#idk why tumblr won't let me indent these quotes

[thehours2002]

I haven't seen this documentary because I can't seem to find it listed in any libraries and it doesn't seem to be on the Brontë museum's online shop anymore.

Excerpts from the article:

Claire O’Callaghan (C.O.): In A Regular Black, the contemporary novelist, Caryl Philips, author of The Lost Child (2015), another contemporary novel that takes on Heathcliff’s legacy, argues that the date of Mr Earnshaw’s walk to Liverpool in the summer of 1771 makes it apparent that Earnshaw visits the city to participate in ‘some kind of business’ and that business must have been the slave trade.1 Do you agree with Philips’ assertion?

Michael Stewart (M.S.): Well, I think A Regular Black is a very interesting film, but I think that that point slightly over-states its case.

C.O.: Do you have any thoughts on how the suggestion that Earnshaw was participating in the slave-trading business impacts his character’s dynamic? It seems to me that the idea makes him a far less likeable figure than if we read him solely as a philanthropist for bringing a young orphan home?

M.S.: Yes, I think there’s a great dark side to Mr Earnshaw. He goes to Liverpool in the middle of summer as a gentleman farmer. There’s no business for farmers in Liverpool; it is a port, not a market town. He bypasses Bradford, Keighley, Leeds, all of the places where farmers would have had business. He travels on foot. I’ve done that journey myself to research Ill Will and it is a fair old way. He did it in three days there and back. It took me three days to get there, and I’m not a slow walker, I wasn’t shirking. So, he goes on foot in the middle of summer, but he’s got horses in the stable, as Joseph mentions, and there’s a coach from Keighley to Liverpool. That begs the question: why is he covert in his movements?

C.O.: The purpose of his visit is never fully explained, but I also wonder why he walks when he can take a horse. After all, he tells us it is ‘sixty miles each way’ and that ‘that is a long spell!’.[2]

M.S.: I made it more than that, I tracked closer to 70 miles. He comes back with what I think are joke presents, really: a fiddle and a whip. Very symbolic, actually.

C.O.: Why do you think they are joke presents? They are problematic objects in relation to the history of institutional slavery.

M.S.: What I mean is that they are actual objects that are also verbs. You can ‘fiddle’, as in, play around. And you can ‘whip’, as in, wind somebody up. That’s representative of the children’s respective characters. Anyway, he also brings back an orphan boy that Mrs Earnshaw takes an instant dislike to. I mean, Caryl Philips says that he sees Mr Earnshaw in the tradition of John Newton, the English Anglican clergyman and later abolitionist, who wrote ‘Amazing Grace’.[3] I think you have to leap forward to put those things together. There’s no evidence for any of that. But certainly, what was interesting for me was the mystery of Mr Earnshaw going to Liverpool. He goes there and back in three days, so he has no time to hang around to see The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour. He goes for a specific purpose. He has two or three hours when he gets there and then he’ll have to walk back again. So, he is there for a specific purpose and he’s already pre-arranged something. He’s not just mulling about. So yes, absolutely, there is a dark side to Mr Earnshaw. I mean, why does he call him Heathcliff after his dead son? Why does he favour him?[4] There are so many unexplained things there.

[...]

C.O.: Importantly, black characters are not wholly new to Brontë fiction. The character ‘Quashia’ appears in their juvenilia, he is ‘the only indigenous African in Glass Town’.[10] However, on the point of potential historical sources for Heathcliff and the questions surrounding his racial origins, although Heathcliff is named after Mr Earnshaw’s deceased son, Emily also draws attention to the fact that his name ‘served him’ both as a ‘Christian and surname’ (WH, p. 40). It is noted in the documentary that the single moniker was also used for enslaved people.[11] What are your thoughts on this?

M.S.: I think Caryl Philips nails this. And he also rightly points out the use of ‘it’ to refer to a child and the phrase ‘his owner’. I like his phrase ‘an act of unexplained intimacy’ to refer to Mr Earnshaw’s naming Heathcliff.[12]

C.O.: Yes, on the topic of language, the documentary notes that in chapter four of Wuthering Heights, the scene where Mr Earnshaw returns from Liverpool, the word ‘it’ appears prominently. I counted Emily’s usage and it appears seventeen times here with reference to Heathcliff.[13] Emily’s phrasing, as Caryl Philips says, decidedly evokes the language of slavery and property, themes that the novel is concerned with more widely. What are your thoughts on Emily’s deliberate use of language in this pivotal scene?

M.S.: Yes, Emily’s such a clever writer in that sense. ‘It’ and ‘its owner’ are even more telling in that respect (WH, p. 39). But she never explicitly addresses the issue really, so all of these things are food for thought. The ethnicity of Heathcliff is another thing that she refuses to come down on – the idea that he could be a ‘gypsy’, a ‘lascar’, this or that, or as an ‘American or Spanish castaway’ (WH, p. 54). You know, the idea of a lascar in itself is ethnically very ambiguous. The term refers to a ship worker, but they could be from North Africa, India, Arabia, China. She doesn’t want to close any doors, really, and it is absolutely open.

