Heathcliff's usurpation of Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff's usurpation of Wuthering Heights is the central act of his revenge, a patient and calculated seizure of the Earnshaw family seat that transforms the dark-skinned foundling, once brought to the house as a dirty, ragged, black-haired child from the streets of Liverpool, into its absolute master. The process is not a sudden conquest but a slow, legal, and economic strangulation, achieved through Hindley Earnshaw's own dissipation and debt. By the time the usurpation is complete, Heathcliff holds firm possession of the house, having reduced Hareton Earnshaw, the rightful heir, to a state of complete dependence, living in his own home as a servant, deprived of wages and ignorant that he has been wronged. This acquisition is the material foundation of Heathcliff's power, the instrument through which he bends the remaining Earnshaws and Lintons to his will, and the final inversion of the childhood hierarchy that had branded him a gipsy brat and a ploughboy.

The Financial Mechanism of the Takeover

The legal and economic engine of the usurpation is Hindley Earnshaw's own ruin. After his wife Frances's death, Hindley descends into a mania for gaming, mortgaging every yard of land he owns to supply cash for his vice. Heathcliff, returning from his three-year disappearance a wealthy man, becomes the mortgagee, the creditor holding the debt against the entire Earnshaw estate. The lawyer who had served both Earnshaw and Linton confirms the bleak situation: the whole property is mortgaged, and the sole chance for the natural heir, Hareton, is to allow him an opportunity of creating some interest in the creditor's heart, so that he may be inclined to deal leniently towards him. This hope proves futile. When Hindley dies, having spent his final night drinking himself to death deliberately after locking the doors against Heathcliff, the full extent of the financial trap is revealed. Heathcliff, as mortgagee, proves to the attorney—who in turn proves it to Edgar Linton—that Hindley had mortgaged every yard of land he owned. In that manner, Hareton, who should now be the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, is reduced to complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy.

The Moment of Possession

The transfer of power is made brutally explicit at Hindley's funeral. Heathcliff maintains a hard, careless deportment, indicative of neither joy nor sorrow, expressing at most a flinty gratification at a piece of difficult work successfully executed. As the people bear the coffin from the house, a flicker of exultation crosses his aspect. He has the hypocrisy to represent a mourner, and before following with Hareton, he lifts the unfortunate child onto the table and mutters 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 unsuspecting child is pleased at this speech, playing with Heathcliff's whiskers and stroking his cheek, but Ellen Dean divines its meaning and tartly insists that the boy must go back with her to Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff's response is a direct threat: he has a fancy to try his hand at rearing a young one, and if Edgar Linton attempts to remove Hareton, he will supply the place of this with his own son, Linton. "I don't engage to let Hareton go undisputed; but I'll be pretty sure to make the other come!" This hint is enough to bind Edgar Linton's hands; he speaks no more of interfering, and Ellen Dean is not aware that he could have done anything to any purpose had he been ever so willing.

Consolidation and Expansion of Power

The usurpation of Wuthering Heights is not an end in itself but a platform for further conquest. Heathcliff's wealth, which Ellen Dean describes as "nobody knows what money" that increases every year, makes him rich enough to live in a finer house, yet he remains close-handed, preferring to let Thrushcross Grange to a good tenant for a few hundred more rather than occupy it himself. His design extends to the next generation: he openly declares to Ellen Dean that his whole scope is that the two cousins, Catherine Linton and his son Linton, may fall in love and get married, so that Catherine will be provided for as joint successor with Linton. When Ellen Dean objects that Catherine would be the heir if Linton died, Heathcliff corrects her: there is no clause in the will to secure it so; his property would go to him. "But, to prevent disputes, I desire their union, and am resolved to bring it about." This resolution leads to the imprisonment of Catherine Linton at Wuthering Heights and her forced marriage to the sickly Linton, after which Linton Heathcliff's will bequeaths the whole of his, and what had been her, moveable property to his father. The lands, being a minor's, Linton could not meddle with, but Heathcliff claims and keeps them in his wife's right and his own, legally, leaving Catherine, destitute of cash and friends, unable to disturb his possession.

The Master's Privilege and the Final Inversion

Heathcliff's mastery is exercised with the full arrogance of ownership. When he comes to Thrushcross Grange to fetch Catherine back, he makes no ceremony of knocking or announcing his name: he is master, and avails himself of the master's privilege to walk straight in without saying a word. The scene is charged with irony: it is the same room into which he had been ushered as a guest eighteen years before, the same moon shining through the window, the same autumn landscape outside, the portraits of the Lintons on the wall. Time has little altered his person—the same man, his dark face rather sallower and more composed, his frame a stone or two heavier. The foundling who had once been dragged into the garden and locked out now enters the Grange as a master, arresting Catherine by the arm and commanding her to come home. The usurpation of Wuthering Heights has made him not merely the equal of the gentry but their superior, able to dictate terms to the daughter of the house he once spied upon from the moors.

The Collapse of the Usurper

The usurpation, for all its success, ultimately hollows out its architect. In his final days, Heathcliff 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 Dean that he wishes to send for Mr. Green to make legal inquiries, that he has not written his will yet, and that he cannot determine how to leave his property: "I wish I could annihilate it from the face of the earth." His obsession with Catherine's ghost has consumed the very purpose of his conquest. He confesses, "I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself." He dies in the oak-panelled bed at Wuthering Heights, his eyes open in a frightful, life-like gaze of exultation that will not shut, his face and throat washed with rain from the flapping lattice. Joseph declares that the devil has harried off his soul, and falls on his knees to return thanks that the lawful master and the ancient stock are restored to their rights. The usurper's death undoes his life's work: Hareton, the most wronged, is the only one who really suffers much, sitting by the corpse all night, weeping in bitter earnest, pressing its hand and kissing the sarcastic, savage face that everyone else shrank from contemplating. The property, so carefully seized, passes back to the Earnshaw line through Hareton's union with Catherine Linton, and the usurpation, which had seemed absolute, proves to be a temporary and self-destructive tyranny.