If Catherine Had Ever Thought Heathcliff Was A Worthy Husband Shed Have Never Have Considered Edgar In

if catherine had ever thought heathcliff was a worthy husband she’d have never have considered edgar in the first place.

i’m not saying cathy never loved heathcliff; she did, that much is true. but isabella on the other hand, stood by heathcliff until her dying day; even when he’d managed to make enemies everywhere he went, she believed that she could cure his infatuation with cathy; and is aware she risks her relationship with edgar. even if this relationship, too, is toxic, it just goes to show how much of an inferiority complex brontë weaves into the novel.

if you think about the setting and ideally the periods the brontës were writing in, surely you can understand that still people were fearful of the unknown, myths and legends, witchcraft and apparitions; it would make anyone mental.

but the fact that brontë personifies this into a piece of fiction. that’s what gets me. she openly challenges people to look at the repercussions and the consequences of toxic relationships, delirium, abuse, and chooses to be risky in her portrayals of “ghosts” and mental health issues. it’s sort of like she’s speaking directly to her audience

Continuing some thoughts…so many use Catherine’s obvious ignorance of marriage and sex in her conversation to Nelly about Edgar’s proposal to say her relationship with Heathcliff is platonic. But this ignores that she’s a 15 year old girl in a time when women were kept in the dark as much as possible about anything that happens between men and women. Nelly herself says she is either “ignorant of the duties you undertake in marrying; or else that you are a wicked, unprincipled girl” - I think based on other knowledge of Catherine it should be assumed that she’s ignorant (which is no fault of her own). On Heathcliff’s part - he obviously already desired her as a wife at 16 which is why he ran away when she said she couldn’t marry him. 

By the time we see Catherine and Heathcliff as adults and more experienced, they still consistently choose each other. As we see throughout the novel he still holds his attachment with Catherine as more important than other potential physical/romantic relationships, such as with Isabella. These feelings may not be as clear on Catherine’s side but this could simply be because Heathcliff is alive through more of the novel so we don’t spend as much time with her. When we do though, it should be noted she was already pregnant by the time Heathcliff returns which I think would increase the unlikelihood of their pursuing anything physical. At this time she is being pushed and pulled by various forces into the Linton family and away from Wuthering Heights, her childhood, and Heathcliff. Still I think its safe to assume that she’s more knowledgeable about marital duties during this time period and she would have been taught that her husband should be her main focus, and yet she consistently treats Heathcliff has his equal, if not his superior.

Just because their relationship is never consummated does not mean it was meant to be seen as platonic. From what we know of Emily Brontë I don’t think she would have written about an actually physical adulterous affair; in part because of her own personal morality and that it probably wouldn’t have gotten published. It also (totally my own conjecture) seems to be deliberate to bolster the element of yearning, unfulfillment, and tension that is constant through the book. All of this to say, no, they are not platonic lol. 

'The Picture of Dorian Gray' by Oscar Wilde (published in 1890)

Lovers portraits complete!:)

Heathcliff and Catherine artworks

from Emily Bronte “Wuthering Heights”

i think it’s fair to say that cathy sacrificed her love for heathcliff in order to appease her family obligation. falling in love with edgar was a choice but falling in love with heathcliff was fate. i believe she struggled internally with the expectations of her family and her real desires. she was the black sheep of her family and wanted to make sure she didn’t lose them. cathy was incredibly loyal but she was quite ignornant - most especially with her family’s mistreatment of heathcliff while she was the only one who was kind and she’d also failed to see heathcliff would sacrifice the world to be with her but she only saw a dire financial situation. marrying edgar was the only way to ensure she was well cared for.

More thoughts on “Wuthering Heights”

Recent discussions about the nature of Heathcliff and Catherine’s love, especially in @astrangechoiceoffavourites’s posts, have made me think about a topic that I’ve seen a few critics discuss in the past, but not many. Namely that they don’t love each other in precisely the same way. Without denying the soul connection they do share, each one’s individual love has distinctly different nuances.

Cathy is the one who describes her love for Heathcliff in the unique terms that are so often quoted and as the description of “their” love: “…he’s more myself than I am,” “Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same,” “I am Heathcliff!” etc. She’s the one who emphasizes their twin souls and insists that Heathcliff is her “own being.” Her love doesn’t care about his looks (she acknowledges that he’s handsome, but only to say that it’s not why she loves him), or whether or not he’s “pleasant to be with,” or the presence of other romantic partners in either of their lives. She feels free to fall in love with Edgar, without it diminishing her deeper love for Heathcliff, and doesn’t think her marriage will change her relationship with Heathcliff at all, because she assumes he understands her perfectly. (She’s sadly wrong in that last regard.) And the same is true in reverse. This might be an unpopular, debatable opinion, but she arguably shows no real jealousy when Isabella falls in love with Heathcliff: she objects to their match because she knows it will drive Edgar to banish Heathcliff from their lives, and because she knows Heathcliff doesn’t love Isabella and will mistreat her, but she says that if Heathcliff had really cared for Isabella, then she would have been willing to let them marry. While each of them straddles the line between lover and sibling for the other, Cathy’s love is the easier of the two to interpret as an intense, codependent platonic love rather than romantic love.

