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Wuthering Heights - Catherine and Heathcliff Essay written by Midnight Toker
A Presentation of the Personalities of Heathcliff and Murray Kempton once
admitted, ‘No great scoundrel is ever uninteresting.’ The human race continually
focuses on characters who intentionally harm others and create damaging
situations for their own benefit. Despite popular morals, characters who display
an utter disregard for the natural order of human life are characters who are
often deemed iconic and are thoroughly scrutinized. If only the characters of
Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights were as simple as that. Set on the mysterious
and gloomy Yorkshire moors in the nineteenth century, Wuthering Heights gives
the illusion of lonesome isolation as a stranger, Mr. Lockwood, attempts to
narrate a tale he is very far removed from. Emily Bronte’s in-depth novel can be
considered a Gothic romance or an essay on the human relationship. The reader
may regard the novel as a serious study of human problems such as love and hate,
or revenge and jealousy. One may even consider the novel Bronte’s personal
interpretation of the universe. However, when all is said and done, Heathcliff
and Catherine are the story. Their powerful presence permeates throughout the
novel, as well as their complex personalities. Their climatic feelings towards
each other and often selfish behavior often exaggerates or possibly encapsulates
certain universal psychological truths humans are too afraid to express.
Heathcliff and Catherine’s stark backgrounds evolve respectively into dark
personalities and mistaken life paths, but in the end their actions determine
the course of their own relationships and lives. Their misfortunes,
recklessness, willpower, and destructive passion are unable to penetrate the
eternal love they share. Heathcliff’s many-faceted existence is marked by
wickedness, love, and strength.
His dark actions are produced by the distortion
of his natural personality. Although Heathcliff was once subjected to vicious
racism due to his dark skin color and experienced wearisome orphan years in
Liverpool, this distortion had already begun when Mr. Earnshaw brought him into
Wuthering Heights, a dirty, ragged, black-haired child(45; ch.7). Already he was
inured to hardship and uncomplainingly accepted suffering. Heathcliff displays
his strength and steadfastness when he had the measles, and when Hindley treated
him cruelly if he got what he wanted. From the very beginning he showed great
courage, resoluteness, and love. Few have the audacity to be victimized (as
Heathcliff was by Hindley after Mr. Earnshaw’s death) and find secret delight in
his persecutor sinking into a life of debauchery which will undoubtedly cause
his own death. Not only did Heathcliff show his strength through Hindley, but
also by following his personal goal of a life with Catherine Earnshaw.
Heathcliff vanishes for three years to win Cathy over with his successes. He
chose to fight a battle most would never attempt to begin. Heathcliff, being the
survivor that he is, proved himself to be quite a gentleman. Nelly offers her
impression when narrating, “…he would certainly have struck a stranger as a born
and bred gentleman…” (130; ch. 14). Although Heathcliff’s personality is so
unusually and intensely strong, he does emit qualities rooted in ourselves. His
trials and tribulations only develop and exaggerate the darkness and violence
inherited in not only Heathcliff, but everyone. However, Heathcliff’s wickedness
is entirely inappropriate and unusual. Without question he is brutal. The primal
and universal darkness in Heathcliff must not be excused. The vicious manner n
which he helps to destroy Hindley, kidnaps Cathy and Nelly, and brutalizes
Isabella and Hareton, suggests that he is not born with the same primal and
universal structure as everyday man, but some other disturbed quality.
For
example, Isabella in a letter to Ellen wrote, “Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? And if
so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?” (121; ch. 13). The antisocial menace
now induces pain on his undeserving wife. In just a few chapters the reader
identifies with Heathcliff’s dark instincts, awes at his inability to feel
compassion in certain instances, and becomes intrigued with his passion and
undying love for Cathy. Lockwood’s first impressions of this gentleman reflect
the complex and contrasting images he presents simultaneously when he quotes,
“But Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode and style of living.
He is a dark-skinned gypsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman: that is,
as much of a gentleman as many a country squire: rather slovenly, perhaps, yet
not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome
figure; and rather morose.” (3; ch. 1). Even the conflicting ideas his sheer
appearance resonates result in a complexity. Heathcliff initially treats others
with contempt and behaves antisocially. Lockwood again offers, “…his reserve
springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling- to manifestations of
mutual kindness. He’ll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a
species of impertinence to be loved or hated again” (4; ch. 1). Behind all the
hidden agendas, natural attributes, and wounds of external circumstances, the
love of two kindred spirits prevails. In the end love conquers even a Heathcliff
-after his soul has been cleansed with age and wisdom of the hate and distortion
with which he has lived for decades. Perhaps the evil that he once acted upon
sprung not entirely from a primal root of evil itself, but from the upset of the
natural processes of love.
