The forced marriage of Catherine and Linton

The forced marriage of Catherine Linton to Linton Heathcliff stands as the coldest and most calculated stroke of Heathcliff's long revenge, the moment when his campaign of property seizure and personal torment converges on a single legal act. By compelling the healthy, high-spirited daughter of Edgar Linton to bind herself to his own sickly, terrified son, Heathcliff does not merely gratify a grudge; he engineers a transfer of wealth and status that no court could later undo. The marriage is the hinge on which the second generation's fate turns, reducing Catherine from the cherished heiress of Thrushcross Grange to a penniless widow imprisoned in the house of her father's enemy.

The Trap Is Set

The marriage is not a sudden impulse but the culmination of a scheme Heathcliff has pursued for years, rooted in his systematic acquisition of property. After Hindley Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff had already proven to the attorney—and through him to Edgar Linton—that Hindley had mortgaged every yard of land he owned to feed his mania for gaming, and that Heathcliff himself was the mortgagee. In that manner Hareton Earnshaw, who should have been the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, was reduced to complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy, living in his own house as a servant. The same legal machinery that devoured Wuthering Heights is now turned against Thrushcross Grange. Heathcliff's plan requires that his son Linton marry Catherine so that, upon Linton's death, her fortune and the Linton estate will pass into Heathcliff's hands. Edgar Linton, sensing this design, 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. Yet Edgar cannot understand why Heathcliff does not simply wait for his own death, because he is ignorant of how nearly his nephew Linton will quit the world alongside him.

The Deception and Detention

The trap is sprung through a combination of Linton's cowardice and Heathcliff's brutality. Linton, who has been menaced with an awful visitation of wrath if he fails in decoying Catherine and Ellen Dean to Wuthering Heights, delivers his father's message with chilling composure once safely inside the house. He tells Catherine that his father wants them to be married, that he knows her papa would never permit it, and that he is afraid of Linton dying if they wait; therefore they are to be married in the morning, and she is to stay all night. The revelation exposes the full extent of the conspiracy: Linton has been used as a lure, his terror on the moor subsiding the moment he enters the Heights, his earlier anguish merely the performance of a boy who knows he will be punished if he fails. Ellen Dean, outraged, calls him a pitiful changeling and a little perishing monkey, and even shakes him, but the cough that follows and Linton's recourse to moaning and weeping show how fragile—and how effectively weaponized—the boy's illness is.

The Prisoner's Plea

Catherine's response to her captivity reveals both her courage and her desperate love for her father. When Heathcliff approaches, she instinctively raises her hand to her cheek, the neighbourhood of the man reviving a painful sensation from his earlier blow. He scowls on her childish act and mutters that her courage is well disguised, that she seems damnably afraid. She admits she is afraid now, because if she stays, her papa will be miserable, and she cannot endure making him miserable. In a plea that is both a surrender and an appeal to whatever humanity he might possess, she promises to marry Linton willingly, saying her papa would like her to, and that she loves him. Heathcliff's answer is a study in sadistic clarity: he will enjoy himself remarkably in thinking her father will be miserable, he shall not sleep for satisfaction, and she could have hit on no surer way of fixing her residence under his roof for the next twenty-four hours than informing him that such an event would follow. As to her promise, he will take care she shall keep it, for she shall not quit the place till it is fulfilled.

The Legal Cage

Heathcliff's power rests not on physical force alone but on the law itself, which he wields as precisely as any weapon. When Ellen Dean threatens that there is law in the land, that it is felony without benefit of clergy, Heathcliff dismisses her clamour and states the true terms of the imprisonment: Catherine must either accept Linton or remain a prisoner, with Ellen along with her, until her master dies. He can detain them both, quite concealed, and if they doubt it, they have only to encourage her to retract her word and they will have an opportunity of judging. The threat is absolute, and Catherine, kneeling at his knee and vowing not to rise until he looks at her, makes her final appeal—she does not hate him, she is not angry that he struck her, and she asks whether he has never loved anybody in all his life. Heathcliff's reply is to repulse her brutally, crying that he would rather be hugged by a snake and that he detests her. The marriage proceeds, and its legal consequences unfold with grim precision. Edgar Linton, on his deathbed, had already altered his will, placing Catherine's fortune in the hands of trustees for her use during life and for her children after her, precisely so it could not fall to Heathcliff should Linton die. But the alteration comes too late to save her from the trap itself.

The Widow's Inheritance

The aftermath of the marriage completes Catherine's ruin. After Edgar's death, the lawyer Mr. Green—who has sold himself to Heathcliff, which was the cause of his delay in obeying Edgar's summons—takes upon himself to order everything and everybody about the place, giving all the servants but Ellen notice to quit. Catherine, now Mrs. Linton Heathcliff, is suffered to stay at the Grange only until her father's corpse has quitted it. She had escaped the Heights before dawn, stealing out through her mother's window and down the fir-tree, with Linton as her terrified accomplice, but the freedom is brief. Heathcliff goes up to her once to show her Linton's will, by which the dying boy has bequeathed the whole of his—and what had been her—moveable property to his father, having been threatened or coaxed into that act during her week's absence when his uncle died. The lands, Linton being a minor, he could not meddle with, but Heathcliff has claimed and kept them in his wife's right and his own, and Catherine, destitute of cash and friends, cannot disturb his possession. She stays upstairs a fortnight, visited only by Zillah, whose attempts at kindness are proudly and promptly repelled, and when she finally descends on a Sunday afternoon, she is dressed in black, her yellow curls combed back behind her ears as plain as a Quaker's. The marriage has achieved exactly what Heathcliff intended: the complete transfer of the Linton fortune into his hands, and the reduction of Catherine Linton to a captive dependent in the house where Hareton Earnshaw already serves as a labourer.

The Machinery of Revenge

The forced marriage is the purest expression of Heathcliff's method, which he had announced long before in his refusal to forgive: he would not leave to God the satisfaction of punishing the wicked, but would plan it out himself, and while thinking of that, he did not feel pain. The same pitiless logic that made him declare he had no pity, that the more the worms writhe the more he yearns to crush out their entrails, governs the marriage. It is a moral teething, and he grinds with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain. Yet the marriage also reveals the hollowness at the centre of his triumph. Years later, when he contemplates his own will and wishes he could annihilate his property from the face of the earth, he confesses that his soul's bliss kills his body but does not satisfy itself. The marriage that secured everything has left him unable to determine how to leave his property, unable to eat or rest, his cheeks hollow and his eyes blood-shot. The legal cage he built for Catherine has become the prison of his own making, and the forced marriage stands as the monument to a revenge that consumed its architect along with its victims.