C.O.: Nelly complicates things by encouraging Heathcliff to ‘frame high notions’ of himself when she says, ‘Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them able to buy up, with one week’s income, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange together’ (WH, p. 61). This seems open to me. And yet, the documentary is adamant that the imagery is certain and explicit; the historian Iain McCalman claims that Victorian readers were ‘likely to have known’ that Emily was referring to a ‘West Indian mulatto’.[14] How do you respond to the idea that Emily’s use of the term ‘it’ gives power and possibility for a whole range of identities and/or non-white subjects, rather than only black people as asserted in the documentary?

M.S.: Certainly, Heathcliff is described as ‘dark almost as if it came from the devil’ (WH, p. 39). He is also described as a ‘black villain’ (WH, p. 119) and as having a ‘black countenance’ (WH, p. 190), and reference is also made to his ‘black father’ (WH, p. 187) and the ‘blackness [visible] through his features’ (WH, p. 194). And some people say well, you know, that’s a moral judgement, rather than an ethnic idea. It could mean that he’s not black or that he is black. ‘A regular black’ is another very telling phrase (WH, p. 61). And it is very interesting the way it is used there in the book, isn’t it? Nelly says, ‘if you were a regular’, but she doesn’t fully finish the sentence (WH, p. 61). It’s just left there for the reader to think about.

C.O.: Yes, the key word there is ‘if’ (WH, p. 61). To me, ‘if you were a regular black’ implies that Heathcliff is not a ‘regular black’, whereas in Low’s documentary, the quotation is being used with a different emphasis and omitting the ‘if’ to qualify a perceived textual certainty about Heathcliff, asserting that it is clear on the page that he is referred to as ‘a regular black’, so he must have been ‘a regular black’ (WH, p. 61). At the same time, it is also interesting that Heathcliff’s voice is described as ‘deep’ and ‘foreign in tone’ (WH, p. 99).

M.S.: I think he’s bi-racial. I mean, that’s just the way that I interpret that. Of course, other people interpret it in different ways. Terry Eagleton is absolutely adamant that he’s Irish, for instance. And you can make a compelling case for that too.[15] One of the interesting things about Eagleton’s point is that the language used to racially stereotype the Irish pejoratively in the nineteenth century overlaps with derogatory images and words used against black people.[16] And Elsie Michie says, ‘direct references to the Irish are difficult to identify [in Victorian literature] because they are screened by references to China, India, Turkey and the West Indies’.[17] In some ways, those reminders leave open the possibility of reading Heathcliff as black, bi-racial, Irish, or, of course, as someone who is physically unclean, as he is when he first appears in the text. And cleanliness is an important context for how others perceive Heathcliff. On his arrival at Wuthering Heights, of course, he is described as ‘dirty’, and Mr Earnshaw instructs Nelly to ‘wash it and give it clean things’ (WH, p. 39). Later, when Catherine returns from Thrushcross Grange, she and Heathcliff have a heated exchange about his cleanliness. She tells him ‘If you wash your face, and brush your hair, it will be all right. But you are so dirty’ (WH, p. 59). But interestingly he responds quite defiantly, telling her ‘You needn’t have touched me! […] I shall be as dirty as I please, and I like to be dirty, and I will be dirty’ (WH, p. 58). So, there is not only a wider class connotation to her statement about being degraded if she married Heathcliff, but potentially something that is intersectional, rather than a binary either/or class or racial comment.

[...]

C.O.: Yes, and to circle back to this point, in the documentary, Caryl Philips says that when Hindley takes over the Heights after Mr Earnshaw’s death, Heathcliff’s life is analogous to that of a slave: he isn’t living in the main house, he is beaten, he is given the worst domestic tasks to do, and he is treated as inferior to others around him.[20] Heathcliff, of course, also later says, ‘The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don’t turn against him, they crush those beneath them’ (WH, p. 120). So, with that information about Liverpool in mind and Philips’ comments, to what extent do you read the different behaviours and happenings in the house in relation to slavery?

M.S.: I think one of the most interesting aspects of A Regular Black is that it exposes the practice of farmers using slaves in their farms in and around Yorkshire. I don’t think that is common knowledge. But Emily may have been aware of this. We can’t say for certain, but it’s plausible. And knowing this, we can read the characters from that point of view. To come back to the notion of the whip, for example, read in that way, this takes on a further symbolic meaning.

[...]

