Heathcliff and Catherine

As readers painfully recall, Heathcliff leaves his beloved Cathy after overhearing her say it would degrade her to marry him. That moment really hurts, because if anything is obvious, it's that Catherine is Heathcliff's soul mate and his only ally against the brute Hindley. In a sense, their love remains immature, since they were only ever "together" as young children. The moments of joy that haunt Heathcliff for the rest of his life occur over just a few pages. Many of them take place as an escape from violence, as in this memory recounted in Catherine's makeshift journal:

"Hindley is a detestable substitute – his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious – H. and I are going to rebel – we took our initiatory step this evening." (3.13)

And soon after:

"We made ourselves as snug as our means allowed in the arch of the dresser. I had just fastened our pinafores together, and hung them up for a curtain, when in comes Joseph, on an errand from the stables. He tears down my handiwork, boxes my ears, and croaks…" (3.19)

Without her, Heathcliff quickly turns from mythic hero into well-schooled brute.

Heathcliff and Cathy are haunted by each other; each sees the other as inseparable from his or her being. As Catherine tells Nelly Dean:

"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 – so, don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable." (9.101)

This confession is one of the novel's most famous lines, because it so poignantly expresses the nature of Heathcliff and Catherine's love: it is beyond the physical, transcending all else. Heathcliff 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 . . . my own features mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her." (33.62)

Heathcliff and Cathy see themselves as one and the same, which is interesting considering how big of a deal everyone else makes about Heathcliff's "otherness": his swarthy complexion and low social standing. Cathy doesn't care about any of these differences; her love renders them meaningless.

But this closeness also leads to one of the biggest problems in the novel. Because Catherine considers Heathcliff to be a part of her, she does not see her marriage to Edgar as a separation from Heathcliff. For Heathcliff, though, soul mates should be together. Her death only increases his obsession, and he goes so far to have the sexton dig up her grave so he can catch one last glimpse of her.

While he can be a horrible brute, it's easy to pity Heathcliff. After all, he finds his perfect love and she marries a stiff like Edgar Linton. Does Brontë intend for us to like Heathcliff as much as we do? It's hard to tell. Emily's sister Charlotte wrote that "Heathcliff, indeed, stands unredeemed; never once swerving in his arrow-straight course to

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Wuthering Heights is not just a love story, it is a window into the human soul, where one sees the loss, suffering, self discovery, and triumph of the characters in this novel. Both the Image of the Book by Robert McKibben, and Control of Sympathy in Wuthering Heights by John Hagan, strive to prove that neither Catherine nor Heathcliff are to blame for their wrong doings. Catherine and Heathcliff s passionate nature, intolerable frustration, and overwhelming loss have ruined them, and thus stripped them of their humanities.

 McKibben and Hagan take different approaches to Wuthering Heights, but both approaches work together to form one unified concept. McKibben speaks of Wuthering Heights as a whole, while Hagan concentrates on only sympathies role in the novel. McKibben and Hagan both touch on the topic of Catherine and Heathcliff s passionate nature. To this, McKibben recalls the scene in the book when Catherine is "in the throes of her self-induced illness" (p38). When asking for her husband, she is told by Nelly Dean that Edgar is "among his books," and she cries, "What in the name of all that feels has he to do with books when I am dying." McKibben shows that while Catherine is making a scene and crying, Edgar is in the library handling Catherine s death in the only way he knows how, in a mild mannered approach. He lacks the passionate ways in which Catherine and Heathcliff handle ordeals. During this scene Catherine s mind strays back to childhood and she comes to realize that "the Linton s are alien to her and exemplify a completely foreign mode of perception" (p38). Catherine discovers that she would never belong in Edgar s society. On her journey of self-discovery, she realized that she attempted the impossible, which was to live in a world in which she did not belong. This, in the end, lead to her death. Unlike her mother, when Cathy enters The Heights, "those images of unreal security found in her books and Thrushhold Grange are confiscated, thus leading her to scream, "I feel like death!" With the help of Hareton, Cathy learns not to place her love within a self created environment, but in a real life where she will be truly happy. The character s then reappear as reconciled, and stability and peace once more return to The Heights.

 Hagan, when commenting on Catherine s passionate nature, recalls the same scene when Catherine is near death. Hagan shows, like McKibben, that Catherine has an ability to love with fierce passion, something that only herself and Heathcliff share. "I ll not be there by myself; they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won t rest til you are with me. I never will" (p108). Hagan shows that by Emily Bronte s use of sympathy, the reader cannot pass moral judgment on the characters. Even though Catherine is committing adultery, and Heathcliff is planning a brutal career of revenge, the reader still carries sympathy for them. Because Catherine chose to marry Edgar, she created a disorder in their souls. Bronte, Hagan says, modifies our hostile response to Catherine and Heathcliff by always finding a way to express their misery.

