nyx!

The only way to begin is by beginning. And season 8 is beginning soon...

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Catch up on every episode of Game Changer right now on @dropoutdottv:

The good thing to come out of this adaptation and its notoriety is, of course, that everyone is re-reading the novel. Both the actual work and the conversation around it have been more (sociologically) interesting than all the film chatter. What’s surprised me in the book-revival discourse is the obsession around getting definitive answers to two things: whether or not Heathcliff was a person of colour, and whether or not the book is a ‘love story’. I think the former question is partially due to us imposing a modern (US-centric) understanding of race and class on the past; we tend to see these things less as shifting social concepts that are highly context-dependent and more as immovable parts of our identity, which is why, for instance, people are so confident in calling multi-millionaires ‘working class’, centring their background rather than their current material circumstances, and why we find it so difficult to understand that people considered POC in some (white-majority) countries might be considered ‘white’ in others, and vice versa. The insistence on Heathcliff as having one certain racial identity is, I think, born of an inability to engage with how the concept of ‘whiteness’ has changed over the last few hundred years, and how literature from that period might be playing with this complexity (and the paranoia it engendered). On the question of whether or not this is a ‘love story’, I suspect this is mostly a misunderstanding of the gothic as a subcategory of Romanticism (a particular literary genre that does not equate to ‘love story’), as well as an inability to imagine novels as multifaceted, thanks to a culture that increasingly reduces literature to single, simple marketing terms and their most social-media-friendly tropes.

The overall issue, though, seems to be a refusal of this book’s ambiguity, which really is a refusal of what the gothic genre is: that is, ambiguous. You are not meant to know the provenance of Heathcliff, because you are not meant to know where you, the reader, or the characters in the book should place him on a class basis, relative to other characters and the social norms of the time. The fact that he is from the streets of Liverpool—at the time a thriving hub for the slave trade, but also a place full of Irish immigrants—is enough for the characters to fear that he has some mixed heritage, and it is that fear that comes across in their descriptions of him, which make reference to multiple distinct racial groups (truly a grab-bag of Orientalism, though, tellingly, the narrative voice never describes Heathcliff in these terms). His arrival amongst the Earnshaws also occurs in the midst of the enclosures, during which there was a new establishment of class centred around who owned land and who had a right to be there, imposed through extreme violence and maintained through both physical boundaries (which did not previously exist) and an aggressive othering; it is not an accident that Heathcliff is referred to as both ‘gypsy’ and ‘lascar’, terms not referring to distinct ethnic communities but to groups defined by crossing borders. His actual racial heritage is much less important than the fact that he is audaciously transgressing these new boundaries, and cannot be subdued by the violence with which these borders are usually policed.

the canon always sees men as universal observers and geniuses who undertake social studies, but when it comes to women, they are reduced to being mere subjective chroniclers of interiority, supposedly recording their personal romantic fantasies.

many novels contain a romantic thread. among other things, Wuthering Heights opens with one. but most of the book is about revenge, cruelty, trauma, inheritance, generational damage etc. and yet, because it was written by a woman, only the love story is treated as significant.