Wuthering Heights, xxx
Nell gathers intelligence from Zillah about Catherine’s condition at the Heights.
Catherine is sure that Linton is dying but Heathcliff refuses to call for a doctor. By and by he dies and none cry. Of course, he has willed everything to his father—probably by force—and Heathcliff is now checkmate.
Catherine would avoid everybody if possible: “Mr. Hareton, and the whole set of you, will be good enough to understand that I reject any pretense at kindness you have the hypocrisy to offer! I despise you and you have nothing to say to any of you! When I would have given my life for one kind word, even to see one of your faces, you all kept off. But I won’t complain to you! I’m driven down here by the cold, not either to abuse you, or to enjoy your society.” (235)
Zillah observes, “she’ll snap at the master himself, and as good as dares him to thrash her; and the more hurt she gets, the more venomous she grows” (236)
Thus ended Miss Dean’s story.
Wuthering Heights, xxix
Male heirs. Heathcliff has played the board masterfully: Hindley beat him as a child and Heathcliff indebted him, stole his son, broke him.
Edgar and Isabella made fun of the dirty, swearing servant boy; Edgar as adult thought Heathcliff still servant in station; Edgar lands a lucky punch to his throat; Heathcliff takes the sister, makes an heir, and crushes that family, and walks in as master: if your ethic is that revenge is justified, he is your man.
As students of history and social equality—what was that? What did you say, Boy?—you know that women can’t own property. Catherine is trapped. Nell, a servant, is no social equal: she speaks her mind and is tolerated—but the superior’s shut-up is backed by termination of at-pleasure employment. No labor board or lawyer to complain to.
A woman’s protest—regardless of station—could be met with abuse. No police, no CPS. Heathcliff established his level of physical control, and we understand that Linton, not strong enough physically, will work his as does the rat.
Heathcliff relays to Nell his bribery of the sexton to show his Cathy’s corpse, and to secure a spot next to her when his time comes. Then he tells of, some eighteen years ago, digging to her grave in a snowfall to die next to her. But then her ghost “appears”—and keeps appearing.
“Now since I’ve seen her, I’m pacified – a little. It was a strange way of killing, not by inches, but by fractions of a hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope, through eighteen years!” (230)
Nerves of catgut.
We suppose that Heathcliff would have killed himself at her death, but the hope that she would come back more substantially stops him, and he reckons that she has killed him by teasing her spectral presence.
Have you ever had a ghost lover? Let me tell you…
“Liar,” Henry Rollins Band
But the challenge stands: Heathcliff never lies.
Wuthering Heights, xxvii, xxviii
“Catherine’s face was just like the landscape—shadows and sunshine flooding over it in rapid succession” (211). Edgar is slipping away rapidly and inevitably.
The Thursday meeting at the same spot—but now the fear is both evident and admitted.
And now we witness Heathcliff’s tactics. Heathcliff seems inured to tooth and nail, and he responds: that is what the British call “boxing the ears.”
“[Catherine’s] cousin had shrunk to a corner of the settle, as quiet as a mouse, congratulating himself, I daresay, at the correction have a lighted on another than him” (216).
Catherine recovers quickly, and attempt a different tactic: kneeling before Heathcliff and attempts love.
“Keep your eft’s fingers off; and, or I’ll kick you!” cried Heathcliff, brutally repulsing her. “I’d rather be hugged by a snake. How the devil can you dream of fawning on me? I detest you!” (219)
And why is that, especially, in her case?
xxviii
Heathcliff would not have let Catherine go; she finally convinced Linton, and escapes through her mother’s window, climbing down a tree—an egress that we can assume her mother used as a girl to have a scamper about the moors.
The lawyer Green shows up finally. In Heathcliff’s pocket, he gives a quit order and fires all servants and hands save Nell: Heathcliff remembers her early kindnesses, and is in a sense loyal to those he considers friend.
Wuthering Heights, xxiv, xxv, xxvi
xxiv
I’m glad that chapter’s over. I know we’re supposed to suffer fools but Lord that chapter about makes me lose my religion.
xxv
Edgar senses he hasn’t long.
The correspondences, negotiating a meeting of Catherine and Linton.
Are you familiar with chess? Heathcliff is maneuvering people as pieces, hey? Gaining control of the board…
xxvi
Come just a little further…
…aaaaaand he’s a quarter mile from the Heights with no horse.
Linton did not appear to remember what she talked of; and he had evidently great difficulty sustaining any kind of conversation. His lack of interest in the subjects she started, and his equal incapacity to contribute to her entertainment, were so obvious that she could not conceal her disappointment. An indefinite alteration had come over his whole person and manner. The pettiness that might be caressed into fondness, had yielded to a listless apathy; there was less of the peevish temper of a child which frets and tease on purpose to be soothed, and more of the self-absorbed moroseness of a confirmed invalid, repelling consolation, ready to regard the good-humored mirth of others as an insult. (208)
[Andersen takes the quill from Brontë and takes over the narrative:
Cathy looks down in resigned disgust as realizes that Linton is indeed a “whey-faced wretch.” She scans the heathered hills, hoping to see no witnesses, and with a wrinkled nose whispers to Ellen, “Can’t we just put him out of his misery or something?”
