Richard Wilcocks writes:
A really impressive panel was lined up for us on the Saturday evening (9 June) of the AGM weekend – from left to right in the photograph, Terry Eagleton (Distinguished Professor of English Literature, Lancaster University), novelist and essayist Caryl Phillips (Professor at Yale University), chair John McLeod (Professor at Leeds University) and our President Bonnie Greer. They were there to pass comment on a thirty-minute documentary with the title A Regular Black – The Hidden Wuthering Heights, which was shown after an introduction by its director, Adam Low.
A really impressive panel was lined up for us on the Saturday evening (9 June) of the AGM weekend – from left to right in the photograph, Terry Eagleton (Distinguished Professor of English Literature, Lancaster University), novelist and essayist Caryl Phillips (Professor at Yale University), chair John McLeod (Professor at Leeds University) and our President Bonnie Greer. They were there to pass comment on a thirty-minute documentary with the title A Regular Black – The Hidden Wuthering Heights, which was shown after an introduction by its director, Adam Low.
Filmed on location in Yorkshire, Lancaster and Liverpool, it
‘examines the ambiguities of Emily Brontë’s classic novel and uncovers a
shameful chapter in the hidden history of Black Britain.’ The story is located in
Dentdale, home to the slave-trading Sill family, whose own history bears a
strange resemblance to that of the fictional Earnshaws. The Sills were
mentioned on this blog in a review of Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights in November last year.
The documentary features commentary by Caryl Phillips, historians Iain McCalman
and Cassandra Pybus, and local historians Melinda Elder and Kim Lyon. Kim Lyon
was in at the beginning of the research process back in the 1970s, and is
responsible for much of the work on the adoption of an orphan boy called
Richard Sutton, who was described as a ‘foundling’ when brought to Dentdale by
Edmund Sill. Rather than bringing him up with the Sills’ three sons and one
daughter, however, he was kept with the slaves used by the Sills instead of
regular servants. Many questions are raised , many speculations sent flying by
the thirty minutes of video, not least amongst them the one about the naming of Heathcliff. Why is he given
just one name, like a slave? Why is he not Heathcliff Earnshaw?
Terry
Eagleton reminded us that Heathcliff is a fictional character, a ‘collection of
black marks on a page’. Heathcliff is ‘nowhere’ before the beginning of the
story, just as Hamlet is nowhere before the play starts. That’s the nature of literature. “Literature gives us the green light to
speculate,” said Caryl Phillips, and Bonnie Greer agreed, describing Emily
Brontë as “the greatest novelist in the English language” who provides us with
“a poetic dimension we are still trying to unravel.” She told us that she was
writing a screenplay based on the speculation that Emily Brontë actually met
Frederick Douglass in Leeds in 1847.
“One
isn’t bound to appreciate Wuthering Heights through the prism of slavery,”
said Caryl Phillips. “These speculations lead us to some kind of a meditation
on this great British enterprise, the Slave Trade, a meditation which began in
2007 when we marked the
bicentenary of its abolition.” Liverpool, we should remember, was the biggest
and busiest slaving port in Europe. Bonnie Greer said that her perception of
Liverpool had changed drastically since the time she first visited, when it had
been the city of the Beatles, and mentioned the William Wyler movie version of Wuthering
Heights,
in which the irony was in the fact that it was Cathy - Merle Oberon - who was
of mixed race, a secret she kept until the day she died.
Terry
Eagleton explained his case that Heathcliff is of Irish origin, a waif speaking
Gaelic, one of the huge numbers passing through, or stranded in, Liverpool at
the time of the Famine on their way to America: “He is an insider-outsider, a
crucial figure in the English novel from Tom Jones to Harry Potter, a character
brought into a domestic situation who becomes a joker in the pack, a disrupting
influence… let’s examine Patrick Brontë, the foreigner who became more English
than the English… and let’s not forget that Heathcliff is also a shit of the
first water, relentless and pitiless.”
Caryl
Phillips found Eagleton’s proposal on Heathcliff’s Irish origins to be
persuasive. We should not forget Liverpool’s strong Irish connections, and the
contemporary prejudice against Irish people. “Well, if we knew these things for sure, the
novel would lose its attraction. We can pour into it what we need and what we
want,” said Bonnie Greer.
Questions
from the audience showed that most of the audience was open to the proposals
made in the documentary. One member contrasted Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley to Wuthering
Heights,
pointing out that it was “very much more factually-based”, and another member
revealed herself to be a descendant of Richard Sutton: “He was not like that at
all,” she said. “Kim Lyon got it all wrong!”