Heathcliff opens Catherine's coffin

Heathcliff opens Catherine's coffin years after her burial, an act of obsessive grief that reveals his refusal to accept her death and his belief in her continued spiritual presence. This desecration, committed in the churchyard at night, is the culmination of eighteen years of torment and the beginning of his final, strange peace.

The Act of Desecration

On the day after Edgar Linton's funeral, Heathcliff tells Nelly Dean what he did the previous day. He had gone to the sexton who was digging Linton's grave and bribed him to remove the earth from the lid of Catherine's coffin. Heathcliff opened it, and for a moment he thought he would stay there, lying beside her. He saw her face again, and it was still hers. The sexton had hard work to stir him, but warned that the air would change it. Heathcliff then loosened one side of the coffin—not Linton's side, which he wished had been soldered in lead—and covered it up. He also bribed the sexton to pull that side away when Heathcliff himself was laid there, and to slide his own coffin out too, so that by the time Linton joins them, he will not know which is which.

The Motivation: Eighteen Years of Haunting

Heathcliff explains to Nelly that he disturbed nobody, but gave some ease to himself. He claims that Catherine has disturbed him night and day for eighteen years, incessantly and remorselessly, until the night before he opened the coffin. That previous night, he had been tranquil for the first time, dreaming he was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with his heart stopped and his cheek frozen against hers. He tells Nelly that he has a strong faith in ghosts and a conviction that they can and do exist among the living. The day Catherine was buried, a fall of snow came. In the evening, he went to the churchyard alone, got a spade from the tool-house, and began to dig with all his might. He scraped the coffin and fell to work with his hands, the wood cracking about the screws. He was on the point of attaining his object when he seemed to hear a sigh from someone above, close at the edge of the grave. He felt the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. He knew no living thing was by, but he felt that Cathy was there, not under him but on the earth. A sudden sense of relief flowed from his heart through every limb. He relinquished his labour of agony and turned consoled at once, unspeakably consoled. Her presence was with him as he refilled the grave and led him home. He rushed eagerly to the door of Wuthering Heights, but it was fastened, and Hindley Earnshaw and his wife opposed his entrance. He hurried upstairs to his room and hers, looking round impatiently, feeling her by him, almost seeing her, yet not. He had not one glimpse. She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to him. Since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, he has been the sport of that intolerable torture, keeping his nerves at such a stretch that if they had not resembled catgut, they would long ago have relaxed to the feebleness of Linton's. When he sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out he should meet her; when he walked on the moors he should meet her coming in. When he went from home he hastened to return; she must be somewhere at the Heights, he was certain. When he slept in her chamber, he was beaten out of that. He could not lie there, for the moment he closed his eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child, and he must open his lids to see. He opened and closed them a hundred times a night, to be always disappointed. It racked him. He has often groaned aloud, till old Joseph no doubt believed that his conscience was playing the fiend inside of him. Now, since he has seen her, he is pacified, a little. It was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths, to beguile him with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years.

The Aftermath and Significance

After this confession, Heathcliff tells Nelly that he has nearly attained his heaven, and that of others is altogether unvalued and uncoveted by him. He instructs her that his body is to be carried to the churchyard in the evening, and that no minister need come, nor need anything be said over him. He insists that the sexton obey his directions concerning the two coffins. This act of opening Catherine's coffin is the pivotal moment that breaks the eighteen-year cycle of haunting and begins Heathcliff's final, rapid decline toward death. It is the physical manifestation of his lifelong refusal to be separated from Catherine, and it directly precedes his strange, joyful, and ultimately fatal state of mind. The desecration is not an act of malice but of desperate love, a literal attempt to breach the barrier of death and reclaim the woman who was his soul. It is the culmination of his revenge against time and mortality, and the prelude to his own end, where he believes he will finally join her.