“Girl! I have waited so long for you to say that!” hissed an electrified Nell, suppressing a jig and producing a shockingly large, long-barreled pistol, Clint Eastwood-like, from under serapé…
ROLL CREDITS
Sigh…]
You see, however, Linton’s terror at his father’s being disappointed with the outcome of the meeting. Heathcliff is apparently quite rough with one of the pieces he’s moving around the board.
Do you have any sympathy for Linton?
Wuthering Heights, xxii, xxiii
Chapter twenty-two starts a second love story — oh what a love story it is!
Catherine is convinced by her father. Phew! Out of danger. But there she is, more “on the fence” than she appears, hey? And she slips over…
The description of the other side of the wall is symbolic, the locked door symbolic, Ellen Dean’s entreaties through said door symbolic…
Nell calls Heathcliff a liar: again, is he lying? (I challenge you to find his lies anywhere in the entire text.)
xxiii
Does anybody sympathize with Linton?
Is anybody not rolling eyes at Catherine?
Is anybody not in Brontë’s pocket at the moment? Dramatic irony much?
Wuthering Heights, xx, xxi
Heathcliff has called for his son Lindon, and as Edgar is a magistrate, he knows well that the law is on the Heathcliff’s side, and bids Nell to take the peevish boy to the Heights.
Here we see directly how Heathcliff is at childrearing. The only “kindness” he gives his son is allowing a substitute to the porridge and that he refuses.
Heathcliff already refers to his son as a “puling chicken” (169) and “whey-faced whining wretch” (170) and his mother as a slut. But Lockwood’s opening query on how Heathcliff came to be landlord of Grange and Heights is becoming clear: “I will be very kind to him you need to fear! ” [Heathcliff] said laughing. “Only nobody else must be kind to him — I’m jealous of monopolizing his affection.”
xxi
Four years later, Catherine is sixteen. She and Nell go exploring and as Catherine is looking for grouse eggs on the property of the Heights — which is poaching the property of others and is a serious crime in that day — she is “arrested” quote by Heathcliff and Hareton.
Catherine had reached her full height; her figure was both plump and slender, elastic as steel, and her whole aspect sparkling with health and spirits. Linton’s looks and movements were very languid, and his form extremely slight; but there was a grace in his manner that mitigated these defects and rendered him not unpleasing. (175)
Well we can guess where this is going.
Have you noted that Heathcliff does not lie to Catherine? On that matter, have you noted him lie?
Ever?
His assessment of Hareton’s character belies much about himself as well as the lad he likes better than his own son: gold used as paving stones, tin polished to look silver (178).
So it comes out that she has visited, and Edgar tells the truth that she had been holding until Catherine was older. Catherine has difficulty comprehending that a human being can be so dark. She asks Nell if she can send a note to Linton explaining why she can’t come, and when Nell forbids it, Catherine enlists the help of the milkmaid’s boy to start a correspondence. Note the Pandora’s Box element: Nellie is the voice of reason, Catherine is Pandora. Perhaps there is also a comparison to be made to the legend of Bluebeard.
At this point we think back to our first meeting of Catherine Jr. on Lockwood’s second visit to the Heights, her character much changed. How did she become so?
Read on!
Wuthering Heights: Thrushcross Grange
I recommend that you read first, always, and allow your imagination to form the image of character and place. Once that is established, then look at the images that others have created to suit their imaginations.
Visit http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/index.php for a source of Brontë’s life and times, the photos and locations of the actual places that likely inspired her, pronunciations, pertinent essays, and more.
Here is that author’s rendering of the layout of Thrushcross Grange:
Wuthering Heights: the house
I recommend that you read first, always, and allow your imagination to form the image of character and place. Once that is established, then look at the images that others have created to suit their imaginations.
Visit http://www.wuthering-heights.co.uk/index.php for a source of Brontë’s life and times, the photos and locations of the actual places that likely inspired her, pronunciations, pertinent essays, and more.
Here is that author’s rendering of the layout of Wuthering Heights:
Wuthering Heights, xviii, xix
Twelve years beyond Cathy’s death.
“Catherine” now refers to the daughter: she is “the most winning thing that brought sunshine into a desolate house” (155), but is also saucy and petulant.
Catherine wants to wander beyond what is known, but her father forbids it for the avoidance of Heathcliff. One wonders why Ellen Dean did not suss the meaning of “crossing the Desert with caravan” (157).
Catherine Jr. attempts making Penistone Crags, but encountering Hareton near the Heights, and the unsuing dog battle, undoes the plan. A panicked Nell finds her at the house.
Catherine a wonderful time with Hareton until he tells her he’ll be damned to be her servant (157). She is further shocked to learn they are cousins. Hareton is described as althletic and healthy, “good things lost in a field of weeds” (161).
Edgar returns with a weak Linton who cries and cries. He’s not there a whole day before Joseph shows up, on behalf of Linton’s father Heathcliff, to claim him as parent and guardian.
Kingsley Andersen 