Catherine Earnshaw

Character List



HEATHCLIFF

Is the central male character of the novel. A foundling raised by the Earnshaw family, he forms a bond with his foster sister Catherine Earnshaw and they share a passionate love, but it is founded on their sameness, of being different halves of the same soul, rather than just a romance or some physical attraction. Meanwhile he nurses a bitter rivalry with his foster brother Hindley, who resents the partiality his father shows Heathcliff and is cruel to him after his father's death. The only time he truly showed love or emotion was when it had to do with Cathy. He runs away from the heights when he is approximately sixteen (his age is unknown but he looks slightly older than Cathy) and returns three years later, having mysteriously made his fortune, education and refinement. He is a brooding, vindictive man, and his anger and bitterness at Catherine's later marriage to their neighbor Edgar Linton sees him engage in a ruthless vendetta to destroy not only his enemies but their heirs, a crusade that only intensifies upon Catherine's death.

 


CATHERINE EARNSHAW 

 She is Heathcliff's foster sister. She has dark brown eyes which are characteristic of her family. A free-spirited, wild, passionate, and somewhat spoiled young woman, she returns Heathcliff's love entirely, but because Heathcliff had been made so low that if she married them they would become beggars, instead she chooses another, Edgar Linton, through which marriage she hopes to help Heathcliff and bring him back to the standing he would have had. Heathcliff leaves the Heights after overhearing that it would degrade her to marry him, and because of this she throws herself into a violent fit and is ill for a while. When Edgar asks her to marry him she is about fifteen; they are married three years after Edgar's father's death when she is about eighteen, presumably when Edgar comes into his inheritance. When Heathcliff returns after those same three years she renews their friendship, which makes Edgar unhappy. Always on the edge of madness, her physical and mental health are destroyed by the feud between them, and she descends into prophetic madness before dying in an angelic state shortly after childbirth at about nineteen.



EDGAR LINTON  

He is a childhood friend of Catherine Earnshaw's who later marries her. His fair appearance, blonde hair and blue eyes, contrasts with Heathcliff's dark appearance. A mild and gentle man, if slightly cowardly and distant, he loves Catherine deeply but is unable to reconcile his love for her with her feelings for her childhood friend Heathcliff. This leads to a bitter antagonism with Heathcliff, and it is partly this which leads to Catherine's breakdown. He is well-mannered and gentlemanly but always remains something of a spoiled child. He is too afraid to fight Heathcliff and shows fear at the prospect, earning both Cathy's scorn and solidifying Heathcliff's contempt. Linton is incapable of competing with Heathcliff's guile and ruthless determination across the decades, and his health fails him while still a relatively young man.



ISABELA LINTON

 She is the younger sister of Edgar who becomes infatuated with Heathcliff. She fundamentally mistakes his true nature and elopes with him despite his apparent dislike of her. Her love for him turns to hatred almost immediately, as she is ill treated both physically and emotionally and held captive against her will. When Heathcliff returns from the Grange after Cathy's death she taunts him and he responds by trying to attack her, but Hindley interferes and she escapes the Heights. She leaves for London after visiting Nelly at the Grange and gives birth to their son Linton Heathcliff about seven months later, whom she attempts to raise away from Heathcliff's corrupting influence.

 

 


HINDLLEY EARNSHAW

He is Catherine's brother and Heathcliff's other rival. Having loathed Heathcliff since childhood, Hindley delights in turning him into a rough servant upon inheriting Wuthering Heights, making him work the fields. However, his wife's death from consumption destroys him; he becomes a self-destructive alcoholic and gambler and it is this that allows Heathcliff, upon returning to Wuthering Heights, to turn the tables and to buy the mortgage to Wuthering Heights which Hindley created because of his gambling debts, and to become its owner.

 

CATHY LINTON
  The daughter of Edgar Linton and the first Catherine as “young Catherine.” The first Catherine begins her life as Catherine Earnshaw and ends it as Catherine Linton; her daughter begins as Catherine Linton and, assuming that she marries Hareton after the end of the story, goes on to become Catherine Earnshaw. The mother and the daughter share not only a name, but also a tendency toward headstrong behavior, impetuousness, and occasional arrogance. However, Edgar's influence seems to have tempered young Catherine's character, and she is a gentler and more compassionate creature than her mother.
 
 
HARETON EARNSHAW 
 
 The son of Hindley and Frances Earnshaw, Hareton is Catherine's nephew. After Hindley's death, Heathcliff assumes custody of Hareton, and raises him as an uneducated field worker, just as Hindley had done to Heathcliff himself. Thus Heathcliff uses Hareton to seek revenge on Hindley. Illiterate and quick-tempered, Hareton is easily humiliated, but shows a good heart and a deep desire to improve himself. At the end of the novel, he marries young Catherine.

 

 

 

ELLEN (Nelly) DEAN 

 The housekeeper of both Thrushcross Grange and Wuthering Heights, and is the primary narrator of the novel, told through M. Lockwood's journal entries. She is Hindley's, Heathcliff's and Cathy's foster-sister and servant, and is the same age as Hindley, seven years older than Cathy. Heathcliff genuinely likes her and is always glad to see her. She recognizes early on that Heathcliff is Catherine's true love and tries to dissuade her from the disastrous marriage to Edgar. Having been a disapproving witness and unwilling participant to many of the events between Heathcliff and both the Earnshaw and Linton families for much of her life, she narrates the story to Lockwood during his illness at the Grange. It is presumed that she never married as she keeps the name Dean throughout her life. It could be considered that she is the true hero of the story, and without her many of the events in the story would never have taken place; however, she is not the primary protagonist.

