WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Catherine Earnshaw.
Nelly Dean tells us that, as a child, Catherine was always singing, playing, teasing and driving the adults to distraction. She is full of mischief---wild, passionate, cruel yet tender-hearted.
Nelly Dean does not love her, understanding little of Catherine’s complex nature. Nelly does not take her illness or breakdown seriously, believing that she is in one of her selfish tantrums. Catherine’s dominant, wilful nature resists Nelly’s authority “To hear you, people might think that you were the mistress here. You want setting down in your place!”
Catherine’s love for Heathcliff controls her life and is her single great obsession. They are as one: “I am Heathcliff” She totally identifies with him. One of the enduring images from the novel is our glimpses of the young Catherine and Heathcliff running wild and barefoot on the moors.
Her extended stay at the Grange separates her from Heathcliff and introduces her to the refined and comfortable world of the Lintons. She does not fully understand that she must choose between Edgar’s world and Heathcliff’s world—the Grange or the Heights.
She describes, in a conversation with Nelly, the contrast between her feelings for Edgar and Heathcliff—“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it….as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being”.
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same: and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightening, or frost from fire”
Her marriage to Linton is a fatal choice. Her nature, like Heathcliff’s, is rough and passionate. She cuts herself off from her own nature by marrying Linton and moving into his refined, genteel but limiting world. During her delirious ravings she cries “Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors. I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy and free…Why am I so changed? I’m sure I should be myself again were I among the heather on those hills” Whereas Heathcliff turns his hatred and grief outward and destroys others, she turns her restless unhappiness inwards and destroys herself.
Fearless herself, she has contempt for all signs of weakness or cowardice in others. We see her cruelty towards Isabella “Begone…and hide your vixen face”, and towards Edgar. Having provoked a fight between Edgar and Heathcliff (in the incident where she hurls the door key into the fire) she pours scorn on her husband’s weakness: “Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever” “Your type is not a lamb, it is a sucking leveret”
She despises Edgar’s cool intellectualism—as represented in the novel by his library and his love of books---craving the restless passion which is so much part of her own nature and of Heathcliff’s. “Among his books! What in the name of all that feels, has he to do with books when I am dying” She is a stranger in the Grange, an outsider among the cool Lintons “How dreary to meet death surrounded by those cold faces”. Her wild nature cannot be confined within the restrictive, domestic spaces of Thrushcross Grange.
Her choice of burial place expresses her longing for freedom, even in death: “Not among the Lintons, mind, under the chapel roof, but in the open air…” She will have her wish. Her grave, Nelly tells us, is at the edge of the churchyard, with wild heath and bilberry from the moor climbing over it. Catherine’s great power is in death. She influences Heathcliff from beyond the grave. He spends 18 years in torment, longing to be reunited with her. From her grave she torments him to madness. By the end of the novel she is transformed from a passionate, wilful girl into a troubled spirit.
Nelly Dean tells us that, as a child, Catherine was always singing, playing, teasing and driving the adults to distraction. She is full of mischief---wild, passionate, cruel yet tender-hearted.
Nelly Dean does not love her, understanding little of Catherine’s complex nature. Nelly does not take her illness or breakdown seriously, believing that she is in one of her selfish tantrums. Catherine’s dominant, wilful nature resists Nelly’s authority “To hear you, people might think that you were the mistress here. You want setting down in your place!”
Catherine’s love for Heathcliff controls her life and is her single great obsession. They are as one: “I am Heathcliff” She totally identifies with him. One of the enduring images from the novel is our glimpses of the young Catherine and Heathcliff running wild and barefoot on the moors.
Her extended stay at the Grange separates her from Heathcliff and introduces her to the refined and comfortable world of the Lintons. She does not fully understand that she must choose between Edgar’s world and Heathcliff’s world—the Grange or the Heights.
She describes, in a conversation with Nelly, the contrast between her feelings for Edgar and Heathcliff—“My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it….as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff! He’s always, always in my mind, not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being”.
“Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same: and Linton’s is as different as a moonbeam from lightening, or frost from fire”
Her marriage to Linton is a fatal choice. Her nature, like Heathcliff’s, is rough and passionate. She cuts herself off from her own nature by marrying Linton and moving into his refined, genteel but limiting world. During her delirious ravings she cries “Oh, I’m burning! I wish I were out of doors. I wish I were a girl again, half savage and hardy and free…Why am I so changed? I’m sure I should be myself again were I among the heather on those hills” Whereas Heathcliff turns his hatred and grief outward and destroys others, she turns her restless unhappiness inwards and destroys herself.
Fearless herself, she has contempt for all signs of weakness or cowardice in others. We see her cruelty towards Isabella “Begone…and hide your vixen face”, and towards Edgar. Having provoked a fight between Edgar and Heathcliff (in the incident where she hurls the door key into the fire) she pours scorn on her husband’s weakness: “Your cold blood cannot be worked into a fever” “Your type is not a lamb, it is a sucking leveret”
She despises Edgar’s cool intellectualism—as represented in the novel by his library and his love of books---craving the restless passion which is so much part of her own nature and of Heathcliff’s. “Among his books! What in the name of all that feels, has he to do with books when I am dying” She is a stranger in the Grange, an outsider among the cool Lintons “How dreary to meet death surrounded by those cold faces”. Her wild nature cannot be confined within the restrictive, domestic spaces of Thrushcross Grange.
Her choice of burial place expresses her longing for freedom, even in death: “Not among the Lintons, mind, under the chapel roof, but in the open air…” She will have her wish. Her grave, Nelly tells us, is at the edge of the churchyard, with wild heath and bilberry from the moor climbing over it. Catherine’s great power is in death. She influences Heathcliff from beyond the grave. He spends 18 years in torment, longing to be reunited with her. From her grave she torments him to madness. By the end of the novel she is transformed from a passionate, wilful girl into a troubled spirit.