Linton family portraits

The Linton family portraits are a pair of oil paintings that hang in the library of Thrushcross Grange, depicting Edgar Linton and his wife, Catherine Earnshaw. They are first described by Ellen Dean, who points out that Edgar's portrait used to hang on one side of the fireplace with his wife's on the other, but that hers has been removed. The surviving portrait of Edgar shows a soft-featured face, exceedingly resembling the young lady at the Heights, but more pensive and amiable in expression, with long light hair curling slightly on the temples, large and serious eyes, and a figure almost too graceful. Mr. Lockwood, examining the picture, marvels not that Catherine Earnshaw could forget her first friend for such an individual, but that such a man, with a mind to correspond with his person, could fancy the idea of Catherine Earnshaw. The portrait thus becomes an early index of the novel's central question: how could the wild, elemental Catherine be drawn to the refined but insipid Edgar, and what does his image reveal about the world she chose to enter?

The Portraits as Witnesses to Departure and Loss

The portraits take on a poignant, almost ceremonial role at a moment of permanent rupture. When Isabella Linton, having escaped from Wuthering Heights and her disastrous marriage to Heathcliff, prepares to leave Thrushcross Grange forever, she steps onto a chair, kisses both Edgar's and Catherine's portraits, bestows a similar salute on Ellen Dean, and descends to the carriage accompanied by her dog Fanny. This gesture of farewell to the painted images of her brother and her former sister-in-law marks her final break with the Linton world, a world she has been irrevocably expelled from by her own elopement. The kiss is a silent acknowledgment that the family she once belonged to exists now only as images on a wall, frozen in a past she can never rejoin. The scene underscores how the portraits function as surrogate presences, repositories of memory and affection for those who have been scattered or lost.

Heathcliff's Covetous Gaze and the Claim of Ownership

The portraits become the focus of Heathcliff's most revealing moment of desire and possession. When he comes to Thrushcross Grange to reclaim his daughter-in-law, Catherine Linton, he enters the library—the same room into which he had been ushered as a guest eighteen years before, with the same moon shining through the window and the same autumn landscape outside. Time has little altered his person: his dark face is rather sallower and more composed, his frame a stone or two heavier. After Catherine scornfully withdraws, Heathcliff, for the first time, allows himself a glance round the room and a look at the pictures. Having studied Mrs. Linton's portrait, he declares, "I shall have that home. Not because I need it, but—" He turns abruptly to the fire, and continues, with what Ellen Dean can only call a smile, to describe how he had the sexton remove the earth off her coffin lid and opened it. The portrait of Catherine is thus directly linked to her corpse: both are objects of his consuming fixation, images of the woman he has lost and cannot relinquish. His claim to "have that home"—the portrait—is an extension of his larger project of possessing everything connected to Catherine, even as he acknowledges he does not need it. The painting is not a decoration but a relic, and his gaze upon it is the gaze of a man who has already begun the work of exhuming the original.

The Portraits and the Legal Machinery of Inheritance

The portraits also stand at the intersection of the novel's legal and economic conflicts, where property, marriage, and inheritance are wielded as instruments of power. Heathcliff's acquisition of Wuthering Heights is achieved through the mortgage that Hindley Earnshaw took out to supply his mania for gaming, leaving the natural heir, Hareton, reduced to a state of complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy. The lawyer's advice that Hareton's sole chance is to create some interest in the creditor's heart reveals the cold logic of a system where affection is a bargaining chip. In this world, the portraits are not merely sentimental objects but part of the material estate that changes hands. When Edgar Linton, divining that one of his enemy's purposes is to secure the personal property as well as the estate to his son, determines to alter his will and put Catherine's fortune in the hands of trustees, he is fighting a legal battle against Heathcliff's encroachment. The portraits, hanging in the library, are silent witnesses to this struggle over who will control the Linton legacy. Later, after Linton Heathcliff's death, Heathcliff claims and keeps the lands in his wife's right and his own, leaving Catherine, destitute of cash and friends, unable to disturb his possession. The fate of the portraits is bound up with this larger dispossession: the Linton world, with its grace and refinement, is being systematically dismantled and absorbed by the man who once stood outside its windows.

The Portraits as Mirrors of Resemblance and Transformation

The portraits acquire their deepest resonance through the theme of likeness, as the second generation begins to echo the features of the first. Ellen Dean observes that Hareton Earnshaw, though degraded by his upbringing, is a well-made, athletic youth, good-looking in features, and stout and healthy, and that she can detect in his physiognomy a mind owning better qualities than his father ever possessed—good things lost amid a wilderness of weeds, evidence of a wealthy soil that might yield luxuriant crops under other circumstances. When Hareton and Catherine Linton sit together by the fire, studying and growing close, Ellen notes that their eyes are precisely similar, and that they are those of Catherine Earnshaw. The present Catherine has no other likeness to her mother except a breadth of forehead and a certain arch of the nostril that makes her appear rather haughty; with Hareton the resemblance is carried farther, and it is particularly striking because his senses are alert and his mental faculties wakened to unwonted activity. This resemblance disarms Heathcliff: he walks to the hearth in evident agitation, but it quickly subsides as he looks at the young man, or rather alters its character, for it is there yet. He takes the book from Hareton's hand, glances at the open page, and returns it without any observation. The portraits on the wall thus find their living counterparts in the two young people, whose faces carry the Earnshaw inheritance into a new generation. The painted Catherine is echoed in the eyes of her daughter and of Hareton, and this living likeness proves more powerful than any legal claim in unsettling Heathcliff's resolve.

The Portraits and the Haunting of the Dead

The portraits ultimately participate in the novel's larger meditation on the persistence of the dead and the impossibility of escape from the past. Heathcliff's obsession with Catherine's image—whether in the portrait, in the faces of the young people, or in her ghost—drives him to the point of madness. His confession that he cannot eat or rest, that his soul's bliss kills his body but does not satisfy itself, reveals a man consumed by a presence that will not let him go. The entire world, he has said, is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that he has lost her. The portrait is one such memorandum, a fixed image of the woman whose loss defines his existence. His plan to have the sexton pull away the side of his coffin so that his remains will mingle with hers, so that "by the time Linton gets to us he'll not know which is which," is the ultimate expression of this desire for union. The portraits, hanging in the library of Thrushcross Grange, are the civilized, domesticated version of this obsession—images to be kissed farewell and claimed as property—but they point toward the wilder, more desperate longing that ends in the desecration of a grave. In the end, the Linton family portraits are not merely paintings of two individuals; they are the visible trace of a world that Heathcliff both covets and destroys, and the enduring image of a woman whose face, in paint and in flesh, haunts the novel to its close.