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How Does Heathcliff Change Throughout The Novel

987 Words4 Pages

Rose Canady
Cannon
AP Literature
30 Jan 2023
Heathcliff’s Narcissism in Wuthering Heights Many people say that going through trials strengthens and refines a person. While this is normally true for many protagonists in literature, it isn’t for Wuthering Heights. Wuthering Heights follows a man named Heathcliff from his abusive childhood to his tragic death brought on by a toxic love triangle. Heathcliff had many events during his life that could have majorly effected him for the better, but did not. Despite going through challenges that would normally strengthen a person, Heathcliff’s character changed for the worse throughout Wuthering Heights due to his narcisstic personality. Heathcliff suffered abuse from his adoptive brother Hindley …show more content…

One would think it would’ve made him more empathetic and loving, but it didn’t at all. Catherine explains why she couldn’t accept his marriage, “‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him’,” (Bronte 59). Catherine did love Heathcliff, but because Hindley had degraded his social status so lowly she felt she could not marry him. Of course Heathcliff reacts very badly to Catherine’s rejection, because he is a narcissist. He runs away after Catherine refuses him, “Heathcliff had never been heard of since the evening of the thunder-storm, and, one day, I had the misfortune, when she provoked me exceedingly, to lay the blame of his disappearance on her,” (Bronte 65). Heathcliff completely disappears after Catherine’s answer, and it can be seen that it was because of her answer that he fled. The reason that this makes him a narcissist is because Heathcliff couldn’t deal with not being loved and wanted, proved by his disappearance. Heathcliff was treated poorly by Catherine, but this didn’t make him a more empathetic man. Instead of learning that what Catherine did to him was wrong, he then treated his wife, Isabella, poorly. Isabella shares why Heathcliff was an awful lover, “‘I gave him my heart, and he took and pinched it to death; and flung it back to me’,” (Bronte 127). Catherine’s rejection failed to make Heathcliff unlike her, he did to Isabella what Catherine did to him. Heathcliff lacks any sympathy for Isabella, even though Catherine’s abuse should have made him sympathetic to poor treatment in romantic relationships. Despite being rejected by Catherine, Heathcliff didn’t learn how to be a good husband because of his narcissistic

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In Wuthering Heights, a good majority of the characters suffer in many ways. Anorexia, idiocy, and abuse are prevalent throughout this story. It is ultimately these sources that lead to character’s abundant psychological suffering. To name a few, Isabella enters a loveless marriage, the death of Hindley’s wife, and, above all, Heathcliff and Catherine have a constant back and forth of blaming the other for their pain (Baldys). Evan at the end of Catherine’s life, Heathcliff comments, “Misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it.

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No matter how much Heathcliff attempts to blend with society, he will always have a savage heart. Moreover, Cathrine points out Isabella’s deplorable ignorance of his character” due to her infatuation.

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Due to the time that this novel was written a boys childhood would be a lot stricter than the girls, in the novel this is present between Heathcliff and Catherine, which would naturally make his childhood bitter in comparison. Heathcliff’s childhood could be considered bitter in many ways due to his relationship with the different people within Wuthering Heights and how he got there in the first place. The most common relationship that would make is childhood bitter was his relationship with Hindley Earnshaw. Mr Earnshaw found the orphaned Heathcliff in Liverpool, where we are lead to believe that Heathcliff would be found around the docks as due to unemployment as a result of industrialisation, the Irish potato famine would lead to thousands

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(Brontë pg number; chapter 10). Catherine has called out Isabella for a surface-level love and warned Isabella that Heathcliff is too much for her, and Isabella retorts by saying she loves Heathcliff more than Catherine has loved Edgar, which is proof of her becoming more assertive. Heathcliff and Isabella’s relationship quickly turns toxic and abusive and Isabella finally decides to stand up for herself and run away to London. Isabella is an interesting character, the more she matures, the more stubborn and self-protective she becomes, just like Catherine. As a teenager, when Catherine is unable to get Nelly Dean to leave the room, she stubbornly pinches her and makes her leave.

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He treats his son like a pawn and uses him to obtain property rather than take care of him as he dies from sickness. This cruelty from Heathcliff further illustrates the evils of social classes, turning an innocent child into a revenge-seeking man. Wuthering Heights shows that Heathcliff's cruelty is not a result of his moral deterioration but because of how others treated him due to his

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Heathcliff is driven by revenge and doesn’t have any regard for Isabella, his wife. His belittling attitude towards Isabella shows how little he thinks of her, especially when he chastises her for referring to themselves as a unit. All he cares about his getting the revenge against his brother that he thinks he deserves. Marrying Isabella was merely all a part of his plan of getting back at Hindley. He thinks of her as something that can be used, without any consequences.

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Heathcliff was tipped by his childhood and led down the path to become an abusive man who knows nothing about healthy relationships. He hangs his wife’s dogs and brags to her about it during an argument, he hit’s Nelly while she’s trying to stop him from beating Cathy, and he uses his son Linton as a tool for his own selfish gain, and abuses him while he’s on his deathbed. Yet the path too good or evil isn’t always as straight laced as one would believe.

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Because they do not have a connection like her and Heathcliff, her love for Linton will die over time. It is clear that Catherine would rather be the talk of the neighborhood than be in a relationship with someone she deeply loves. Her decision to

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Firstly the obsessive love between Catherine and Heathcliff. Catherine claims that her love for Heathcliff “resembles the eternal rocks beneath –a source of little visible delight, but necessary” (73). She tells her housekeeper “Nelly, I am Heathcliff –he’s always, always in my

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The jealousy between the characters of Hindley and Heathcliff began the first second Heathcliff was brought into the home of the Wuthering Heights. Hindley was jealous of Heathcliff he instantly won the affection of his father that he was denied as a child. In the novel it states “He has been blaming our father for treating Heathcliff too liberally; and swears he will reduce him to his right place” This whole revenge circle that is never ending all started with hindley envying heathcliff because his father loved an orphan more than his biological son. That caused the downfall and how the jealousy

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We could ask ourselves whether Heathcliff’s personality is a result of the things that had happened to him or a result of the conscious decisions he made. Emily Brontë is constantly putting Heathcliff in a good light, she is always explaining why is he the way he is; we see his childhood and the abuse he had to take, just because he was different and we can’t help but feel sorry for him. Heathcliff left Wuthering Heights, made something out of himself, but instead of moving on, he returned and started torturing his torturers, becoming “more of an oppressor than his original tormentors.” (5) And not just that he was good at it, he enjoyed it,

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But he was wild and the spirit of revenge. In the end of novel, Heathcliff was crazy because he sees the ghost of Catherin and hi

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Emily Brontë approaches the idea of sickness and death of the characters in her novel Wuthering Heights in a peculiar way. The characters that are ill are usually mentally ill, and their deaths often result from physical ailments derived from mental illness. The drive for revenge and desire for love that reigns among the characters often lands them in stressful situations that cause them to spiral downward into these mental illnesses. Emily Brontë’s emphasis on the motif of sickness and death in Wuthering Height deepens the drama of the plot and constructs more complicated relationships between the characters.

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