M.S.: Yeah, the Reverend Patrick Brontë was an abolitionist. The siblings were home educated, and they would have had these kinds of conversations with Patrick, which ordinarily they wouldn’t have had at school. And he lost his wife in 1821 so, in a way, they were playing a surrogate figure for him, and it is entirely plausible that they would have those kinds of conversations together. I believe Wilberforce was his mentor at St John’s College in Cambridge and funded him to be there. So yes, absolutely, why wouldn’t Patrick have had conversations about abolition with his children if there were, in fact, slaves working on farms around Haworth? Of course, they’d discuss those things. They were interested in justice on all levels, whether that was for women’s rights, the abolitionist movement, workers’ rights. Patrick was very vocal about that. So all of those conversations would have been things they were talking about.

C.O.: At the end of the documentary, Caryl Philips makes the point that during Heathcliff’s three years of absence, the only possibility for Heathcliff to have made money during his three-year absence would have been by participating in the slave trade. Philips says categorically that that’s the only thing that both accounts for Heathcliff’s rapid wealth and what made him ‘unhinged’.[23] I know that your novel, Ill Will, offers some thoughts on that, but, when reading Emily’s novel, what are your thoughts on Heathcliff’s absence?

M.S.: Heathcliff is missing for three years. He runs away in the summer of 1780 and returns in the summer of 1783. He could have made his money through any form of criminality – as I imagine he does in my book. There’s absolutely nothing in Emily’s novel to suggest that Heathcliff is involved in the slave-trading business. Caryl Philips is very certain about the savagery that Heathcliff returns with is through the slave trade. They are abused and then they become abusers. I sort of get that. But it does feel to me to be about many other possibilities other than him entering the slave trade. Of course, that is one way to make money, but there were lots of other ways to make money too. Not all of them legal, but why would he have cared about that anyway? My book is about him going back to Liverpool to get revenge on the people that he blames. His mother is a slave. He discovers this in returning to Liverpool and he wants retribution for his mother’s enslavement and imprisonment. You know, it’s compelling, isn’t it? Liverpool as a centre of the slave trade, but also, as the largest black community in Europe at that time, all of these things really make sense. Seeing it in that light and the advertisement from the Liverpool Gazetteer, the local paper, they call it in the film, you know, before I saw this film, I came across that in the archives of the public records of Liverpool Library. I also came across the bill notices of the slave auctions and I just cut and pasted one of the those into the book.[24] And when Heathcliff goes to Liverpool, in my book, he sees a list of people who are being sold that morning. I guess again, I hadn’t given it that much thought – that it was so open, not just open, but on the streets, in people’s faces, slavery wasn’t hidden in some sort of auction room somewhere, it was an outside arena.

---

[2] Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights [1847] (London: Penguin English Library, 2012), p. 39. Hereafter in-text as WH.

[3] Philips, A Regular Black, 05.14 minutes.

[4] The suggestion that Heathcliff was treated favourably by Mr Earnshaw is established, as Nelly says, ‘from the beginning’ on the night that Earnshaw brings him home (WH, p. 40). Brontë writes that Mr Earnshaw ‘took to Heathcliff strangely [,] petting him up far above Cathy’, and that this ‘bred bad feeling in the house’ (WH, p. 40).

[10] The Brontës, Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal: Selected Writings, ed. by Christine Alexander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. xxvii

[11] See Cassandra Pybus, A Regular Black, 06.22 minutes. Corinne Fowler also makes this point in her article ‘Was Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff black?’ See The Conversation, 25 October 2017 < http://theconversation.com/was-emily-bront-s-heathcliff-black-85341> (accessed 25 April 2019).

[12] Philips, A Regular Black, 05.46 minutes.

[13] Such references appear close together across pp. 39–40 in chapter four.

[14] Iain McCalman, A Regular Black, 07.50 minutes.

[15] See Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture (London and New York: Verso, 1995).

[16] Several images from nineteenth-century periodicals used the same dehumanising stereotypes for both Irish and black people, portraying them as ape-like to suggest racial difference and inferiority. With respect to the Irish, see, for example, John Leech’s ‘The British Lion and The Irish Monkey’ (1848), or ‘Mr G-O’Rilla, I presume?’ (1861). For more detail on this topic see L. Perry Curtis Jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature (Smithsonian Books: Washington, 1997) and Sheridan Gilley, ‘English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780-1900’, in Immigrants and Minorities in British Society, ed. by Colin Holmes (London, 1978), pp. 81–110.

[17] Elsie Michie, ‘From Simianized Irish to Oriental Despots: Heathcliff, Rochester and Racial Difference’, Novel: A Forum on Fiction 25:2 (1992), 125–40, p. 125. Of course, there were Irish subjects in Liverpool too. For more on the connection between the description of Heathcliff’s arrival at Wuthering Heights and Victorian representations of Irish children in Britain as a result of the potato famine, see Winifred Gérin, Emily Brontë: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).

[20] Philips, A Regular Black, 07.00 minutes.

[23] Philips, A Regular Black, 13:56 minutes.

[24] See Michael Stewart, Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), p. 182.