Hareton's books

Hareton's books are a hidden cache of reading material that Hareton Earnshaw keeps in his room at Wuthering Heights, a secret stock of Latin and Greek texts, tales, and poetry that he has gathered for the mere love of possessing them. The books surface in the narrative when Catherine Linton, confined at the Heights after her father's death, discovers them during her captivity. She describes how she came upon the secret stock in Hareton's room and characterizes his hoarding as the work of a magpie gathering silver spoons, an act of theft done for the love of stealing rather than for any use he might make of the volumes. The revelation exposes the central irony of Hareton's position: he has been denied the education that would let him read the books he treasures, and he conceals them in the bad spirit that, as he cannot enjoy them, nobody else shall. Catherine's accusation stings precisely because it is true, and Hareton blushes crimson when his private literary accumulations are laid bare before her and Ellen Dean.

The Books as Evidence of Deprivation

The existence of Hareton's books is inseparable from the legal and economic ruin that Heathcliff has inflicted on him. When Hindley Earnshaw died, the lawyer explained that the whole property was mortgaged and that the sole chance for the natural heir was to allow him an opportunity of creating some interest in the creditor's heart. That creditor was Heathcliff, who had become the mortgagee of every yard of land Hindley owned, cash advanced to supply his mania for gaming. In that manner Hareton, who should have been the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, was reduced to a state of complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy, living in his own house as a servant, deprived of the advantage of wages, quite unable to right himself because of his friendlessness and his ignorance that he has been wronged. The books are thus a symptom of a larger dispossession: Hareton's degradation is not merely material but intellectual, and his secret hoard represents a furtive, thwarted hunger for the cultivation that his birthright should have guaranteed. The volumes he has gathered are the only property he can claim as his own, and even that claim is precarious, subject to exposure and ridicule.

Catherine's Scorn and the Quarrel Over the Volumes

When Catherine discovers the books, she turns them into a weapon of class superiority. She tells Hareton that the books are of no use to him and accuses him of concealing them out of envy, suggesting that his hoarding may have counselled Heathcliff to rob her of her own treasures. She declares that she has most of her books written on her brain and printed in her heart, and that he cannot deprive her of those. Hareton, labouring under a severe sense of mortification and wrath, responds by gathering half a dozen volumes and throwing them into Catherine's lap, exclaiming that he never wants to hear, read, or think of them again. Catherine refuses them in turn, saying she will connect them with him and hate them. She then opens one that has obviously been often turned over and reads a portion in the drawling tone of a beginner, laughing and throwing it from her, before commencing a verse of an old ballad in the same fashion. The scene is a cruel performance of literacy as a marker of social rank, with Catherine using her reading ability to humiliate a cousin who has been deliberately kept illiterate. Ellen Dean intervenes, noting that Hareton is not envious but emulous of Catherine's attainments, and predicting that he will be a clever scholar in a few years. The young man evidently thinks it too bad that he should be laughed at for his ignorance and then laughed at for trying to remove it, a double bind that captures the impossibility of his position under Heathcliff's rule.

The Gift Book and the Reconciliation

The quarrel over the books becomes the pivot on which Catherine and Hareton's relationship turns from hostility to affection. After the confrontation, Catherine returns to the hearth and frankly extends her hand to Hareton, who blackens and scowls like a thunder-cloud, keeping his fists resolutely clenched and his gaze fixed on the ground. Catherine, divining that it is obdurate perversity and not dislike that prompts his dogged conduct, stoops and impresses on his cheek a gentle kiss, whispering to Ellen that she must show him some way that she likes him and wants to be friends. The kiss is followed by a more deliberate gesture: Catherine wraps a handsome book neatly in white paper, ties it with a bit of ribbon, and addresses it to Mr. Hareton Earnshaw, asking Ellen to be her ambassadress and convey the present to its destined recipient. She sends the message that if he will take it, she will come and teach him to read it right, and if he refuses it, she will go upstairs and never tease him again. Hareton will not open his fingers to accept the gift, so Ellen lays it on his knee, and he does not strike it off either. Catherine, hearing the slight rustle of the covering being removed, steals away and quietly seats herself beside her cousin, who trembles and glows, all his rudeness and surly harshness deserting him. She murmurs a petition that he say he forgives her, telling him that he can make her so happy by speaking that little word. The gift book thus becomes the material token of their reconciliation, the object through which Catherine offers Hareton the education he has been denied and through which he accepts her as a teacher and friend.

The Books and Heathcliff's Disintegration

The fate of Hareton's books is bound up with the larger collapse of Heathcliff's will to dominate. In his final days, Heathcliff confesses to Ellen that he has lost the faculty of enjoying destruction and is too idle to destroy for nothing. He describes how Hareton seemed a personification of his youth, not a human being, and how his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. Heathcliff explains that he cannot look down to the floor without her features being shaped in the flags, that in every cloud and every tree he is surrounded with her image, and that the entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist and that he has lost her. Hareton's aspect was the ghost of his immortal love, of his wild endeavours to hold his right, his degradation, his pride, his happiness, and his anguish. This recognition of Hareton as a living echo of his own youth and of Catherine dissolves Heathcliff's capacity for revenge, rendering him regardless of how Hareton and his cousin go on together. The books, which had been a site of conflict and humiliation, become the foundation of the couple's future, a future that Heathcliff can no longer bring himself to obstruct. His inability to care about their union is the final surrender of the monomaniacal project that had consumed his life, and the books are the quiet beneficiaries of that surrender.

The Books as Symbol of Inheritance and Renewal

The trajectory of Hareton's books traces the novel's larger movement from destruction to renewal. The volumes that Hareton hoarded in secret, that Catherine mocked and then gifted back to him, embody the possibility of education and self-improvement that Heathcliff's tyranny had sought to crush. They are the means by which Hareton begins to close the gap between his degraded present and his rightful inheritance as the first gentleman in the neighbourhood. The gift book, wrapped in white paper and tied with ribbon, is a deliberate inversion of the earlier scene of humiliation: where Catherine had thrown Hareton's books back at him, she now offers him one of her own as a pledge of friendship and instruction. The books thus carry the weight of the novel's legal and economic themes, standing in for the property and status of which Hareton has been dispossessed, and for the education that is the true inheritance of the Earnshaw line. In the end, the books are not merely objects but the instruments of a reconciliation that points beyond the cycle of revenge, a small and concrete sign that the world of Wuthering Heights can be rebuilt on terms other than those of Heathcliff's monomania.