Heathcliff's death

Heathcliff's death is the final, enigmatic event of Wuthering Heights, in which the tormented antihero starves himself to death after a period of visionary obsession, convinced he is about to be reunited with Catherine Earnshaw. His end is not a defeat but a strange, triumphant consummation of his lifelong fixation, leaving behind a legacy of ghostly legend and a quiet reconciliation between the surviving heirs.

The Final Decline

In the weeks before his death, Heathcliff underwent a profound and unsettling transformation. He began to shun meals, refusing to eat for four days, and became increasingly absorbed in a private, ecstatic vision. Nelly Dean observed that he had a "strange, joyful glitter in his eyes" and an "unnatural appearance of joy under his black brows" that altered his entire aspect. He told her, "I'm on the threshold of hell. To-day, I am within sight of my heaven. I have my eyes on it: hardly three feet to sever me!" He would sit staring at the empty air with "glittering, restless eyes," as if he saw something within two yards' distance that communicated "both pleasure and pain in exquisite extremes." His physical state deteriorated rapidly: his cheeks became hollow, his eyes bloodshot, and he breathed as fast as a cat. He confessed to Nelly that he had "lost the faculty of enjoying" the destruction of his enemies and that he took so little interest in daily life he hardly remembered to eat or drink. He described his condition as a "long fight" and expressed a single, all-consuming wish: to be reunited with Catherine.

The Night of Death

On the final night, Heathcliff locked himself in the oak-panelled bedroom that had once been Catherine's. Through the whole night and far into the morning, the household heard him groaning and murmuring to himself. When the doctor, Kenneth, was summoned, Heathcliff refused to admit him, bidding them all "be damned." The following evening, a heavy rain set in and poured until dawn. When Nelly Dean went to investigate the next morning, she found the window swinging open and the rain driving straight in. Inside, Heathcliff lay on his back, dead and stark. His face and throat were washed with rain, the bedclothes dripped, and the lattice had grazed one hand that rested on the sill, though no blood trickled from the broken skin. His eyes met Nelly's "so keen and fierce" that she started, and he seemed to smile. She tried to close his eyes, but they would not shut, and his parted lips and sharp white teeth seemed to sneer at her attempts. Joseph, the old servant, declared, "Th' divil's harried off his soul," and fell on his knees to give thanks that the "lawful master and the ancient stock were restored to their rights."

The Aftermath and Burial

Hareton Earnshaw, the most wronged of all Heathcliff's victims, was the only one who truly mourned. He sat by the corpse all night, weeping bitterly, pressing its hand, and kissing the "sarcastic, savage face that every one else shrank from contemplating." Kenneth was perplexed as to the cause of death; Nelly concealed the fact that Heathcliff had swallowed nothing for four days, believing his abstinence was a consequence of his strange illness, not its cause. Heathcliff was buried according to his own wishes, to the scandal of the whole neighbourhood. The only attendants were Hareton, Nelly, the sexton, and six men to carry the coffin. Hareton himself dug green sods and laid them over the brown mould. Heathcliff's grave was dug on a green slope in a corner of the kirkyard, next to Catherine's, and his headstone, bearing only the single word "Heathcliff" and the date of his death, remained bare while the others were overgrown. Country folk swore on the Bible that he walked, claiming to have met him near the church, on the moor, and even within the house. An old man by the kitchen fire affirmed he had seen two figures—Heathcliff and Catherine—looking out of the chamber window on every rainy night since his death.

Thematic Significance

Heathcliff's death is the culmination of a life defined by obsessive love and implacable revenge. His final days were not a surrender but a deliberate, ecstatic pursuit of the ghost that had haunted him for eighteen years. He had opened Catherine's coffin and bribed the sexton to remove the side of it so that when he was laid beside her, their dust would mingle. He told Nelly that he had been "the sport of that intolerable torture" of Catherine's presence, feeling her everywhere but unable to see her, and that now, having seen her, he was "pacified." His death was a strange kind of victory: he achieved the union he had craved, and his passing allowed the living—Hareton and the younger Catherine—to finally find peace and reconciliation. The novel ends with Lockwood lingering by the three headstones, wondering how anyone could imagine "unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."