Catherine Linton's captivity

Catherine Linton's captivity at Wuthering Heights stands as the central act of coercion in the novel's second generation, the moment when Heathcliff's long-nurtured revenge finally seizes the Linton inheritance through the body of a girl. The detention is not a single dramatic abduction but a sustained state of imprisonment, engineered with legal cunning and psychological cruelty, that strips Catherine of her freedom, her fortune, and ultimately her father. It is the mechanism by which Heathcliff completes his usurpation of both houses, and it sets the conditions for the novel's closing reconciliation between Catherine and Hareton Earnshaw, a union that quietly defeats the captor's purposes after his death.

The Trap and the Forced Marriage

The captivity begins when Catherine, against her father's explicit injunctions, rides to Wuthering Heights to visit her cousin Linton Heathcliff, only to find herself detained. Heathcliff announces his intention with chilling frankness: he tells the weeping Linton that in a month or two the boy will be able to pay back Catherine's present tyrannies with a vigorous hand, and that she shall have him. When Catherine protests that she will willingly marry Linton if only she may go home to her anxious father, Heathcliff refuses outright, declaring that he will enjoy himself remarkably in thinking her father will be miserable, and that he shall not sleep for satisfaction. He makes the cruelty of the design explicit: Catherine could have hit on no surer way of fixing her residence under his roof for the next twenty-four hours than informing him that her departure would relieve Edgar Linton. The promise to marry Linton is not accepted but seized upon; Heathcliff vows to take care that she shall keep it, for she shall not quit the place until it is fulfilled.

The detention is enforced with a jailer's precision. When Catherine and Ellen Dean attempt to escape through the window of Zillah's chamber, they find it narrow like those below, and the garret trap is safe from their attempts; they are fastened in as before. The missed opportunity to signal the three servants sent from Thrushcross Grange to seek Catherine becomes a source of uncontrolled grief, and Heathcliff allows the two women to wail on till nine o'clock before ordering them upstairs. Ellen Dean is locked in a room apart, where she remains enclosed the whole day, and the whole of the next night, and another, and another. Five nights and four days she remains altogether, seeing nobody but Hareton once every morning, who proves a model of a jailor: surly, and dumb, and deaf to every attempt at moving his sense of justice or compassion. Catherine herself is taken out at seven o'clock on the first morning, pulled from the room by Heathcliff while Ellen is turned back at the lock.

The Legal Machinery of the Captivity

The imprisonment is not merely physical but legal, and Heathcliff's mastery of property law turns the detention into a transfer of wealth. The lawyer Mr. Green, who had been Edgar Linton's attorney as well as Hindley Earnshaw's, has sold himself to Heathcliff, and his delay in obeying the summons to Thrushcross Grange is the cause of his late arrival. Heathcliff's acquisition of Wuthering Heights had already followed the same pattern: Hindley Earnshaw had mortgaged every yard of land he owned for cash to supply his mania for gaming, and Heathcliff, as the mortgagee, proved to the attorney that the whole property was mortgaged, leaving the natural heir Hareton little else than a beggar. The lawyer's advice had been that the sole chance for the natural heir was to allow him an opportunity of creating some interest in the creditor's heart, that he may be inclined to deal leniently towards him. In that manner Hareton, who should have been the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, was reduced to a state of complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy, living in his own house as a servant, deprived of the advantage of wages, quite unable to right himself because of his friendlessness and his ignorance that he has been wronged.

The same legal machinery now operates on Catherine. During her week's absence, while her uncle Edgar Linton lies dying, Linton Heathcliff is threatened or coaxed into bequeathing the whole of his, and what had been her, moveable property to his father. The lands, being a minor, Linton could not meddle with, but Heathcliff claims and keeps them in his wife's right and his also, and Catherine, destitute of cash and friends, cannot disturb his possession. Edgar Linton, divining that one of his enemy's purposes was to secure the personal property as well as the estate to his son, or rather himself, feels that his will had better be altered: instead of leaving Catherine's fortune at her own disposal, he determines to put it in the hands of trustees for her use during life, and for her children, if she had any, after her. By that means, it could not fall to Mr. Heathcliff should Linton die. But the alteration comes too late to save the dying man's peace, and the legal contest between the two wills frames the captivity as a battle over inheritance conducted through the bodies of the young.

The Escape and Its Aftermath

Catherine's liberation comes not from the law but from the terrified cunning of her sickly husband. She tells Ellen Dean that her anguish at last spurred Linton to incur the risk of liberating her. Hearing the men Ellen sent disputing at the door, and gathering the sense of Heathcliff's answer, she is driven desperate. Linton, who had been conveyed up to the little parlour soon after Ellen left, is terrified into fetching the key before his father re-ascends. He has the cunning to unlock and re-lock the door without shutting it, and when he should have gone to bed, he begs to sleep with Hareton, and his petition is granted for once. Catherine steals out before break of day. She dares not try the doors lest the dogs should raise an alarm; she visits the empty chambers and examines their windows, and, luckily, lighting on her mother's, she gets easily out of its lattice and on to the ground by means of the fir-tree close by. Her accomplice suffers for his share in the escape, notwithstanding his timid contrivances.

The escape delivers Catherine to her father's deathbed, but it does not restore her freedom. Edgar Linton, on hearing that she is alive and well, half rises up, looks eagerly round the apartment, and then sinks back in a swoon. He dies without seeing the legal protections take effect, and Mr. Green, the lawyer who has sold himself to Heathcliff, takes upon himself to order everything and everybody about the place, giving all the servants but Ellen notice to quit. He would have carried his delegated authority to the point of insisting that Edgar Linton should not be buried beside his wife, but in the chapel with his family; only the will hinders that, and Ellen's loud protestations against any infringement of its directions. The funeral is hurried over, and Catherine, now Mrs. Linton Heathcliff, is suffered to stay at the Grange only till her father's corpse has quitted it.

The Widowhood and the Hollow Victory

After the funeral, Catherine's captivity continues in a subtler form. She stays upstairs a fortnight, according to Zillah, who visits her twice a day and would have been rather more friendly, but her attempts at increasing kindness are proudly and promptly repelled. Heathcliff goes up once, to show her Linton's will, the document by which the whole of his and her moveable property has been bequeathed to his father. Nobody ever approaches her door except Zillah, and nobody asks anything about her. The first occasion of her coming down into the house is on a Sunday afternoon, when she cries out that she cannot bear any longer being in the cold; as soon as she hears Heathcliff's horse trot off, she makes her appearance, donned in black, her yellow curls combed back behind her ears as plain as a Quaker. The captivity has reduced the once-winning child, who had grown like a larch and could walk and talk in her own way before the heath blossomed a second time over her mother's dust, to a silent, black-clad widow in her captor's house.

Yet the captivity that was meant to complete Heathcliff's triumph becomes the seed of his undoing. The same house that imprisons Catherine also holds Hareton, and the two cousins, both degraded by Heathcliff's power, begin the slow reconciliation that will end the novel's cycle of revenge. The state of captivity, with its shared suffering and its stripping away of false distinctions, creates the conditions for the union that Heathcliff's own monomania could never foresee. And in his final days, the captor himself is consumed by the very obsession that drove the imprisonment: he roams to and fro in a state approaching distraction, his heavy sighs succeeding each other so thick as to leave no space for common breathing between, and he tells Ellen Dean that he has not written his will yet, and how to leave his property he cannot determine, wishing he could annihilate it from the face of the earth. His soul's bliss kills his body, but does not satisfy itself. The captivity that was to secure his revenge leaves him unable to enjoy its fruits, while the captive he made finds in her fellow prisoner the freedom he could never grant.