Heathcliff and Hareton Earnshaw's guardian-ward relationship

Heathcliff and Hareton Earnshaw's guardian-ward relationship is one of the novel's most sustained and ironic cruelties. After Hindley Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff becomes the legal guardian of the boy whose father he has ruined, and he uses that power not to nurture but to deform. Yet the relationship does not end as a simple tale of oppression: Hareton's resilient nature and his eventual bond with Catherine Linton force Heathcliff to see in the young man a living ghost of his own lost youth, and the guardian's will to destroy finally falters before the image he cannot bear to face.

Origins and Legal Capture

Heathcliff's guardianship of Hareton begins as a predatory legal seizure. After Hindley dies deeply in debt, Heathcliff, as the mortgagee, proves that every yard of land has been mortgaged to him, and he takes possession of Wuthering Heights. Hareton, who should have been the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, is reduced to complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy, living in his own house as a servant, deprived even of wages, and ignorant that he has been wronged. Heathcliff's first act as master is to lift the child onto a table and mutter with peculiar gusto, "Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!" The boy, unsuspecting, plays with Heathcliff's whiskers and strokes his cheek, while Nelly Dean divines the meaning at once: Heathcliff intends to raise Hareton as a brute, to undo every advantage of birth and education that Hindley once enjoyed.

Systematic Degradation

Heathcliff's method of degradation is deliberate and thorough. He never teaches Hareton to read or write; he never rebukes him for any bad habit that does not annoy his keeper; he never leads him a single step toward virtue or guards him by a single precept against vice. The boy grows up able to swear fluently but unable to spell his own name. When the curate might have offered instruction, Heathcliff promises that the curate will have his teeth dashed down his throat if he steps over the threshold. Hareton is left to the company of Joseph, whose narrow-minded partiality flatters him as the head of the old family while doing nothing to check his deterioration, and to the rough work of the farm. Heathcliff himself reflects aloud on his success: "I've got him faster than his scoundrel of a father secured me, and lower; for he takes a pride in his brutishness. I've taught him to scorn everything extra-animal as silly and weak." He takes a grim pleasure in the comparison, noting that Hareton is no born fool—that would diminish the satisfaction—but a naturally intelligent lad whose better qualities are deliberately wasted.

The Paradox of Affection

Despite the calculated cruelty, a strange bond forms between guardian and ward. Hareton, Nelly Dean observes, is "damnably fond" of Heathcliff. When Heathcliff is wounded by a burst gun and confined to the kitchen, Hareton sits morose at the chimney corner, and when Catherine Linton tries to turn him against his guardian, he sternly checks her, saying he will not suffer a word to be uttered in Heathcliff's disparagement: if the man were the devil, it did not signify; he would stand by him. Heathcliff, for his part, finds himself increasingly unsettled by Hareton's face. "But when I look for his father in his face, I find her every day more! How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him," he mutters, unconscious that Lockwood is behind him. The resemblance to Catherine Earnshaw—the woman Heathcliff loved and lost—begins to disarm him. He confesses to Nelly that Hareton's aspect is "the ghost of my immortal love; of my wild endeavours to hold my right; my degradation, my pride, my happiness, and my anguish." The systematic project of revenge falters because the instrument of that revenge has become a living reminder of the only person who ever mattered to him.

The Unravelling of Control

In the final months of his life, Heathcliff's grip on Hareton loosens visibly. He tells Nelly that he has lost the faculty of enjoying destruction: "I don't care for striking: I can't take the trouble to raise my hand!" When he sees Hareton and Catherine Linton sitting together over a book, their faces animated with eager interest, he walks to the hearth in evident agitation, takes the book from Hareton's hand, glances at it, and returns it without a word. He admits that Hareton and Catherine are the only objects that retain a distinct material appearance to him, and that appearance causes him pain amounting to agony. Yet he makes no further move to separate them. The guardian who once boasted that he would make Hareton as crooked as himself now watches the young man's brightening mind brighten his features, and does nothing to stop it. When Hareton, with a streaming face, digs green sods and lays them over Heathcliff's grave himself, the relationship reaches its final paradox: the boy Heathcliff wronged most is the only one who really mourns him.