was there’ (qtd. in Kemmerle).

We can see that Arnold is, in some ways, operating with

colour-blind principles; the actor appeared in the open audition and got the part because he fitted
it best. But by casting the mixed-raceHowson, in this way, it could be
argued that Arnold was actually using race in quite a conventional way to represent
anger, rawness and difference.
In any case, the casting of Howson as the adult Heathcliff (with Solomon Glave as
the child) suggests that racial difference offers a frame for reading the film which will
be picked up by viewers. This is endorsed by the film’s presentation of the character.
Heathcliff’s ethnicity is communicated verbally through the way others speak to him.
Nellie Dean imagines that he owes his good looks to a mother who is ‘an African queen’
and a father who is ‘a Chinese emperor’. The vicious Hindley uses coarser, racist terms
which are not from the book: ‘[h]e’s not my brother, he’s a nigger’; the word is picked
up by other characters who shout similar insults at him. Ethnicity is also put on display visually
in the emphasis on the body. Nakedness reveals the scars of floggings on
Heathcliff’s bare back. The young Cathy tugs with curiosity on his black, curly hair, a
gesture which rhymes later with the actions of the older Heathcliff who pulls at his own
hair in preparation for going into the Linton house. Locked in the darkness of the barn,
where he can only glimpse Cathy in the light through gaps in the slats, Heathcliff leans
back and his face takes on the passive lineaments of a helpless slave. Association is made
between this desperate ‘nigger’ and mud, darkness and fear. ‘I like being dirty’ he defiantly tells
Cathy, and film reviewer A.O. Scott, makes the connection that ‘the screen’s
first black Heathcliff . . . emphasizes mud, misery and savage, inarticulate feelings’. On
several occasions, he scrabbles to ground, chased furiously by barking dogs; at his enforced
baptism—at which the biblical reading speaks of cleaning him of ‘filthiness’ - he
flees outside when asked the question ‘Do you reject Satan?’; and his final orgasmic
consummation with the dead Cathy takes place in the dark mud of the grave.
Hila Shachar observes that ‘Heathcliff has become increasingly dominant’ (188) in
adaptations of Bronte’s novel. This is taken to exceptional lengths in this version which
literally uses Heathcliff’s viewpoint to control the audience’s access to the story. The
viewer is positioned with him as he follows Cathy, on foot and on horseback, and as he
watches events taking place, their meaning obscured by distance or by the frames of
doors and windows through which we are forced to watch. The film tells the story of a
child who is brutally degraded and dehumanized, whose own voice is silenced and who,
in his rage, treats others as brutally as he is treated. The use of tropes of slavery, dirt,
and violence in his representation ‘could inadvertently confirm an impression that the
origins of black British subjects must in some way be questionable, if not implicated in
transgression or shame’ (Carroll 26). Some critics certainly felt the narrowness of this
frame of viewing through the racial dimension. Philip French argued that ‘the movie
does little to explore his character other than seeing him as a perpetual outsider’ and
felt that in end ‘he’s merely a puzzle, a tornado of resentment whirling destructively
across the bleak and intimidating landscape’. For Anthony Quinn, Howson as the older
Heathcliff is ‘simply too opaque’.
Understanding this Wuthering Heights through the framework of racial difference can
lead to different conclusions. US critics Hasenfratz and Semenza thought it worked
to communicate between past and present in that ‘the severity of the abuse’ worked