locket

The locket, a gold case holding two miniature portraits, is a charged object in Wuthering Heights that concentrates the novel's central conflicts of love, possession, and violent inheritance. First appearing as a token of Catherine Earnshaw's dual affections, it later becomes the site of a physical struggle between Heathcliff and his daughter-in-law, Catherine Linton, and is finally smashed by Heathcliff in a symbolic act of domination. The object's trajectory—from cherished keepsake to broken relic—traces the ruin of the Earnshaw-Linton line and the relentless pressure of Heathcliff's revenge.

Appearance and Initial Significance

The locket is introduced as a piece of jewelry worn around Catherine Linton's neck, containing two portraits: on one side her mother, Catherine Earnshaw, and on the other her uncle, Edgar Linton, when they were young. It is described as a "little picture" in a "gold case," a compact double portrait that physically binds the two figures Catherine Linton most loved. The object is first mentioned in the context of Heathcliff's earlier theft of a similar token: after Catherine Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff opened the locket hung around her neck, cast out its contents (presumably a curl of Edgar's light hair), and replaced them with a black lock of his own. Nelly Dean later twisted the two locks together and enclosed them, an act that symbolically merged the rival claims on Catherine's heart. The locket thus carries from the start a history of contested possession and the attempt to overwrite one attachment with another.

The Struggle for the Locket

The locket's most dramatic appearance occurs during Catherine Linton's imprisonment at Wuthering Heights after her forced marriage to Linton Heathcliff. Desperate to escape, Catherine offers Linton all her possessions—books, birds, her pony Minny—if he will procure the key to their room. When he refuses, she takes the locket from her neck and offers it to him, saying he "should have that." Linton, parroting his father's greed, declares the locket already his: "I said they were mine, too; and tried to get them from her." Catherine pushes him away, and when Linton shrieks, Heathcliff enters. He takes the portrait of Edgar from Linton and orders Catherine to surrender hers. She refuses, and Heathcliff "struck her down, and wrenched it off the chain, and crushed it with his foot." The violence of this act—striking a young woman to the ground, tearing the chain from her neck, and deliberately destroying the image of her father under his boot—is one of the novel's most explicit demonstrations of Heathcliff's physical cruelty and his determination to annihilate every trace of the Linton line.

Aftermath and Symbolic Weight

After the locket is crushed, Catherine gathers up the bits of the picture and sits with her face to the wall, refusing to speak. The destruction of the portrait of Edgar Linton is not merely an act of vandalism; it is a calculated assault on Catherine's last tangible connection to her father and her former life at Thrushcross Grange. The locket, which once held the two people she loved most, is reduced to fragments, mirroring the fragmentation of her world. Heathcliff's action also echoes his earlier manipulation of Catherine Earnshaw's locket, creating a pattern of symbolic violence against the objects that embody the Linton-Earnshaw union. The locket thus functions as a material index of the novel's central tragedy: the impossibility of holding together the two families, and the brutal force with which Heathcliff enforces their separation.

Narrative Role and Thematic Significance

The locket serves as a concrete focal point for the novel's exploration of inheritance, memory, and the physicality of love. Unlike abstract declarations of devotion, the locket is a tangible object that can be worn, offered, stolen, and destroyed. Its passage through the hands of Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Nelly Dean, Catherine Linton, and Linton Heathcliff traces the shifting alliances and betrayals of the plot. The fact that Heathcliff first replaces Edgar's hair with his own, and later crushes Edgar's portrait entirely, underscores his obsessive need to erase his rival and possess Catherine entirely—even beyond death. The locket's destruction also prefigures the eventual dissolution of the Earnshaw-Linton inheritance, as Heathcliff's machinations leave both families dispossessed. In the end, the locket is not merely a sentimental trinket but a battlefield where the war for love, identity, and power is fought in miniature.