity.
That this has happened across countless adaptations suggests not oversight but avoidance. To engage seriously with Heathcliff’s racialisation would require confronting Britain’s imperial history, Protestant moral hierarchies, and the ways in which racial difference has been bound up with ideas of sin, degeneration, and who gets to exist without having their humanity questioned.
And now when Heathcliff is played by the favourite white boy of the month (his violence becomes sexy menace, his obsession becomes passion, and his cruelty becomes angst). It a best neutralises but may utterly remove, the audience’s discomfort that this man has been made monstrous by a system that first dehumanised him and he then maladapted to. Instead he is just a sexy bad boy instead of someone who has been brutalised by a system that is still alive and well in big 2026.
And in an era apparently more capable than ever of grappling with race, power, and historical violence, the continued refusal to explore this dimension leads to hollow adaptations. Indeed, we could argue that we are regressing massively (given the rise of the far right) and we therefore should be pushing nuanced explorations of structural inequality into the zeitgeist.
Caveat: I’m not saying that Bronte was unpacking racialisation in an entirely intentional and measured way (there are for sure orientalist tropes and colonial undertones in the novel) but that Heathcliff is a racialised character and is treated as such throughout the novel, thus should be explored and not completely ignored.
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