Reply to Ok DCUM, what do you think of the Wuthering Heights movie?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]From what I read, Heathcliff is described as a gypsy and a dark stranger in the novel. Could it just be that he’s dark in mysterious or does it imply that he’s from a completely different race? I never understood it this way. The actor who plays Heathcliff is tall, dark and handsome.[/quote]

I'm French and have lived in the UK.  "Gypsy" means traveling Roma people that mostly came from Eastern Europe but that have very distant Indian heritage (they migrated in the Middle Ages or something). They are not of African or Arab descent. In Bronte's time, gypsies would have looked like the gypsies of today, and since the settled populations looked down on them, they probably wouldn't distinguish between impoverished English folk without a home and actual Roma, if both looked relatively similar. If you walk in the streets of Paris right now, you can see gypsy women holding babies in their laps begging for money, usually near metro stations. They are purposefully scruffy to attract sympathy, but they do actually have relatively pale skin and dark hair (also today they're slaves to a begging racket, so don't give them money - they'll have to hand it over to the menfolk in charge).

So casting a Caucasian with dark hair in the role of Heathcliff is entirely appropriate.
[/quote][b]NOPE.

For the love, people. Can you do some reading. The evidence is in the book. You can google it. [/quote][/b]

DP here.  You clearly have not read the book.  Don't lie: I can tell you didn't.  "Googling it" for summaries or other people's interpretations is not the same as reading the novel, ESPECIALLY because Bronte DOES very much leave his race ambiguous.  As the previous poster explained, the Roma of Europe aren't white.  I've seen them both in Eastern Europe and in the UK, and will note that the Roma I saw in Eastern Europe were distinctly brown/not white, while the ones we saw in the UK were lighter, so maybe mixed.  But in any case, the "gypsy"/Roma people would have been familiar to Emily Bronte, and they probably were the  inspiration for Heathcliff.  They aren't white: they are brown, they are POC.  But to the super pasty white English of the Northern English countryside, they were blatantly non-white, in a way that would stand out jarringly in one of these isolated rural communities.

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