 

LOCKWOOD

  Lockwood's narration forms a frame around Nelly's; he serves as an intermediary between Nelly and the reader. A somewhat vain and presumptuous gentleman, he deals very clumsily with the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights. Lockwood comes from a more domesticated region of England, and he finds himself at a loss when he witnesses the strange household's disregard for the social conventions that have always structured his world. As a narrator, his vanity and unfamiliarity with the story occasionally lead him to misunderstand events.

Analysis of Major Characters

 HEATHCLIFF
 
Wuthering Heights centers around the story of Heathcliff. The first paragraph of the novel provides a vivid physical picture of him, as Lockwood describes how his “black eyes” withdraw suspiciously under his brows at Lockwood's approach. Nelly's story begins with his introduction into the Earnshaw family, his vengeful machinations drive the entire plot, and his death ends the book. The desire to understand him and his motivations has kept countless readers engaged in the novel.
Heathcliff, however, defies being understood, and it is difficult for readers to resist seeing what they want or expect to see in him. The novel teases the reader with the possibility that Heathcliff is something other than what he seems—that his cruelty is merely an expression of his frustrated love for Catherine, or that his sinister behaviors serve to conceal the heart of a romantic hero. We expect Heathcliff's character to contain such a hidden virtue because he resembles a hero in a romance novel. Traditionally, romance novel heroes appear dangerous, brooding, and cold at first, only later to emerge as fiercely devoted and loving. One hundred years before Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights, the notion that “a reformed rake makes the best husband” was already a cliché of romantic literature, and romance novels center around the same cliché to this day.
 
However, Heathcliff does not reform, and his malevolence proves so great and long-lasting that it cannot be adequately explained even as a desire for revenge against Hindley, Catherine, Edgar, etc. As he himself points out, his abuse of Isabella is purely sadistic, as he amuses himself by seeing how much abuse she can take and still come cringing back for more. Critic Joyce Carol Oates argues that Emily Brontë does the same thing to the reader that Heathcliff does to Isabella, testing to see how many times the reader can be shocked by Heathcliff's gratuitous violence and still, masochistically, insist on seeing him as a romantic hero.
 
It is significant that Heathcliff begins his life as a homeless orphan on the streets of Liverpool. When Brontë composed her book, in the 1840s, the English economy was severely depressed, and the conditions of the factory workers in industrial areas like Liverpool were so appalling that the upper and middle classes feared violent revolt. Thus, many of the more affluent members of society beheld these workers with a mixture of sympathy and fear. In literature, the smoky, threatening, miserable factory-towns were often represented in religious terms, and compared to hell. The poet William Blake, writing near the turn of the nineteenth century, speaks of England's “dark Satanic Mills.” Heathcliff, of course, is frequently compared to a demon by the other characters in the book.
 
Considering this historical context, Heathcliff seems to embody the anxieties that the book's upper- and middle-class audience had about the working classes. The reader may easily sympathize with him when he is powerless, as a child tyrannized by Hindley Earnshaw, but he becomes a villain when he acquires power and returns to Wuthering Heights with money and the trappings of a gentleman. This corresponds with the ambivalence the upper classes felt toward the lower classes—the upper classes had charitable impulses toward lower-class citizens when they were miserable, but feared the prospect of the lower classes trying to escape their miserable circumstances by acquiring political, social, cultural, or economic power.
 
 

CATHERINE

 The location of Catherine's coffin symbolizes the conflict that tears apart her short life. She is not buried in the chapel with the Lintons. Nor is her coffin placed among the tombs of the Earnshaws. Instead, as Nelly describes in Chapter XVI, Catherine is buried “in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor.” Moreover, she is buried with Edgar on one side and Heathcliff on the other, suggesting her conflicted loyalties. Her actions are driven in part by her social ambitions, which initially are awakened during her first stay at the Lintons', and which eventually compel her to marry Edgar. However, she is also motivated by impulses that prompt her to violate social conventions—to love Heathcliff, throw temper tantrums, and run around on the moor.
Isabella Linton—Catherine's sister-in-law and Heathcliff's wife, who was born in the same year that Catherine was—serves as Catherine's foil. The two women's parallel positions allow us to see their differences with greater clarity. Catherine represents wild nature, in both her high, lively spirits and her occasional cruelty, whereas Isabella represents culture and civilization, both in her refinement and in her weakness.
 
 

EDGAR

 Just as Isabella Linton serves as Catherine's foil, Edgar Linton serves as Heathcliff's. Edgar is born and raised a gentleman. He is graceful, well-mannered, and instilled with civilized virtues. These qualities cause Catherine to choose Edgar over Heathcliff and thus to initiate the contention between the men. Nevertheless, Edgar's gentlemanly qualities ultimately prove useless in his ensuing rivalry with Heathcliff. Edgar is particularly humiliated by his confrontation with Heathcliff in Chapter XI, in which he openly shows his fear of fighting Heathcliff. Catherine, having witnessed the scene, taunts him, saying, “Heathcliff would as soon lift a finger at you as the king would march his army against a colony of mice.” As the reader can see from the earliest descriptions of Edgar as a spoiled child, his refinement is tied to his helplessness and impotence.
 
Charlotte Brontë, in her preface to the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights, refers to Edgar as “an example of constancy and tenderness,” and goes on to suggest that her sister Emily was using Edgar to point out that such characteristics constitute true virtues in all human beings, and not just in women, as society tended to believe. However, Charlotte's reading seems influenced by her own feminist agenda. Edgar's inability to counter Heathcliff's vengeance, and his naïve belief on his deathbed in his daughter's safety and happiness, make him a weak, if sympathetic, character.
 
 
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