"Wuthering Heights"
Was Heathcliff sexily nonwhite?
I read Wuthering Heights in high school 50 years ago. I’m not sure why Emily Brontë’s novel was assigned in my all-boys high school, but it’s a freight train of not-right-in-the-head greatness, a culmination of the Romantic age. It ranks high on my list of books I would not care to read again, but also am glad I read once. (I’d advise young men to read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice instead so they better understand the Elizabeth Bennetts of the female sex rather than the Cathy Earnshaws. Charlotte Bronte’s Jayne Eyre falls in-between.)
From the New York Times opinion section:
Whitewashing ‘Wuthering Heights’
Feb. 20, 2026
By Naveen Kumar
Mr. Kumar is a former theater critic for The Washington Post.
Mr. Kumar was a steady iSteve content generator:
until Jeff Bezos got tired of paying him.
Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” has become the No. 1 movie in the country in large part because of its extreme horniness. But to me, the most relatable scene comes when the servant Nelly Dean flops into a chair and gazes wearily offscreen, seeming to wonder how she got caught up in such a hot mess. As played by Hong Chau,
this version of Nelly isn’t just a servant to the story’s chaotic lovers; she’s a nonwhite character in a film that has been accused of whitewashing.
Uh, Wuthering Heights is famously set in the remote West Yorkshire moors more than 200 years ago. It is extremely implausible that the Earnshaws and Linton employed a Vietnamese servant.
Similarly, Cathy Earnshaw marries dweeby, pale Edgar Linton, played by David Niven in the famous 1939 movie version, rather than her true love Heathcliff, her cruel and ruthless foster brother played by tall, dark, and handsome Laurence Olivier.
In his bestselling memoirs, Niven is somewhat regretful about accepting Sam Goldwyn’s offer to play the extremely white Edgar opposite Olivier’s Heathcliff.
But in the new movie, the pale Edgar is played by Shazad Latif, who is half Pakistani and half Brit:
How come?
Paywall here.
