Catherine's locket

Catherine's locket is a small gold trinket hung around Catherine Earnshaw's neck, a personal ornament that becomes one of the novel's most potent material symbols of contested love and posthumous possession. The locket contains a curl of light hair fastened with a silver thread, presumably a keepsake of Edgar Linton, her husband. Its significance lies not in its monetary value but in what it holds and what is done with it after Catherine's death, when Heathcliff, in a secret act of desecration and devotion, opens the trinket, casts out its contents, and replaces them with a black lock of his own hair. This single gesture condenses the entire rivalry between Edgar and Heathcliff for Catherine's heart, extending the contest even beyond the grave.

Identity and Material Significance

The locket is described as a trinket hung round Catherine's neck, a small personal object worn close to the body. Its contents—a curl of light hair fastened with a silver thread—mark it as a sentimental keepsake, likely a lock of Edgar Linton's fair hair, given his yellow curling hair and the Linton family's fair coloring. The silver thread and the careful fastening suggest a delicate, cherished object, one that holds a physical remnant of a loved one. As a material object, the locket functions as a portable reliquary, carrying a fragment of a person's body as a token of affection and memory.

The Posthumous Desecration

The locket's pivotal moment occurs after Catherine's death, during the days between her decease and her funeral. Heathcliff, who has been spending his nights outside Thrushcross Grange, is granted a final opportunity to view the corpse when Ellen Dean, moved by his perseverance, opens a window for him on the Tuesday after Catherine's death. He enters cautiously and briefly, and his presence is only discovered afterward by the disarrangement of the drapery about the corpse's face and by the observation on the floor of a curl of light hair fastened with a silver thread. Ellen Dean ascertains that Heathcliff had opened the locket hung round Catherine's neck, cast out its contents, and replaced them with a black lock of his own hair. This act is a violation of the dead and a symbolic claim of ownership, asserting that Heathcliff, not Edgar, should be the one remembered in death. Ellen Dean, discovering the desecration, twists the two locks together and encloses them both in the locket, an act of quiet reconciliation that mingles the two men's claims on Catherine even as it restores the original contents.

The Locket and Heathcliff's Grief

The locket's desecration is inseparable from Heathcliff's overwhelming and unhinged grief. His reaction to Catherine's death is one of violent, almost inhuman anguish. Upon hearing that she died without recognizing anyone and with a sweet smile on her face, he cries out with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot and groaning in a paroxysm of ungovernable passion, praying that she may wake in torment and cursing her as a liar to the end. He dashes his head against a knotted trunk, howling like a savage beast, leaving splashes of blood on the bark. This is the same man who, in his grief, will later attempt to open Catherine's coffin, declaring 'I'll have her in my arms again!' The locket's desecration is a smaller, more intimate version of this same impulse: a desperate attempt to possess Catherine even in death, to replace the husband's token with his own. The black lock of his own hair is a physical assertion of his claim, a way of inserting himself into the very fabric of her burial attire.

The Locket as a Symbol of Contested Love

The locket's journey—from containing Edgar's light hair, to being violated by Heathcliff, to being restored with both locks twisted together—mirrors the larger narrative of Catherine's life, torn between the civilized, fair-haired Edgar and the dark, wild Heathcliff. The light hair and the black hair represent the two poles of her existence: the comfortable, respectable life at Thrushcross Grange and the passionate, elemental bond with Heathcliff. Ellen Dean's act of twisting the two together is a quiet, almost unconscious acknowledgment that both claims are valid, that Catherine belonged to neither fully. The locket, buried with Catherine, thus carries the mingled remains of both men into the grave, a silent testament to the impossibility of choosing between them. It is a material object that holds the novel's central emotional conflict in miniature, a physical artifact of the love triangle that defines the story.

Narrative Role and Thematic Resonance

The locket functions as a narrative device that reveals character and advances the theme of possession. Its desecration is discovered by Ellen Dean, the housekeeper and primary narrator of the inner story, who serves as a witness to the private, hidden acts of the characters. The locket's story is told within the larger frame of Ellen's retrospective narration to Mr. Lockwood, a story that itself is a form of possession, a retelling that shapes the reader's understanding. The locket, like the novel's other objects—the diary, the portraits, the wills—is a concrete thing that carries emotional and symbolic weight. It is a reminder that in this world of intense feeling, even the smallest object can become a battlefield for the souls of the living and the dead. The mingling of the two locks of hair, an act of peace by Ellen, stands in stark contrast to the violent, unresolved passions of Heathcliff, suggesting a possibility of reconciliation that the living characters themselves could never achieve.