Catherine Earnshaw's Death

Catherine Earnshaw's Death is the central catastrophe of Emily Brontë's novel, the event that converts Heathcliff's calculated revenge into a lifelong haunting and seals the fate of the next generation. It occurs at Thrushcross Grange, where Catherine, now married to Edgar Linton, dies two hours after giving birth to a puny, seven-months' child. The death is not merely a personal loss; it is the fulcrum on which the entire narrative turns, transforming Heathcliff from a man of worldly vengeance into one possessed by a spectral obsession, and leaving Edgar Linton a distracted, broken guardian to a daughter who will inherit the consequences of her mother's choices.

Illness and Decline

Catherine's final illness is a slow, consuming process that begins long before her death. Following the violent quarrel between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton, she falls into a state of profound mental and physical distress. The doctor, Mr. Kenneth, examining her case, speaks hopefully of a favourable termination only if perfect and constant tranquillity can be preserved around her. Privately, however, he confides to Ellen Dean that the threatening danger is not so much death as the permanent alienation of intellect. This diagnosis frames Catherine's decline as a psychological unraveling as much as a physical one. For two months she endures what is denominated a brain fever, during which Edgar Linton tends her with a devotion that borders on self-destruction. No mother could have nursed an only child more devotedly than Edgar tends her, watching day and night and patiently enduring all the annoyances that irritable nerves and a shaken reason could inflict. Kenneth remarks that what Edgar saves from the grave will only recompense his care by forming the source of constant future anxiety, that his health and strength are being sacrificed to preserve a mere ruin of humanity. Yet Edgar knows no limits in gratitude and joy when Catherine's life is declared out of danger, and he sits beside her hour after hour, tracing her gradual return to bodily health and flattering his too sanguine hopes with the illusion that her mind will settle back to its right balance. The first time she leaves her chamber is at the commencement of the following March, when Edgar has put a handful of golden crocuses on her pillow; her eye, long a stranger to any gleam of pleasure, catches them in waking and shines delighted as she gathers them eagerly together. This fragile recovery, however, proves to be only a prelude to the final collapse.

The Birth and Death

About twelve o'clock on the night of her death, Catherine gives birth to the daughter who will be known as Catherine Linton, a puny, seven-months' child. Two hours after the birth, the mother dies, having never recovered sufficient consciousness to miss Heathcliff or know Edgar. The timing is cruelly precise: she slips away without a final word to either of the two men who have defined her life. Ellen Dean, witnessing the scene, reflects on the tragedy of the newborn, an unwelcomed infant that might have wailed out of life with nobody caring a morsel during those first hours of existence. The child's beginning is as friendless as its end is likely to be, Ellen muses, a grim prophecy that will largely come true. Edgar Linton's distraction at his bereavement is a subject too painful to be dwelt on, but its after-effects show how deep the sorrow sinks. Ellen also notes a great addition to the tragedy: Edgar is left without an heir, as old Linton has secured his estate to his own daughter rather than his son's, a natural partiality that Ellen mentally abuses. The next morning, bright and cheerful out of doors, the light steals softened in through the blinds of the silent room and suffuses the couch and its occupant with a mellow, tender glow. Edgar Linton has his head laid on the pillow and his eyes shut, his young and fair features almost as deathlike as those of the form beside him, almost as fixed, but his is the hush of exhausted anguish and hers of perfect peace. Her brow is smooth, her lids closed, her lips wearing the expression of a smile; no angel in heaven could be more beautiful than she appears. Ellen, partaking of the infinite calm in which Catherine lies, instinctively echoes the words Catherine had uttered a few hours before: 'Incomparably beyond and above us all! Whether still on earth or now in heaven, her spirit is at home with God!'

Heathcliff's Reaction

The death reaches Heathcliff not through any messenger but through his own vigil. Ellen Dean, stealing out to the pure refreshing air after her protracted watch, finds him in the park, leaning against an old ash-tree, his hat off and his hair soaked with the dew that has gathered on the budded branches and fallen pattering round him. He has been standing there so long that a pair of ousels pass and repass scarcely three feet from him, busy building their nest and regarding his proximity no more than that of a piece of timber. When Ellen approaches, he raises his eyes and speaks: 'She's dead!' he says, 'I've not waited for you to learn that. Put your handkerchief away—don't snivel before me. Damn you all! she wants none of your tears!' Ellen, weeping as much for him as for Catherine, perceives that he has already got intelligence of the catastrophe. When she tells him that Catherine's senses never returned and that she recognised nobody from the time he left her, that she lies with a sweet smile on her face and her latest ideas wandered back to pleasant early days, Heathcliff's reaction is one of frightful vehemence. 'May she wake in torment!' he cries, stamping his foot and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. 'Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there—not in heaven—not perished—where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer—I repeat it till my tongue stiffens—Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you! Oh, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!' He dashes his head against the knotted trunk and, lifting up his eyes, howls not like a man but like a savage beast being goaded to death with knives and spears. Ellen observes several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead are both stained, probably the scene she witnesses being a repetition of others acted during the night. It hardly moves her compassion—it appals her—and she feels reluctant to quit him, but he thunders a command for her to go, and she obeys, recognising that he is beyond her skill to quiet or console.

The Funeral and the Vigil

Mrs. Linton's funeral is appointed to take place on the Friday following her decease, and till then her coffin remains uncovered, strewn with flowers and scented leaves, in the great drawing-room of Thrushcross Grange. Edgar Linton spends his days and nights there as a sleepless guardian. In a circumstance concealed from all but Ellen, Heathcliff spends his nights outside, equally a stranger to repose. Ellen, conscious of his design to enter if he could, opens one of the windows on the Tuesday a little after dark, when her master, from sheer fatigue, has been compelled to retire for a couple of hours. Moved by Heathcliff's perseverance, she gives him a chance of bestowing on the faded image of his idol one final adieu. He does not omit to avail himself of the opportunity, cautiously and briefly, too cautiously to betray his presence by the slightest noise. This secret farewell, witnessed only by Ellen, becomes the seed of Heathcliff's later desecration of Catherine's grave, when he will open her coffin to hold her in his arms again. The death also plants the curse that will define the rest of his life: his prayer that Catherine may not rest as long as he is living is answered in a way he could not have foreseen, as her ghost comes to haunt not only Wuthering Heights but his very consciousness, driving him toward the monomania that will consume his final years.

Legacy and Aftermath

The twelve years following that dismal period are, by Ellen Dean's account, the happiest of her life, her greatest troubles rising from the little lady's trifling illnesses common to all children. The daughter, Catherine Linton, grows like a larch and can walk and talk in her own way before the heath blossoms a second time over Mrs. Linton's dust. She is the most winning thing that ever brought sunshine into a desolate house, 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 of her mother, yet she does not resemble her, for 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, but deep and tender. The mother's death thus casts a long shadow over the daughter's life, shaping Edgar Linton's overprotective seclusion of the child and setting the stage for the second generation's struggles. Catherine Earnshaw's own words, spoken years earlier to Ellen, gain tragic resonance in retrospect: her conviction that she is wrong in her soul and heart to marry Edgar, her declaration that every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing before she could consent to forsake Heathcliff, and her haunting confession that if all else perished and he remained she should still continue to be, while if all else remained and he were annihilated the universe would turn to a mighty stranger. The death fulfills the terrible logic of her divided self, leaving Heathcliff to live out the curse she has inadvertently placed upon him, and leaving her daughter to navigate a world shaped by a mother she never knew.