Wuthering Heights

What usually comes to mind when one thinks of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights? Most will visualize tortured lovers against the extraordinary moors. Perhaps one will even recall the scene of one lover, Heathcliff, opening the grave of his Catherine to dig a space where they can be joined eternally. Yet another equally powerful emotion appears throughout the novel as an antithesis to love, that of revenge. Revenge first forms the basis of the actions of Hindley, the Earnshaw son, toward Heathcliff. Later revenge is mirrored in the vengeful actions of Heathcliff after he loses Catherine. In the process of gaining revenge, both characters lose their own humanity and their souls.

Hindley Earnshaw, the son and heir, reacts badly to his father’s bringing home a stray gypsy boy from the streets of Liverpool and to demands that Heathcliff be treated like his own brother. Both Catherine, his sister, and Hindley refuse “to have it in bed with them, or even their own room” at night so that Heathcliff has to sleep on the landing outside (Bronte 41). While Catherine learns to love Heathcliff, Hindley spends his days in revenge toward the intruder, especially after Heathcliff becomes Mr. Earnshaw’s “favorite” (42). Hindley’s beatings of Heathcliff further alienate Mr. Earnshaw, who is infuriated “when he discovered his son persecuting the poor, fatherless child, as he called him” (42). Hindley regularly beats Heathcliff and threatens to turn Heathcliff out in the cold when Mr. Earnshaw dies (43). When Heathcliff blackmails Hindley into swapping colts for the secret beatings, Hindley shows reasons for his jealousy toward Heathcliff, “Take my colt, gipsy, then, and I pray that he may break your neck, you beggarly interloper! And wheedle my father out of all he has” (43). When Mr. Earnshaw dies and Hindley returns from college to claim his inheritance, he takes his revenge unchecked. “He drove him from their company to the servants, deprived him of the instructions of the curate, and insisted that he should labour out of door instead, compelling him to do so as hard as any other lad on the farm” (49). He also orders floggings for Heathcliff and deprives him of even speaking to Catherine, whom he loves dearly, after an adventure at the Lintons. All these punishments Heathcliff could have stood except when he finally realizes that Hindley has made it impossible for