Wuthering Heights: Character and theme analysis

Love is not those butterflies in your stomach. Love takes hold of your organs and chooses whether to turn it ablaze. It is a spectrum and only a thin line separates it from hell's tyranny. Or perhaps it's a biblical purgatory. A cage of damnation and eternal punishment. Wuthering heights, the most violent continuation of romanticism from Victorian fiction, vigorously thrusts this claim through its complex characters and concepts of vengeance, classism, abuse, obsession, and obviously, love. 

Love and vengeance are represented as twin souls, or rather flames, of Catherine and Heathcliff, both inseparable and corrupt in nature. Not a wax candle flame but a flesh-melting and life-burning conflagration that consumes anything that dares to glance upon its short temper. Only through suffocation can it slowly be brought down. Particularly before Catherine's death (pages 139 to 142) where it is clear that the most famous romance has little to no tenderness, They curse and swear and throw the fault upon one another yet they hold each other to the point of homogeneousness–almost as they were a fire themselves, one of vengence–kindled to take on Angers bidding. Their destination to misery was fated the moment Catherine jumped to his embrace in desperation directly before her death. This violent perspective of connection demonstrates how Emily Bronte refuses to board the train of morality(which was the fad of the time). Her characters threaten, curse, and swear–even with their loved ones which not only aids her prominent theme of the corrupt reality of human nature, but gives us the highest quality to watch the romance unfold, or rather, unravel to destruction. 

Revenge was primarily shown through Heathcliff who sought vengeance to degrade and ruin the two families that ill treated him in his youth. And just as passionate his love for Catherine was equally drove his passions for revenge–some interpretations even claiming the more monstrous his actions are–the more concrete and clear his love for her becomes. Heathcliff’s vengefulness stemmed from the discrimination he received as a child because of his low class and race (as Nelly mentions him to be gypsy like) and further enhanced by Catherine’s betrayal and later death. After the unfortunate events of her betrayal take place does his nefarious behavior start to truly form. First, Heathcliff takes revenge on Hindley by coldly, and with much calculation, takes Wuthering Heights from him and turns his son against him. Emily Bronte shows nothing short of grotesque in Heathcliff's methods of revenge nor behavior. In addition to that, his plans only sour and become confusing after Catherine's death, as he attempts to take Edgar's estate by manipulating Cathy, Edgar and Catherine's daughter, and his own son Linton to wed. He does this not only through manipulation but also by kidnapping and threatening Cathy. Another insightful yet cruel action Heathcliff took was denying Hareton, Hindley's son, an education and keeping him for labor at Wuthering Heights. As well as inflicting the same ill treatment he’d faced as a young man on hareton. its insightful to Heathcliff's character because as someone who was persecuted, belittled, degraded, he became an intelligent sadist who could easily control those weaker and dumber than him (e.g. manipulating cathy, denying Hareton and education), helps us understand his desire to inflict that pain upon others: he who had been dominated his whole life found a route to release his suffocated

pains and desires through dominating the weak.

Catherine Earnshaw’s betrayal of Heathcliff was her act of marrying Edgar Linton for his status and wealth to fit into the shoes of social conventions, despite her tormentful affection for Heathcliff. This push-and-pull between violating and following social convention reveals her stubborn and self-willed personality–paralleling Heathcliff's revenge, as she states “He’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”  as well as “I am Heathcliff! He’s always in my mind; not as a pleasure, anymore than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.”(p.73) They represent the natural forces as against the values of society (Jackiey Ash), and their bond only strengthens when Hindley ill-treats Heathcliff and even after she recognizes that a marriage between herself and Heathcliff is besmearing due to his degraded social status. Despite her actions she fiercely claims that not even death could divide them, even when Catherine haunts Heathcliff, they believe heaven is nowhere but in cohesion with one another. And so her decision to marry Edgar Linton paved the way, not only for her own misery, but also to destroy the lives of Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. Their love is nowhere near civilized and Emily Bronte brilliantly sculpts the destructive and consuming aspects of love no matter its noble purity. 

An interesting aspect of their relationship is that it goes beyond death as our first impression of Catherine is her spectre haunting Heathcliff. Whether her haunting image is just Heathcliff's grief stricken imagination or is her yearning in death as a paranormal existence. The first semblance of their love is abnormal and ardent, Heathcliff weeps to Catherine “ ‘Come in! Come in!’ he sobbed. ‘Cathy, do come. Oh do–once more! oh! my heart’s darling, hear me this time–Catherine, at last!’ ”. Heathcliff is not needlessly cruel but was consumed by revenge against those who pained him. Catherine’s death proves that his love for her was timeless for even after she dies his passions shift to revenge even up until his own death, he tells Nelly: “I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped on the flags! In every cloud, in every tree–filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day, I am surrounded with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women–my own features–mock me with resemblance”(p.288). His revenge symbolizes their love, plaguing, undying, and bitter to the core–till the very end Heathcliff cries to Nelly: “The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!” (p.288) This quote gives us insight on how his rage stems from the constant, painful reminder that he’d lost her. 

To conclude, Heathcliff and Catherine’s rapture encapsulated the powerful link between Heathcliff's passion for Catherine and his violent vengeance after her death. And Emily Bronte wove the grotesque tapestry of Wuthering Heights through the colors of macabre human nature, and the fabrics of malevolence, obsession, and twisted strings of haunting feelings