Catherine's three-day fast

Catherine's three-day fast is the pivotal act of self-destruction that follows her violent quarrel with Heathcliff and Edgar Linton at Thrushcross Grange, when she locks herself in her room and refuses all food and drink. The fast marks the turning point of Catherine Earnshaw's life: it triggers the brain fever from which she never fully recovers, precipitates Isabella Linton's elopement with Heathcliff, and ultimately leads to Catherine's death. More than a mere tantrum, the fast is Catherine's desperate, theatrical protest against the impossible choice between Heathcliff and Edgar—a protest that reveals her conviction that she and Heathcliff are the same being, and that ends by destroying the very body through which she hoped to assert her will.

The Outburst That Precipitates the Fast

The fast begins as the climax of a confrontation that has been building through Heathcliff's return to the neighborhood. When Heathcliff declares his intention to marry Isabella Linton, Catherine protests, and in the ensuing quarrel Heathcliff turns on her with a cold fury that exposes the depth of her betrayal. He tells her he knows she has treated him "infernally—infernally," and warns that if she fancies he will suffer unrevenged, she will soon be convinced of the contrary. When Catherine, astonished, asks how she has treated him so, Heathcliff replies that he seeks no revenge on her—that is not the plan—but that having levelled his palace, she must not erect a hovel and complacently admire her own charity in giving him that for a home. He adds that if he imagined she really wished him to marry Isabella, he would cut his throat. The exchange leaves Catherine reeling, and when Edgar Linton, her husband, enters and demands that she choose between him and Heathcliff, she responds with a calculated fit of frenzy.

The Locked Room and the Refusal of Sustenance

Catherine had resolved, previous to Heathcliff's coming, on exhibiting a fit of frenzy, and when the moment arrives she starts up with her hair flying over her shoulders, her eyes flashing, and the muscles of her neck and arms standing out preternaturally. Ellen Dean, who narrates the scene, makes up her mind for broken bones at least, but Catherine only glares about her for an instant and then rushes from the room, securing the door against pursuit. From that moment she refuses to descend for breakfast, and when Ellen asks whether she will have food carried up, Catherine answers "No!" peremptorily. The same question is repeated at dinner and tea, and again on the morrow after, and receives the same answer. Edgar Linton, for his part, spends his time in the library and does not inquire concerning his wife's occupations, while Isabella and he have an hour's interview in which he tries to elicit from her some sentiment of proper horror for Heathcliff's advances—but he can make nothing of her evasive replies, and is obliged to close the examination unsatisfactorily, adding a solemn warning that if she were so insane as to encourage that worthless suitor, it would dissolve all bonds of relationship between herself and him.

The Third Day: A Body at Its Limit

On the third day, Catherine unbarred her door, having finished the water in her pitcher and decanter, and desired a renewed supply and a basin of gruel, for she believed she was dying. Ellen Dean set that down as a speech meant for Edgar's ears and believed no such thing, so she kept it to herself and brought Catherine some tea and dry toast instead. Catherine ate and drank eagerly, then sank back on her pillow again, clenching her hands and groaning. "Oh, I will die," she exclaimed, "since no one cares anything about me. I wish I had not taken that." A good while later Ellen heard her murmur, "No, I'll not die—he'd be glad—he does not love me at all—he would never miss me!" When Ellen asked if she wanted anything, Catherine demanded what that apathetic being was doing—whether he had fallen into a lethargy, or was dead. The fast has thus become a test of Edgar's love, a performance staged for an audience that refuses to watch, and Catherine's body is the stage on which she enacts her grief.

The Fatal Consequences: Brain Fever and the Loss of Isabella

The fast does not end in reconciliation but in catastrophe. Catherine's prolonged refusal of sustenance, combined with the frenzy that preceded it, brings on a brain fever from which she never fully recovers. When the doctor, Mr. Kenneth, examines her case, he speaks hopefully to Edgar of its having a favourable termination if they can only preserve around her perfect and constant tranquillity—but to Ellen he signifies that the threatening danger is not so much death as permanent alienation of intellect. While Catherine lies in a troubled sleep, her husband hanging over her pillow and watching every shade and every change of her painfully expressive features, the household is thrown into chaos. In the midst of this crisis, Isabella Linton seizes the opportunity to elope with Heathcliff, and by the time Ellen discovers her room empty, Catherine's illness might have arrested her rash step had anyone been a few hours sooner. Ellen dares not rouse the family or unfold the business to Edgar, absorbed as he is in his present calamity and having no heart to spare for a second grief, so she holds her tongue and suffers matters to take their course.

The Meaning of the Fast: A Body That Speaks What Words Cannot

Catherine's fast is the physical enactment of a conviction she had confessed to Ellen long before, when she declared that her love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath—a source of little visible delight, but necessary—and that she herself is Heathcliff. "He's always, always in my mind," she said, "not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being." The fast is thus not merely a punishment of Edgar but an attempt to annihilate the part of herself that chose him, to starve out the wife she became in order to recover the girl who was Heathcliff. It is also a speech act in the most literal sense: denied the power to make Edgar hear her words, Catherine makes her body speak, turning refusal into the only language that remains to her. The irony is that this language destroys her. When Heathcliff later learns that her senses never returned and that she recognised nobody from the time he left her, he cries out that she is a liar to the end, and prays that she may not rest as long as he is living. The fast, which began as Catherine's attempt to force the world to attend to her suffering, ends by confirming Heathcliff's own conviction that he has been murdered by her—and by binding him to her ghost for the rest of his life.

The Fast as Turning Point in the Larger Tragedy

The three-day fast is the hinge on which the entire second half of the novel turns. Before it, Catherine is a woman torn between two men but still alive, still capable of choice; after it, she is a dying woman whose mind is already slipping away into pleasant early days. The fast also sets in motion the elopement of Isabella and Heathcliff, which in turn produces Linton Heathcliff, the sickly instrument of Heathcliff's later revenge upon the younger Catherine. And it deepens the enmity between Heathcliff and Edgar to the point of no return, so that when Heathcliff later stands outside the Grange garden for six hours a night, haunting the place until he can find an opportunity of entering, he is already a man possessed by the ghost of the woman who starved herself rather than choose between him and her husband. The fast is thus not an isolated episode but the moment at which Catherine's inner division becomes a physical fact, and the moment at which her body begins to die even as her spirit—in Heathcliff's imagination, at least—begins its long haunting of the living.