Love and Death in Wuthering Heights: Reconsidering Heathcliff

Readers of Wuthering Heights tend to fall into two camps. Some admire Heathcliff—his pure, raw, untamed love that endures even beyond death. Others find him deeply troubling, unable to sympathize with or understand his storm-like passion and cruelty. After all, the 19th century feels impossibly distant to us now, and we inhabit an entirely different world.

So how should we approach Wuthering Heights today? Are Heathcliff’s admirers simply romantic idealists who chase perfection and love grand emotions? Are his critics pragmatic realists who value reason over passion? Or does each reading offer us a chance to reach beyond our own boundaries and touch the complex, painful core of another person’s love?

A Damaged Boy in a Harsh World

Heathcliff is a man consumed by obsession. When he loves, he sacrifices everything. He pursues that love ruthlessly, even unto death. On the windswept moors of northern England, in a time and place both isolated and primitive, a dark, dirty street child fell in love with Catherine—the source of all his joy and all his suffering.

Wuthering Heights is described as “a perfect misanthropist’s heaven.” Into this beautiful but desolate, closed-off world, Heathcliff arrived as an outsider—a starving six or seven-year-old brought home by old Mr. Earnshaw. His early childhood was marked by hardship: near-starvation before the Heights, and Hindley’s abuse after. Yet with Catherine, everything changed.

Catherine was a wild, spirited girl with restlessness in her blood. As the housekeeper notes, she could try everyone’s patience fifty times a day, always mischievous, never giving a moment’s peace—singing, laughing, and tormenting anyone who wouldn’t play along. Yet this wild child was also kind and beautiful. Unlike her older brother Hindley, who grew jealous of their father’s affection for Heathcliff, young Catherine simply wanted someone to play with.

For Heathcliff, hardened by street life, Catherine’s attention meant everything. Though they came from different backgrounds, what mattered most was that they were children together. Hindley received the education befitting an eldest son, carrying all the weight of family expectations. Old Earnshaw was elderly and often disapproving. Joseph was a neurotic, religiously obsessed farmhand. Nelly was the proper servant, always aligned with her masters’ wishes. To Catherine, who wanted to play and run wild, these people represented rules and order—a rational, unfree world. Heathcliff represented something else entirely: freedom, adventure, and infinite possibility.

Two Worlds Collide

The Heights operated in a raw, unrefined way—emotions included. Compare this to Thrushcross Grange, where the Linton children were polite and civilized, and you see two extremes that would inevitably clash. When Heathcliff observed young Edgar and Isabella fighting over a puppy, then both refusing it out of shame, he was baffled. Had he been in their place with Hindley as opponent, he would have torn the dog apart before surrendering it. Had Catherine wanted it, the question of his own desires wouldn’t even arise—her wishes would be his.

This small detail reveals something crucial about Heathcliff. Unlike the Linton children, who acted from simple desire then were restrained by conscience, Heathcliff never operated from pure personal need. Perhaps he’d had too few choices in life. He cherished Catherine absolutely while hating Hindley with equal intensity. Heathcliff viewed the world through the lens of how it treated him first. His sincere devotion to Catherine reflected her genuine kindness toward him. His desires were always colored by resistance and reaction.

Because Heathcliff had received so little, he demanded more—but no one taught him the proper way to ask. In this sense, he was deeply complex. Every action related to whether he would betray his entire painful, unequal existence. Catherine, by contrast, was far simpler. Her understanding of Heathcliff existed on a different plane than his understanding of her. His feelings for Catherine contained more than simple affection—he no longer saw the real girl, but rather what she represented.

When they ran wild on the moors together, Catherine found it “wonderfully entertaining.” For Heathcliff, it was an act of resistance—rebellion against a world that had wronged him. Catherine approached the world with curiosity, rebelliousness, and playfulness. Heathcliff approached it with defiance, betrayal, and the desire for complete rupture. This meant he often couldn’t see what he should see or consider what he should consider. He was more ruthless and more prone to extremes.

The Loss of Childhood

Their friendship developed without civilized constraints, bound together by shared struggle against the brutal Hindley. They were comrades in arms with no time to consider how they might live without this common enemy, no time to question how much of what they saw in each other was real.

The first crack appeared after Catherine spent five weeks at Thrushcross Grange. She was only twelve. Three years later, at fifteen, she accepted Edgar’s proposal. Three years after that, at eighteen, she married him.

In Heathcliff’s mind, Edgar stole Catherine. When he returned to the Heights years later, he began his cruel revenge. But was this true? Did Edgar really steal her?

After those five weeks away, Catherine changed in two significant ways. First, she learned that “ill-breeding was shameful” and strove to hide her rougher nature, which helped her maintain good relations with the Grange. Second, despite this, “she retained a peculiar attachment to old associations—even Heathcliff remained beloved and unchanged. Young Linton, with all his superiority, found it difficult to make an equally deep impression.”

