I Used to Be Smart.

I have to start with a warning.

This post involves something written by a Bronte. If you’re anything like me, the mere thought of that makes your eyes glaze over. I understand. Just give Emily and I chance here.

If you’ve ever read Wuthering Heights, then you know that one its biggest themes is the treatment of the other. The novel’s (arguably) antagonist, Heathcliff, is Bronte’s other.

A reasonable argument can be made that the novel’s conflicts all happen because of Heathcliff’s otherness, and how other characters react to that state of otherness.

(Okay, so far I’m writing a lit essay, hang with me.)

Because I’m weird, this idea of Heathcliff’s otherness has been knocking around in my head all day — specifically, the descriptions of Heathcliff, and why his otherness was so unnerving to the characters in Wuthering Heights.

I don’t want to give away exactly where I’m going — but while I describe Heathcliff, think about the current American political scene.

The first description of Heathcliff is physical. He’s of dark skin, and of indeterminate, but presumably gypsy origin. He speaks a different language than the family that adopts him. From the beginning, Heathcliff is undoubtedly the other.

This utterly unnerves everyone around him. He suffers constant abuse for no reason besides his status as the other. He never relinquishes that status. He remains so much the other that even at his death, the question of his indeterminable origins haunt the people that knew him, leading them to view him as something demonic.

Pondering all of this in class today, I wondered if this was something we had moved on from — and I was immediately struck that it is not. I found myself becoming….outraged at all of the ways everyone else still treats the other, and how we, as a culture, STILL have a complete inability to deal with anyone that is different than us. We NEED to construct our realities in certain ways, and when things threaten those realities, we are still unable to deal with them.

As I continued to think of this dark character of indeterminable origins, a thought immediately struck me. We’re dealing with the exact same issue right now. A dark man with murky origins is running for the nomination of his party for the office of President — and we are utterly unable to deal with his otherness. We mask it all kinds of ways — we blame his associations with other controversial figures, point to a voting record, or the tiniest of rhetorical inconsistencies. However, most of us are utterly incapable of dealing with Obama’s status as other. He exists outside of the worldview that we have necessarily created for ourselves, and he threatens all of the ways that we have constructed our world. And, 300 years after Wuthering Heights, we are STILL utterly unable to deal with Heathcliff.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 25th, 2008 at 9:51 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.