Heathcliff's Flight

Heathcliff's Flight is the hinge on which the entire tragedy of Wuthering Heights turns. On a dark summer evening threatening thunder, Heathcliff overhears Catherine Earnshaw tell Ellen Dean that it would "degrade" her to marry him, and he leaves the house before she can finish her confession that he is "more myself than I am." He does not return for three years, and when he does, he is no longer the degraded ploughboy but a tall, athletic, well-formed man with the upright carriage of one who has served in the army—transformed in fortune and bearing, and ready to exact a terrible revenge on the families who humiliated him. The flight is thus both an ending and a beginning: it closes the childhood idyll of Catherine and Heathcliff's unity and opens the long, systematic campaign of vengeance that consumes two households and two generations.