Catherine no longer stood united with Heathcliff. She tried to reconcile the conflict between him and Edgar. Meanwhile, Heathcliff changed too. At sixteen, “not bad-looking and reasonably intelligent, he deliberately made himself repulsive inside and out.” He adopted “a slouching gait and an ignoble look,” expanding his natural reserve into “an almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness.”

Catherine lost her childhood because she began thinking rationally about her future. She knew she couldn’t remain with Heathcliff forever as they had been. She had to face the future—and Heathcliff had no future. Two friends who once stood together each lost the other. Catherine knew civilization was “good,” but it brought her no happiness. In that other world, she was false. Raised on the wild moors, she found gentle, fragile Edgar strange. In that world, she betrayed her own life. She missed the past—missed the proud boy who had stood beside her, who treated her as himself, with whom there were no rules or formalities, only honest connection.

At the Heights, past harmony and joy had vanished. Because of Hindley, Heathcliff had no opportunity for advancement. He gave up on himself—but held onto one hope: that Catherine hadn’t given up on him. His self-destruction was built on self-hatred and shame.

The Trap of Impossible Love

Even on that stormy night when Heathcliff fled, they had never truly confronted their future. Since the past was irretrievable, on what foundation should their love rest? Catherine revealed her weakness here. She “loved” Edgar, but then said: “Did it never strike you that if Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars? Whereas, if I marry Linton, I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my brother’s power.”

Catherine approached her love this way, while Heathcliff chose to flee because he couldn’t face it. She was fifteen; he was sixteen. Notice their ages—they were still children. Their love formed before Catherine turned twelve, rooted in childhood joy. But from the moment she returned from Thrushcross Grange, their love had nowhere to anchor. Yet it persisted, fed by unhappiness and beautiful imagination.

During Heathcliff’s three-year absence, what kind of life kept this love alive in both of them? What could survive between two children who hadn’t seen each other for three years?

Without real contact, how could they achieve harmony or lifelong devotion? Real space disappeared, leaving only imagination to fill the void. But was the person you imagined still the real person?

When Heathcliff returned, we might ask: if he and Catherine had reunited successfully, could they have been harmoniously happy? Living in completely different environments, could their supposedly transcendent love—”you are me, I am you”—have endured? If it could have, why did Catherine accept Edgar’s proposal in the first place? The moment they began calculating, the love was already compromised.

Was Catherine’s love for Heathcliff the same at twelve as at eighteen? If their love was truly transcendent, what was its foundation? Sex? Probably not. Freedom from constraint? But could civilized Catherine still be free and natural with Heathcliff? What life should they have lived together? Run wild on the moors like children? Catherine despised Edgar’s weakness—but facing Heathcliff’s absolute love (you are me, I am you), did she ever doubt her own courage to bear it?

When Catherine loved Heathcliff, was she also endorsing his dangerous kind of love? She once warned Isabella about him: describing Heathcliff as “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s day!” Catherine loved Heathcliff, and these words may contain jealousy—but don’t they also contain truth? She warned him: “I’m too fond of her, my dear Heathcliff, and I won’t have you snatch her and devour her.” In the novel, Heathcliff did devour Isabella, bringing a woman who loved him nothing but lifelong misery.

The Form Without Substance

Though we might call it all “love,” the word is far too complex. When Heathcliff returned, he and Catherine still loved each other—but by then, only the form remained. Both became extreme formalists. Their love became resistance against the alienation of their true selves. Heathcliff resisted an unjust world that stole Catherine from him (and Catherine represented the entire world, carrying symbolic weight beyond herself). Catherine resisted life’s constraints, mediocrity, and her own cowardice (with all its attendant pain and unhappiness). Love became the banner of resistance. Heathcliff pursued it fiercely; Catherine no longer dared to bear it.

Heathcliff’s accusation rings true: “You have killed yourself. How strong you are! How many years do you mean to live after I am gone?” If they truly loved each other, why deceive their own hearts? Compared to Catherine, Heathcliff—standing at life’s bottom line—seems more forgivable in his obsession and self-loathing.

Catherine died at nineteen. Heathcliff was twenty.

The Question of Love and Revenge

Yet the story didn’t end there. After Catherine’s death, Heathcliff became deeply unlikeable, his mad revenge seemingly endless—affecting young Linton, young Catherine, young Hareton. Is this love? Hate born from love? Does he love Catherine more, or hate the world more? Does he seek revenge for Catherine, or for himself? Does he love Catherine (the real Catherine), or does he love himself more—demanding that “Catherine” belong only to him, trapped in his private world forever? Does “you are me, I am you” mean “if I flow toward swamps and bogs, you absolutely cannot flow toward the sea”?

Wuthering Heights is a closed world. Heathcliff fanatically believes in his love and in Catherine’s love for him. But is this extreme fanaticism the same as extreme love? Was their love fundamentally the same in nature? When Heathcliff could only become a beggar, Catherine chose to leave and lived with that guilt. Within the small world of Wuthering Heights, everything became so absolute.