The reader leaves the story with the image of a
passionate man whose soulful determination to die is startlingly inspiring. His
apparent thoughts are of happier, more pure days returning, while staring out
into a storm, searching for Catherine. Catherine Earnshaw’s iron will,
immaturity, and quest for high-profile acceptance cause her character to star in
the tragedy of a lost generation. She is both loving and violent, gentle and
passionate, affectionate and willful. Her turbulent and aggressive personality
rivals only that of Heathcliff. Like Heathcliff, certain traumas experienced
feed the fire of their passion, self-interest, and youthfulness. For example,
she is the spawn of a man who says that because he cannot understand her, he
cannot love her. Meanwhile, she finds the inner core and a profound connection
with the stranger who enters her own father’s affection and her life so young.
While her brother feels dispossessed and threatened by Heathcliff, Cathy sees
the ‘dirty, gypsy boy’ a reflection of her own wild nature. Perhaps Catherine
and Heatcliff never leave the self- absorption and recklessness of childhood
because they are thwarted in their passion just before they become adolescents.
Possibly, they prefer to look upon each other as a childlike mirror image,
rather than to progress to the stage of adult-like confidantes. They never
appear to feel sexual desire for others, and are prevented in discovering it in
each other as well. Possibly, they are emotionally trapped in their natural
habitat- absorbing the savage beauty of the countryside while escaping adult
mind games and romantic rules and procedures. The great tragedy in the book is
when Catherine, in all her elegant refinement, attempts to grow up and marry an
established man.
With the exception of wealth and position, all is lost in this
hasty decision. Catherine and Heathcliff’s relations are further thwarted, and
upon their long-awaited reunion, fireworks erupt. “With straining eagerness
Catherine gazed toward the entrance of her chamber,” (140; ch. 15) Nelly
recalled. Heathcliff’s reaction is not surprisingly similar, “…in a stride or
two was at her side, and had her grasped in his arms…He…bestowed more kisses
than ever he gave in his life before…”(140; ch. 15). It is at this point that
Cathy and Heathcliff differ the most. Remarkably, Cathy further displays her
lack of maturity by attempting to make her beloved feel guilty that she is
suffering, although it is caused by her own recklessness. The dramatic and
anguished scene is described as, “ The two, to a cool spectator, made a strange
and fearful picture” (141; ch. 15). Cathy’s gift of pain to Heathcliff and
Heathcliff’s ability to change her rationale in a brief dialogue suggest he is
the most loyal lover. She submitted to the pressures of marrying a man for his
position as Heathcliff changed his own life to be that man. However wicked
Heathcliff becomes, he never betrays his dream and his own private vision of
eternal bliss alongside Cathy, while she seeks a worldly success in the marriage
of Edgar Linton for its own sake. Although they each acknowledge that they are
unavoidably part of one another, solely Heathcliff is willing to face the
consequences. Only at the arrival of her death is she willing to surrender to
the truth of her love.
Catherine and Heathcliff’s misfortunes, recklessness,
willpower, and destructive passion are unable to penetrate the eternal love they
share. However, love is hardly the main theme of the book. It is difficult and
possibly wrong to consider Emily Bronte’s classic, Wuthering Heights, as a
worldly book. As Romantic authors tend to look into man’s inner nature, so did
Bronte glimpse into the mind of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw. What she came
up with however, is hardly a social commentary on the human mind. These are two
unique characters that must exist only in a certain mysticism not found in
Liverpool. The sincerely private relationship of Heathcliff and Catherine make
no reference to any social convention or situation. In fact, it is doomed only
when Cathy begins to be attracted to the mannerly ways and the social graces of
Thrushcross Grange and is led to abandon her true nature. If not social classes,
is the privacy of the human experience the theme of the novel? Or is revenge the
central and recurring idea? Is Bronte proposing that as humans we have the right
to meddle with the cosmic, dark and questioning universe just as Catherine and
Heathcliff manipulated with their own lovers and family? Perhaps it is simply a
book about characters, each to his own, meandering through puddles, with cloudy
morals and mistaken ideals. With a darkness within and beauty without, stumbling
back and forth a two-mile stretch of land searching for something they’ve had
all along. Maybe it’s a book about reality.
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