Throughout Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff’s personality could be defined as dark, menacing, and brooding. He’s a dangerous character, with rapidly changing moods, capable of deep-seeded hatred, and incapable, it seems, of any kind of forgiveness or compromise. The novel clearly establishes Heathcliff as an untamed, volatile, wild man and also establishes his great love of Catherine and her usage of him as the source of his ill humor and resentment towards many other characters. There are certain tensions, contradictions, and ambiguities that establish the true intensity of Heathcliff’s feelings towards Catherine; feelings so intense that they border on a jealous obsession. This obsession derives from loneliness. Catherine’s need for attention and love as a result of past alienations to become a lady and her thoughts that social class is an indicator of the best virtues makes her unloved. Because Wuthering Heights was written during the Gothic movement, the novel reflects many characteristics of the era. Brontë reveals universal aspects of the human condition by highlighting the manner in which those charcaters become isolated- either by their own choice or unintentionally, thus producing unstable protagonists.
Amy Tan once wrote “Our uniqueness makes us special, makes perception valuable- but it can also make us lonely. This loneliness is different from being ‘alone’: You can be lonely even surrounded by people. This feeling stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are.” Heathcliff’s deep-seeded hatred and madness can be an escape since
people like him don’t develop these feelings when they’re in the happiest situations. Madness is Heathcliff’s escape. When things don’t go so well, he essentially imagines something better; Catherine’s ghost. He shows a sweet, gentle love to Catherine. He worries about her and take cares of her when she is ill.
When Heathcliff arrived to the Earnshaw household, he wasn’t treated as fairly or equally as everyone else. He faced racism by almost anyone who approached him in Wuthering Heights. His dark complexion was the gateway for others to treat him differently Heathcliff was treated the equivalent to a slave by Hindley. His experiences have taken control of his mindset and perspective on things in a pessimistic way. The reason he was so attached to Catherine was because she was the only person, from the time he was a child, who approached him and treated him reasonably. Consequently, Heathcliff depends on Catherine to be there for him perpetually considering he’s unfailingly there for her. Others surround him, nevertheless if Catherine isn’t present he’s lonesome. Characters, namely Heathcliff and Catherine remain more actively at war with love in their adult lives. Some force seems to have bent their lives into a pattern of frustration that their own struggle for relief only aggravates. Their need for love is expressed, not through loving, but through the anguish of loneliness. Love has always been associated with the pain of absence, rejection, and disappointment. This pattern, of course, was initiated by the abusive regime of Hindley. But Catherine repeated it, when she wounded Heathcliff by deciding to marry Edgar.
Following Catherine’s death, Heathcliff wished badly on her by saying “May she wake in torment!”(Brontë 161). He blamed Catherine for his own pain and suffering all those years with her being by Edgar’s side. “You said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one
prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living – you said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe… Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! Only do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you! Oh God! It is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” (Brontë 161)An anguished Heathcliff has gone mad. He wants to be haunted by Catherine’s ghost, as long as it means he gets to see her again. Heathcliff is pleading that Catherine never leaves him even when she’s not there in her physical form, but in her spiritual form. Regarding to isolation and loneliness, now that Catherine has passed, Heathcliff can’t seem to process her death. He “prayed (for) her to return…- her spirit.” (Brontë 275). And to think that Heathcliff’s childhood took a toll on his adulthood. Heathcliff has this deep sense of emptiness, worthlessness, and lack of control as a result of losing Catherine physically. He can’t bare to be without her so he requests that her spirit haunts him; for the next eighteen years. Loneliness motivates one to restore the connections we need to survive. Since early history, humans have survived and prospered through banding together in order to provide mutual protection and assistance. Loneliness may trigger alcoholism as it did with Hindley following his wife’s death and poor immune functioning as it did with Edgar Linton following his wife, Catherine’s, death. Heathcliff suffered from significantly higher levels of stress hormones in the way he treated other protagonists in the classic novel; Cathy, Nelly, Linton, and Hareton.