Heathcliff's imprisonment of Catherine Linton

Heathcliff's imprisonment of Catherine Linton stands as the most direct and brutal expression of his lifelong revenge, the moment when his patient scheming finally closes around the next generation. By luring his niece to Wuthering Heights and holding her there against her will, he forces the marriage that transfers the Linton fortune into his hands, completing the usurpation of both estates that began with his mortgage of Wuthering Heights. The act reveals the full scope of his design: not merely to punish his old enemies but to strip them of everything they possess, using their own children as the instruments of their ruin.

The Trap at Wuthering Heights

The imprisonment begins as a calculated deception. Heathcliff, knowing his son Linton is dying, uses the sickly boy as bait to draw Catherine Linton to Wuthering Heights. When Ellen Dean accompanies her charge, Heathcliff locks the door behind them, declaring that his house is not stricken with the plague and that he has a mind to be hospitable. He reveals that Hareton is away with cattle, and Zillah and Joseph are off on a journey of pleasure, leaving him alone with his captives. The pretense of hospitality quickly dissolves into open coercion as Heathcliff makes clear that neither Catherine nor Ellen will leave until he has achieved his purpose.

Violence and Coercion

When Catherine attempts to seize the key to the door, Heathcliff responds with shocking physical brutality. She captures his closed hand and, finding her nails make no impression, applies her teeth sharply to his fingers. Heathcliff opens his hand suddenly, and as she secures the key, he seizes her with his liberated hand, pulls her onto his knee, and administers a shower of terrific slaps on both sides of her head. Ellen Dean rushes at him furiously, crying out that he is a villain, but a touch on her chest silences her, leaving her dizzy and breathless. The scene is over in two minutes, with Catherine released, her hands to her temples, trembling like a reed and leaning against the table perfectly bewildered.

Heathcliff's cruelty is not impulsive but deliberate and pedagogical. As he stoops to retrieve the fallen key, he tells Catherine that he knows how to chastise children, and that he will be her father tomorrow, all the father she will have in a few days. He promises her a daily taste of his correction if he catches such a devil of a temper in her eyes again. The threat is precise: he intends to break her will through systematic violence, just as he has broken others. His earlier declaration that he has no pity, that the more the worms writhe the more he yearns to crush out their entrails, finds its fullest expression in this calculated abuse of a young girl.

The Forced Marriage and Legal Theft

The imprisonment serves a specific legal purpose. Heathcliff forces Catherine to marry his son Linton, and during her week's absence, while her uncle Edgar Linton lies dying, Linton is threatened or coaxed into bequeathing the whole of his and Catherine's moveable property to his father. The lands, being a minor's, Linton cannot meddle with, but Heathcliff claims and keeps them in his wife's right and his own, legally if not morally. Catherine, destitute of cash and friends, cannot disturb his possession. The marriage is thus not merely a personal cruelty but a legal instrument of theft, converting Catherine's inheritance into Heathcliff's property through the dying boy's coerced will.

Edgar Linton, from his sickbed, divines that one of his enemy's purposes is to secure the personal property as well as the estate to his son, or rather to Heathcliff himself. He determines to alter his will, placing Catherine's fortune in the hands of trustees for her use during life and for her children after her, so that it cannot fall to Heathcliff should Linton die. But the alteration comes too late. When Ellen sends four men with serviceable weapons to demand Catherine's release, they return unaccompanied, reporting that Catherine is too ill to quit her room and that Heathcliff will not suffer them to see her. Ellen vows to storm the Heights with a whole bevy at daylight, but the opportunity never comes.

Captivity and Isolation

Ellen Dean herself is held for five nights and four days, seeing nobody but Hareton once every morning, who proves a model jailor, surly, dumb, and deaf to every attempt at moving his sense of justice or compassion. Catherine, after the forced marriage, stays upstairs for a fortnight, visited twice a day by Zillah, whose attempts at increasing kindness are proudly and promptly repelled. Heathcliff goes up once to show her Linton's will, revealing the full extent of her dispossession. Nobody else approaches her door, and nobody asks anything about her. The isolation is total, a deliberate strategy to break her resistance and leave her with no ally, no resource, and no hope of escape.

Her first appearance downstairs comes on a Sunday afternoon, when she cries out that she cannot bear any longer being in the cold. Dressed in black, her yellow curls combed back behind her ears as plain as a Quaker, she emerges into a household where even the servants have become her jailors. The image of the once-spirited girl reduced to this pale, subdued figure marks the completeness of Heathcliff's victory over the Linton line.

The Design Behind the Act

Heathcliff's imprisonment of Catherine is not an isolated cruelty but the culmination of a revenge he has planned for decades. He told Ellen Dean long before that God will not have the satisfaction that he shall, and that while he is thinking of his plan he does not feel pain. The plan has always been to strip his enemies of everything, to reduce them to dependence and despair. His acquisition of Wuthering Heights through Hindley's mortgaged debts, which reduced Hareton to a servant in his own house, was the first stage. The imprisonment of Catherine and the forced marriage to Linton complete the second, delivering Thrushcross Grange's wealth into his hands.

The act also reveals the peculiar logic of his revenge. He told Catherine Earnshaw that he seeks no revenge on her, that the tyrant grinds down his slaves and they crush those beneath them. His cruelty is directed not at those who wronged him directly but at their children, the next generation who inherit the sins of their fathers. By making Catherine Linton and Hareton suffer for the crimes of Edgar and Hindley, he perpetuates the cycle of abuse, turning the innocent into victims of a feud they had no part in beginning.

The Unraveling of the Tyrant

Yet the imprisonment, for all its success, marks the beginning of Heathcliff's own undoing. Having achieved his revenge, he finds himself unable to enjoy it. In the days that follow, he roams to and fro in a state approaching distraction, his heavy sighs succeeding each other so thick as to leave no space for common breathing. He tells Ellen that he has not written his will and cannot determine how to leave his property, wishing he could annihilate it from the face of the earth. His cheeks are hollow, his eyes blood-shot, like a person starving with hunger and going blind with loss of sleep.

He insists that it is not his fault that he cannot eat or rest, that it is through no settled designs. He compares himself to a man struggling in the water, who must reach the shore before he can rest. But the shore he has struggled toward all his life, the complete destruction of his enemies, brings him no peace. He declares that he is too happy and yet not happy enough, that his soul's bliss kills his body but does not satisfy itself. The imprisonment of Catherine Linton, the triumph of his revenge, leaves him emptier than before, a tyrant who has conquered everything and gained nothing. The act that completes his power over others begins the dissolution of his power over himself.