Catherine Earnshaw's Tragic Fate

Follows Catherine Earnshaw from wild girlhood through her fatal choice of Edgar Linton to her death in childbirth and unquiet afterlife.

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Queen of the Countryside

The Haughty Queen A Double Self Catherine Earnshaw grows into a beautiful, willful woman, the queen of the countryside, adored by Edgar and inseparable from Heathcliff. She has learned to behave with grace at the Grange and to let her unruliness run free at the Heights. The Beginning of the Split Her ambition and her heart pull her in different directions, and she begins to adopt a double character without meaning to deceive anyone. The fissure in her identity is the wound from which her fate will bleed.

The Fatal Yes

A Promise Too Easily Given Love and Ambition Catherine accepts Edgar Linton's proposal, then immediately doubts herself, telling Nelly that in her soul and heart she is convinced she is wrong. She imagines she can use marriage to raise Heathcliff out of her brother's power. The World's Logic Her plan is coherent by the standards of wealth and rank, and ruinous by every other standard. In choosing to become Mrs. Linton, Catherine binds herself to a man whose soul, she says, is as different from Heathcliff's as a moonbeam from lightning.

The Fever's Onset

Sitting Out the Storm A Fever of the Heart Catherine waits all night in the rain for Heathcliff to return, then falls into a violent fever. The illness is her body's recognition of the wound she has inflicted on her own soul. A Narrow Escape She recovers, but the sickness marks a permanent alteration in her temper, leaving her more saucy, passionate, and haughty than before, and subject to fits of rage that her family learns to fear.

The Lady of the Grange

Honeysuckles and Thorns A Feigned Heaven For half a year the marriage seems happy; Nelly compares it to honeysuckles embracing a thorn, with Edgar yielding and Catherine presiding. Then Heathcliff's return shatters the precarious calm. A Home That Cannot Hold Her Catherine is caught between her attachment to her husband and her deeper identification with the returned intruder. The paradise of the Grange becomes a cage, and her restless spirit begins to beat itself against the bars.

The Broken Heart

War on the Body A Hunger Strike Against Fate After Edgar demands that she choose between him and Heathcliff, Catherine locks herself in her room and refuses food for three days. Her delirium empties her of every protection against her own feelings. The Return of the Repressed In her fever she imagines herself back in her old chamber at the Heights, relives the grief of her childhood separation from Heathcliff, and speaks of her coffin as her narrow home. The body, unable to bear the contradiction of her life, begins to give way.

Death by Moonlight

A Child and a Corpse The Cost of the Two-Love Life Catherine gives birth to a puny seven-month girl, then dies two hours later without regaining consciousness enough to know Heathcliff or Edgar again. Her last words in life had foreseen this end, when she told Heathcliff she was wearying to escape the shattered prison of her body. A Sweet-Smiled Death She dies with a smile on her lips, her spirit seemingly at peace, though Nelly cannot quite believe the peace is earned. Her unquiet ghost will haunt the Heights for two decades, refusing the separation of the grave.

Catherine's adolescence, before her marriage

the afternoon Edgar Linton proposes, before the storm

after Heathcliff's flight, during the thunderstorm night

the first years of Catherine's marriage to Edgar

after the quarrel at the Grange and the three-day fast, in Catherine's last weeks

midnight after Heathcliff's last visit, when Catherine gives birth and dies