 McKibben s and Hagan s ideas interlock when commenting on the apparent frustration that both Catherine and Heathcliff face throughout the novel. McKibben concentrates on Catherine s frustration and hopelessness when she realizes that she never belonged on Thrushhold Grange. Hagan recalls the emptiness and frustration Heathcliff encountered when he came back to The Heights to find Catherine married to Edgar. The atmosphere of Thrushhold Grange is that of normalcy and convention. McKibben goes farther to explain that convention is "merely an accepted method of simplifying reality." By simplifying her life, Catherine assumes that she will avoid all of the unpleasant aspects of life. Sadly, she ended up doing just the opposite. Catherine pretended to be something that she s not, and by doing so lead her to a life of hidden frustration. When Heathcliff found out that Catherine was married to Edgar, he decided that the only way to get even with Edgar was to marry Isabella. Because of his marriage, Catherine became so sick with jealousy and plain frustration that she ended up killing herself. The years after Catherine s death were so empty and full of regret and frustration that Heathcliff ultimately also ends up killing himself.

 Hagan and McKibben both end their analysis with the idea of Catherine s and Heathcliff s overwhelming loss. Catherine s self discovery of a wasted life leads her to her death. She faces at the end what she refused to see during her life. She and Heathcliff had always belonged together. Although Edgar was a good man, he could never share the blind passion that Catherine and Heathcliff had. Shortly after Catherine s death, Heathcliff is driven to madness by the thought that only "two yards of loose earth are the sole barrier between us" (p229). He opens her casket in the hopes of holding her in his arms once again, only to find that she is gone, and the only way to reunite with her is through death. By showing Heathcliff s misery, Bronte, Hagan comments, " uses symapthy to modify our hostile response to his cruel treatment of Isabella and his unjust scorn of Edgar" (p73).

 Hagan and McKibben, though they use different approaches, concentrate on the same basic points. They proved that the reader stripes both Heathcliff and Catherine of all their evils because they were not in a state of mind to think rationally. Bronte s use of sympathy is so well done that the reader continues to view Heathcliff and Catherine as victims, rather than immoral and corrupt villains. Hagan states that in the end, "we do not condone their outrages, but neither do we merely condemn them. We do something larger and more important: we recognize in them the tragedy of passionate natures whom intolerable frustration and loss have stripped them of their humanity" (p75).

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Heathcliff, the main character in Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, has no heart. He is evil to the core - so savage that his lone purpose is to ruin others. Yet at the very moment at which the reader would be expected to feel the most antipathy towards the brute -after he has destroyed his wife, after he has degraded the life of a potentially great man, and after he has watched the death of his son occur with no care nor concern, the reader finds himself feeling strangely sympathetic towards this character. The answer to this oddity lies in the presentation of the character himself, which causes us to be more pitying of him than we otherwise might.

Bronte's describes the young boy, Heathcliff, as"dark, almost as if he came from the devil," immediately spurring the reader to view the character as evil and immoral. His actions from thence forward largely tend to enhance this notion. From the very get go he hates Hindley, and although the feeling is mutual, Heathcliff certainly does his just portion of cruel deeds. In one incident Mr Earnshaw has given both Hindley and Heathcliff a colt. When Heathcliff's colt goes lame, he threatens to blackmail Hindley if he does not trade with him. At a young age, he begins to plot revenge against Hindley. "I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back," he says, "I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do!" And in his adult years, we find him teaching Hindley's son Hareton to swear desiring that the boy become just as foul as he. As the novel continues, Heathcliff develops another aversion. This time, to the man that married his lover, Edgar Linton. In one particular scene Edgar, Catherine, and Heathcliff are all involved in a passionate dispute. "I wish you the joy of a milk-blooded coward," he says, "....I compliment you on your taste. And that is the slavering, shivering thing you preferred me too. I would not strike him with my fist, but I'd kick him with my... [continues]

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I am aiming to discuss (the above) whom I may feel most sympathy for and why out of Catherine (Cathy for short) and Heathcliff.

 Wuthering Heights is a novel written by Emily Bronte between 1846-1847 and is vastly influenced and dominated by the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine and their eternal, everlasting love for each other. The novel is told through the eyes of several narrators and most of them do not understand the depth and intensity of Cathy and Heathcliff and so they cannot describe it. This book is extremely complexed and our sympathy for each character constantly shifts from one person to another as Bronte keeps giving us reasons to change our views. Even though Heathcliff is an unreclaimed creature, without refinement and whose purpose in life is to seek revenge on all those who have wronged or crossed him, Bronte changes our views by changing his status from hero to villain. Emily Bronte constantly changes the characters status and this adds intrigue to the book. Another example of our fluxuating views is when we first meet Cathy as she clearly talks about disliking her whole life in her diary and this makes us sympathise towards her as she practically thinks that nothings worth living for. However when Nelly describes the treatment that Cathy gave Heathcliff, 'spitting at the stupid little thing' (Pg30, line 14), we all change our views about her and instead we sympathise with Heathcliff because of his mistreatment and we start to detest/dislike her.

 There are many gothic elements in Wuthering Heights. An example of this is when Cathy's ghost taps at the window of Lockwood's bedchamber when a snowstorm throws him on the mercy of Heathcliff's grudging hospitality and he saws the child's arm on broken glass, (Pg20). Throughout the book Heathcliff is linked with bestial nature and called ghoul, goblin and vampire and this is no surprise.

 Cathy was, at first, awful to Heathcliff but when they became to love each other they were thought to be inseparable. However after her father dies she decides to marry Edgar Linton for further social development and not for love. This hurt Heathcliff as she said, to Nelly; it would degrade her to marry him and Heathcliff