Cat

The Cat at Wuthering Heights is a minor but recurring creature whose appearances mark moments of eerie domesticity, supernatural tension, and the uncanny atmosphere of the house. First seen as a brindled grey cat creeping from the ashes of the kitchen fire, it later becomes a silent witness to Heathcliff's torment and the haunting of the Heights, its presence woven into the ghostly and obsessive fabric of the narrative.

First Appearance and Domestic Context

The cat is introduced on the night of Lockwood's first, disastrous stay at Wuthering Heights. After descending from the haunted oak-panelled bed where he dreamed of Catherine Linton's ghost, Lockwood finds his way to the back-kitchen. There, a gleam of fire, raked compactly together, enables him to rekindle his candle. Nothing is stirring except a brindled, grey cat, which creeps from the ashes and salutes him with a querulous mew. This moment establishes the cat as a creature of the hearth, emerging from the embers in a house that is otherwise still and hostile. Lockwood later stretches himself on one of the two benches that nearly enclose the hearth, while the cat—which he calls Grimalkin—mounts the other. They are both nodding when Joseph shuffles down a wooden ladder from the roof, casts a sinister look at the little flame Lockwood has enticed to play between the ribs, sweeps the cat from its elevation, and bestows himself in the vacancy. The cat's displacement by Joseph underscores the rigid, inhospitable order of the household, where even a small animal's comfort is secondary to the servant's sour authority.

The Cat and the Ghostly Atmosphere

The cat's presence is subtly linked to the supernatural currents that run through Wuthering Heights. Lockwood's nightmare of Catherine Linton's ghost—the little, ice-cold hand, the melancholy voice sobbing "Let me in—let me in!"—occurs in the same house where the cat roams. The cat itself is not a ghost, but its silent, watchful movements through the dark rooms contribute to the sense of a place where the boundary between the living and the dead is thin. When Heathcliff, in his anguished vigil, wrenches open the lattice of the oak-panelled bed and sobs for Cathy to come in, the snow and wind whirl wildly through, blowing out the light. The cat is not present in that scene, but the pattern of nocturnal disturbance—the creaking lattice, the howling wind, the desperate invocation of the dead—is the same atmosphere in which the cat first appeared. The cat thus becomes a familiar of the house's haunted hours, a creature that belongs to the night and the firelight, not to the daylight world of ordinary life.

The Cat and Heathcliff's Final Days

In the final phase of Heathcliff's life, as he starves himself and becomes increasingly absorbed by the vision of Catherine's ghost, the cat reappears in a telling detail. When Nelly Dean finds Heathcliff dead in the oak-panelled bed, his face and throat are washed with rain, the bed-clothes drip, and he is perfectly still. The lattice, flapping to and fro, has grazed one hand that rested on the sill; no blood trickles from the broken skin. The cat is not mentioned in this scene, but the room itself—the same room where Lockwood saw the cat—is now the site of Heathcliff's final, ecstatic death. The cat's earlier presence in that space, creeping from the ashes and mewing querulously, now reads as a premonition of the death that will come to that bed. After Heathcliff's burial, the country folk swear on the Bible that he walks; there are those who speak of having met him near the church, on the moor, and even within the house. The cat, as a creature of the house, would be part of that haunted landscape, a silent witness to the restless dead.

The Cat as a Symbol of the Uncanny

The cat at Wuthering Heights functions as a symbol of the uncanny—the familiar made strange. It is a domestic animal, yet it appears in contexts of fear, nightmare, and death. Its brindled grey colour and its emergence from the ashes give it a chthonic quality, as if it belongs to the earth and the fire rather than to the clean, ordered world of Thrushcross Grange. The cat's querulous mew, its silent observation, and its displacement by Joseph all reinforce the sense that Wuthering Heights is a place where even the animals are out of joint, where the ordinary rules of comfort and companionship do not apply. In this, the cat mirrors the larger themes of the novel: the wildness of the moors, the violence of the passions, and the haunting persistence of love beyond death.