Meaning of Love and its Unintended Consequences in “Wuthering Heights”

True love is often pictured as the cliched ending of romance novels or movies with the scene of the girl riding off into the sunset with the perfect prince on a white stallion. In The Notebook, Allie Hamilton and Noah Calhoun had the fairy-tale ending with their happily ever after, but does life really end like that? Would one give up everything just to be with their true love? In Wuthering Heights, the true love between Heathcliff and Catherine was quite different and uniquely human.

Instead of having the perfect conclusion, with their happily ever after, their passionate love ruins their own lives and everyone around them. If only they learned to let go, knowing that if they belonged together, they would have found their way back to each other, avoiding all the trouble and revenge Heathcliff brought onto everyone. In her novel, Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë demonstrates the complex meaning of love, as not perfect or always associated with happiness. Love can instead stir up agony, pain, revenge and bring out not only the best but also the worst in humankind. She expresses this idea through irony and characterization.

Irony is used to demonstrate the pain prompted by the love between Heathcliff and Catherine and how they are fickle and confused. Catherine, the daughter of the Earnshaw family, and Heathcliff, an orphan, confessed to loving each other and were inseparable ever since they were young. They even shared the same interests of “laughing outright at the petted things,” done by the Lintons, a family that lived a few miles away from Wuthering Heights. (Bronte 52). However, after a five week stay with the Linton’s, Catherine comes back and is disgusted with Heathcliff’s ways and “accepted” Edgar, the eldest son of the Lintons. When asked if she “loved him,” she answered “of course I do.”(Bronte 85). Catherine’s fickle mindset is ironic. Catherine said that she loved Heathcliff but then immediately falls in love with Edgar, and starts to look down upon Heathcliff, creating his feelings of revenge that he later conveys. Another example of irony expressed by Heathcliff and Catherine was the scene when he curses her for the pain she created after she died. Heathcliff screams that he hates her, saying that she “cared nothing” of his “sufferings” and would not let her “rest…as long as he is [I am] living.” However, he tells Catherine to “haunt him[me] then, and be with him[me] always.”

He tells her to “take any form” to even “drive him[me] mad,” as long as she “does [do] not leave him[me] in this abyss,” where he cannot be with her, “cannot find her[you], cannot live without his[my] life, without his[my] soul.”(Bronte 186). The fickleness of Heathcliff’s personality is ironic because Heathcliff curses Catherine and says that he will never let her rest and that he hates her but then begs her to take any form to stay by his side. Bronte utilizes irony to explain that humankind is mercurial and most people have no idea what they want when it comes to love. Love is not perfect and causes pain as people are confused about their desires. John Bowen, a professor of literature at the University of York, states that in the novel, Heathcliff, an “overbearing presence,” being both “an outsider and insider,“ creates a world of revenge…without law or justice” because of his “passionate intensities.” His feelings consist of love towards Catherine and hate towards those who took Catherine away from him. Bowen agrees that love or other “passionate intensities” can instigate “a world of revenge” and pain. Clearly Heathcliff is a product of the fundamental human irony of wavering desires, and his character further demonstrates that love evokes pain and humans are capricious and don’t know what they want.

Characterization is utilized to display the passionate love of Heathcliff and Catherine that ruins lives and instigates pain. Catherine and Heathcliff due to their character traits and personality, despite loving each other, caused pain onto one another. Catherine said that she loved Heathcliff, that he was “the eternal rocks beneath” her, and was “always on her [in my] mind,” but then says that it would “degrade her[me] to marry Heathcliff.” She would rather marry Edgar, who is compared to her, “as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire” instead of Heathcliff, who is “more like her[myself] that she is[I am], and whatever their[our] souls are made of, his and hers[mine] are the same.”(Bronte 88-90). This demonstrates Catherine’s character of being strong-willed and passionate, but she is also at war with herself. She is passionate and loves Heathcliff, stating that they are the same and their souls are each others. However, because of her personality of being stubborn, she would not marry Heathcliff but instead Edgar, who is nothing like her, who is someone she doesn’t truly love, because she knew that by marrying Heathcliff, she would degrade herself. She is at war with herself, fighting internal battles of not knowing who to choose, to follow her heart and be with Heathcliff or her head and be with Edgar. In the end, she still chose to marry Edgar, breaking Heathcliff’s heart and prompted the later events of revenge. Heathcliff loved Catherine more than anything, despite saying that he hated her. He loved her so much that he started to see her, “in every cloud, every tree…[she] was filling the air at night and was caught by glimpses in every object by day.” He felt as if he was [I am] surrounded by her image,” and everything he saw “connected [with] her to him[me] and that “the entire world was[is] a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist and that he had [I have] lost her.”(Bronte 357-358). This reveals Heathcliff’s personality of being passionate, romantic and brooding.

He loved Catherine, being passionate and romantic and over the years, his love for her never lessened as he would do anything for her. The fact that he could see her in everything, feeling her presence shows that she was always on his mind even after her death and that he still loved her passionately even after all this time. Heathcliff also demonstrates his personality of brooding as he takes revenge for all who were against him because his love for Catherine. He stated that everything he saw reminded him of her and it seemed like they were mocking him, being a constant reminder that he lost her. His feelings of revenge conjured as he blamed everyone who took Catherine away from him, saying that it was their fault that she didn’t choose him and now he lost her forever. John Bowen, a professor at the University of York states that in Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff’s character consists of being “self-disciplined and completely wild… and he has combination of two contradictory qualities…of being reckless and passionate…and having an ability to plan and sustain vengeance…” Heathcliff was wild, reckless and passionate towards Catherine, willing to do anything for her but at the same time intelligent, planning ways to avenge those who have wronged him. Bowen agrees that Heathcliff’s character of being reckless and passionate instigated his reason of bringing vengeance upon others, bringing pain and agony. In conclusion, both Catherine and Heathcliff had conflicted emotions from their characteristics about love and were both fighting internal battles to make the right decisions and choices that initiated a world of pain, agony and revenge.

In the novel, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, a complex meaning of love was demonstrated as not being perfect and signifying the start of happiness through the usage of irony and characterization. She shows love as causing agony, pain and revenge and being responsible for bringing to light the worst in humankind. Everyone believes that true love expresses the ending of a happily ever after, that when there is true love, everything is perfect. However, wasn’t the love between Catherine and Heathcliff also true love? The only difference is that they didn’t have the perfect ending and launched a world of revenge and pain. Some say, however, that Wuthering Heights did have a happy ending with Catherine and Heathcliff being united in death and their children uniting and creating a semblance of hope that peace was finally restored. Nevertheless, Wuthering Heights included love, heartbreak, hate, revenge, pain and through this story, Bronte reflected the flaws, conflicted emotions, internal battles and fickleness of humans, and it revealed the truth of who we are, and what we are like.

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