Catherine Earnshaw and Catherine Linton's mother-daughter relationship

The relationship between Catherine Earnshaw and her daughter, Catherine Linton, is one of the most poignant paradoxes in the novel: a mother-daughter bond that exists almost entirely through absence. Catherine Earnshaw dies two hours after giving birth to her child, a puny seven-months' infant, having never recovered sufficient consciousness to miss Heathcliff or know Edgar. The daughter is thus born into a world where her mother is already a ghost, and the relationship that should have been the most intimate of human connections becomes instead a matter of inheritance, memory, and resemblance. The child is named Catherine, but she is always called Cathy, a distinction that both separates her from the mother and, paradoxically, binds her to her, as the name forms a connection even as it marks a difference.

Birth and the Shadow of Death

The circumstances of the daughter's birth are steeped in loss and neglect. Born at about twelve o'clock that night, the child is described as a puny, seven-months' child, an unwelcomed infant that might have wailed out of life with nobody caring a morsel during those first hours of existence. The mother dies two hours after the birth, and the father, Edgar Linton, is so distracted by his bereavement that he seems initially regardless of the puny successor to the departed. The child's beginning is as friendless as its end is likely to be, a stark prophecy that hangs over her early life. The mother's death leaves the daughter not only motherless but also, in the eyes of the household, a poor substitute for the woman who has been lost, an addition to the family that is bemoaned rather than celebrated.

The Father's Consolation and the Mother's Legacy

Edgar Linton's initial coldness toward the infant melts as fast as snow in April, and ere the tiny thing could stammer a word or totter a step it wielded a despot's sceptre in his heart. The child is named Catherine, but he never calls her by the name in full, just as he had never called the first Catherine short, probably because Heathcliff had a habit of doing so. The little one is always Cathy, a name that forms for him a distinction from the mother and yet a connection with her. His attachment to the child springs from its relation to her far more than from its being his own, meaning that the daughter is loved, in a profound sense, as a living reminder of the woman he has lost. The mother's legacy thus shapes the father's love, and the daughter grows up in a household where she is cherished not merely for herself but as a vessel of memory.

Resemblance and Difference

The daughter grows into a striking figure who both resembles and diverges from her mother. She is a real beauty in face, with the Earnshaws' handsome dark eyes, but the Lintons' fair skin and small features, and yellow curling hair. Her spirit is high, though not rough, and qualified by a heart sensitive and lively to excess in its affections. That capacity for intense attachments reminds Ellen Dean of her mother, yet she does not resemble her in temperament: she can be soft and mild as a dove, with a gentle voice and pensive expression. Her anger is never furious; her love never fierce: it is deep and tender. This is a crucial contrast with the elder Catherine, whose love was fierce and whose anger was furious. The daughter inherits the mother's capacity for intense feeling but not its violent expression, suggesting a softening of the Earnshaw inheritance through the Linton blood. The physical resemblance, however, is striking and carries its own consequences, particularly in the eyes of Heathcliff, who sees in the younger Catherine and in Hareton Earnshaw the eyes of the woman he lost.

The Mother's Words and the Daughter's Fate

The mother's own words about love and identity cast a long shadow over the daughter's life. Catherine Earnshaw, contemplating her marriage to Edgar Linton, had declared that her love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath, while her love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods, time will change it as winter changes the trees. She had also insisted that she could not consent to forsake Heathcliff, that every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing before she would abandon him. These declarations, made before the daughter's birth, define the emotional landscape into which the child is born. The daughter inherits not only her mother's name and features but also the consequences of her mother's choices. The mother's marriage to Edgar Linton, undertaken in part to aid Heathcliff to rise and place him out of her brother's power, sets in motion the chain of events that will lead to the daughter's captivity and forced marriage to Linton Heathcliff. The daughter thus pays for the mother's decisions, trapped in a web of revenge that began before she was born.

The Daughter's Captivity and the Mother's Absence

The mother's absence becomes most painfully apparent in the daughter's greatest trials. When Catherine Linton is imprisoned at Wuthering Heights and forced to marry the sickly Linton Heathcliff, she has no mother to turn to for comfort or protection. Her father, Edgar Linton, is dying, and she is left destitute of cash and friends, unable to disturb Heathcliff's possession of her property. The mother, who had herself been a figure of fierce independence and passionate attachment, is not there to guide her daughter through the ordeal of captivity and widowhood. The daughter must navigate these trials alone, and her survival and eventual redemption are achieved without the mother's direct influence. Yet the mother's legacy persists: the daughter's capacity for intense attachment, inherited from the mother, enables her to form the bond with Hareton Earnshaw that ultimately saves her. The mother's love, though never directly expressed to the daughter, is transmitted through the very qualities that allow the daughter to find happiness.

The Final Union and the Mother's Vindication

The relationship culminates in the daughter's union with Hareton Earnshaw, a union that in some sense fulfills the mother's thwarted love for Heathcliff. As Catherine Linton and Hareton grow close, teaching and learning from each other, their eyes are revealed to be precisely similar, and they are those of Catherine Earnshaw. The present Catherine has no other likeness to her except a breadth of forehead and a certain arch of the nostril that makes her appear rather haughty, but with Hareton the resemblance is carried farther. This resemblance disarms Heathcliff, who sees in the young couple the eyes of the woman he loved and lost. The daughter, by marrying Hareton, achieves a union that the mother could never have: a union of the Earnshaw and Linton lines that is not born of revenge but of genuine affection. Ellen Dean, watching the two young people, declares that the crown of all her wishes will be the union of those two, and that she shall envy no one on their wedding day. The mother's legacy, which had seemed so tragic, is thus redeemed in the daughter's happiness, as the love that Catherine Earnshaw could never fully realize finds its expression in the next generation.