Linton Heathcliff's Death

Linton Heathcliff's death is the quiet, sickly catastrophe at the center of the novel's second half, an event that unfolds not in a dramatic confrontation but in a series of hushed, grim scenes inside Wuthering Heights. It is the moment when Heathcliff's long campaign of revenge reaches its legal and emotional terminus: the death of his own son, a boy he despised, completes the transfer of both the Earnshaw and Linton fortunes into his hands. The event is narrated by Zillah, the Heights' housekeeper, to Ellen Dean, and it is marked less by grief than by the cold mechanics of inheritance, the forced signing of a will, and the hollow liberation of a young widow who feels she has been left to struggle against death alone. Linton's death is thus both a human extinguishing and a legal instrument, the point at which Heathcliff's monomaniacal pursuit of property and power over the second generation is finally, and brutally, achieved.