Heathcliff’s love definitely seems more conventionally romantic. At age thirteen he speaks of Catherine’s “beautiful hair” and “enchanting face” and describes her as “immeasurably superior to everybody on earth.” To the end of his life, Nelly’s narration refers to Cathy as his “idol,” and he describes himself as her “slave” – Cathy, on the other hand, sees him as her twin soul, but never idolizes him the way he does her. Nor does he ever have romantic feelings for any other woman, and he’s jealous of Edgar’s presence in her life and sees her as despising and rejecting him when she accepts Edgar’s proposal, even though she doesn’t view it as such herself. By marrying Edgar, he describes her as having “levelled my palace” and erected a “hovel” in its place by expecting him to be content as her friend. At the same time, while he does her call his “life” and “soul,” he never claims to be her, or describes her as “more myself than I am,” or assumes that perfect understanding exists between them. She presumes that they share a deeper degree of sameness and mutual understanding than he ever mentions, while his love has layers of both worship and possessiveness that her’s lacks.

This extends into the notorious love-hate aspect of their bond. The inherent ambivalence that critics often attribute to both of them (e.g. “They love each other, but they don’t like each other”) is really more inherent to Catherine than to Heathcliff. She’s the one who describes him as not being a pleasure to her any more than she’s always a pleasure to herself, and who describes her love for him as “a source of little visible delight, but necessary.” She’s the one who freely describes him as “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation” and “a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man,” even when they’re not at odds with each other. Heathcliff’s feelings for her seem less inherently complex; he seems to view her with pure adoration until she befriends the Lintons and his later anger toward her is the more conventional anger of a scorned lover.

Of course part of these differences lie in the class and racial difference between them. She was the privileged daughter of a genteel white family, while he was their poor foundling of a despised race, later reduced to a servant – given the time and place they live in, it makes all too much sense that he should idolize her while she views him as a brute even as she loves him. Although of course it’s complicated, since her father favored Heathcliff above her while he was alive and her wild, unladylike temperament made her a misfit in a different way. Part of Heathcliff’s anger clearly stems from the fact that he and Cathy were once “two outcasts against the world,” so to speak, but then she switched her allegiance to “the world.”

The differences in their loves are interesting, and just as interesting are the different interpretations from the critics I’ve read so far who acknowledge those differences. Some take a more positive view of Heathcliff’s love and a more negative view of Cathy’s, claiming that his more traditional, relatable romantic love is “real” love, while she, textbook narcissist that she is, only loves him as a perceived extension of herself and is so convinced of their inner “sameness” (yet at the same time looking down on him) that she fails to consider his needs as a separate individual. Others take a more positive view of Cathy’s love, seeing the idealism in her vision of a love that features complete mutual understanding and identification with the other, that involves no unrealistic idolizing but sees the other’s flaws yet loves them anyway, and that transcends social convention and any need to possess; Heathcliff, in this view, is the one who falls short by failing to love her without possessiveness. I think both of those interpretations are valid… I might even agree with both at once.

(Note: This is one of the main reasons why I have no patience for claims that Emily Brontë must have had a secret lover, and even less patience for claims that she must have loved someone who rejected her and used Heathcliff as a mouthpiece for her pain and anger. That hypothesis ignores the fact that some of the book’s most unique expressions of love, most different from any portrayal of love she would have found in books and poems, are Cathy’s descriptions of her love for Heathcliff, not so much vice-versa. And Cathy’s love makes perfect sense as the creation of an author whose main experience of love was familial. A sexless love that has nothing to do with looks, where you don’t always “like” the other and sometimes even “hate” them but always love them, where no one understands you the way they do, nor does anyone understand them the way you do, and where you can both be more authentic with each other than with anyone else… Doesn’t that sound more like sibling love than conventional romantic love and make sense as having been written by an author with three close siblings but no romantic partner?)

does anyone else just randomly smell book pages? me personally, i like it. it’s almost as magical as the book itself. the thicker the aroma, the more memories it holds - an infinite vessel