Catherine's Testament

Catherine's Testament is the physical and emotional key that unlocks the buried history of Wuthering Heights. Discovered by the tenant Lockwood during his first, disastrous night at the Heights, this battered volume—a New Testament in lean type, smelling dreadfully musty—serves as the novel's first embedded narrative, a direct, unmediated voice from the past that shatters the present's grim silence. More than a religious text, it is a palimpsest of Catherine Earnshaw's childhood: a diary, a sketchbook, and a repository of rebellion, revealing the passionate, defiant spirit that the adult world of the Heights has tried to suppress.

Discovery and Physical State

Lockwood finds the Testament piled among a few mildewed books on the window-ledge of the oak-panelled bed, a closet-like chamber where he has been lodged. The fly-leaf bears the inscription "Catherine Earnshaw, her book" and a date some quarter of a century back. The volume's state of dilapidation proves it to have been well used, though not for a legitimate purpose: scarcely a chapter has escaped a pen-and-ink commentary—at least the appearance of one—covering every morsel of blank that the printer left. Some are detached sentences; other parts take the form of a regular diary, scrawled in an unformed, childish hand. At the top of an extra page, Lockwood is greatly amused to behold an excellent caricature of Joseph, rudely yet powerfully sketched. This immediate, vivid mark of personality kindles an interest in the unknown Catherine, and he begins to decipher her faded hieroglyphics.

The Diary's Content: Rebellion and Suffering

The diary entries, written in a childish hand, record a specific, brutal Sunday. Catherine writes of her wish that her father were back again, calling Hindley a detestable substitute whose conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious. She and Heathcliff have taken their initiatory step of rebellion. The entry describes a day of flooding rain that prevents church, so Joseph must needs get up a congregation in the garret. While Hindley and his wife bask downstairs before a comfortable fire, Heathcliff, Catherine, and the unhappy ploughboy are commanded to take their prayer-books and mount, ranged in a row on a sack of corn, groaning and shivering. The service lasts precisely three hours. On Sunday evenings, they used to be permitted to play if they did not make much noise; now a mere titter is sufficient to send them into corners. Hindley insists on perfect sobriety and silence, threatening to demolish the first who puts him out of temper. Frances, his wife, pulls Heathcliff's hair as she passes. The diary then recounts how Joseph discovers their attempt to create a curtain from their pinafores, tears it down, boxes Catherine's ears, and croaks about the Sabbath not being o'ered. In defiance, Catherine hurls her dingy volume into the dog-kennel, vowing she hates a good book, and Heathcliff kicks his to the same place. Hindley, summoned, seizes them and hurls both into the back-kitchen, where Joseph asseverates that "owd Nick" will fetch them. Catherine reaches this book and a pot of ink from a shelf, pushing the house-door ajar for light, and has got the time on with writing for twenty minutes. Her companion is impatient, proposing they appropriate the dairywoman's cloak and have a scamper on the moors. The next entry is lachrymose: Catherine writes that she never dreamt Hindley would ever make her cry so, that her head aches till she cannot keep it on the pillow. Poor Heathcliff, Hindley calls him a vagabond, won't let him sit with them nor eat with them any more, and threatens to turn him out of the house if they break his orders. Hindley has been blaming their father for treating Heathcliff too liberally and swears he will reduce him to his right place.

Narrative Function and Thematic Significance

The Testament functions as a crucial piece of embedded narrative, a story within a story that provides the first authentic, unfiltered account of Catherine and Heathcliff's childhood. It directly contradicts the grim, silent present of Wuthering Heights, revealing a past of passionate rebellion and deep, shared suffering. The diary's content establishes the foundational trauma of Hindley's tyranny and the consequent, unbreakable bond between Catherine and Heathcliff, forged in opposition to a common oppressor. It also introduces the motif of the moors as a place of freedom and escape, a sanctuary from the oppressive domestic sphere. The book itself, a religious text repurposed for personal, rebellious expression, symbolizes the clash between the rigid, hypocritical piety of Joseph and the Earnshaw household and the wild, untamable spirit of Catherine. Its discovery by Lockwood, a stranger, initiates the entire retrospective narrative, as his curiosity prompts Nelly Dean to tell the full history of the house and its inhabitants. The Testament is not merely a relic; it is the catalyst for the story's telling, a ghostly voice from the past that demands to be heard.