found some notes I took while watching a Wuthering Heights adaptation and one just says "Book Cathy could not be slut shamed. She did not care."
Catherine is slut-shamed by Joseph in the book and this is how it goes:
My assumption is that she could care a bit as an unmarried teen girl (which is when this scene takes place) but after Heathcliff’s return as a rich man she stopped caring for the most part.
“Catherine Earnshaw - Heathcliff - Linton” are the arc words of Wuthering Heights. They are the cement the book is built on. They are almost a prophecy.
And they are the equivalent of this:
So I was watching this nice review of Wuthering Heights and the reviewer doesn’t believe that Cathy loved Heathcliff. According to her she only loved that he loved her.
And on Twitter people comment how Süleyman and Hürrem didn’t actually love each other under every Sürrem edit.
What are we doing here?
I really am trying to prove that Ibrahim loved Nigar (in his own way) in a universe where people doubt that Cathy loved Heathcliff (she literally died due to being separated from him) or that Süleyman and Hürrem loved each other (just… the whole show). I am in a losing battle.
People have such a narrow definition of “love”.
A good and passionate video:
This paragraph where Heathcliff says goodbye to Cathy's corpse:
He did not omit to avail himself of the opportunity, cautiously and briefly-too cautiously to betray his presence by the slightest noise. Indeed, I shouldn't have discovered that he had been there, except for the disarrangement of the drapery about the corpse's face, and for observing on the floor a curl of light hair, fastened with a silver thread, which, on examination, I ascertained to have been taken from a locket hung round Catherine's neck. Heathcliff had opened the trinket and cast out its contents, replacing them by a black lock of his own. I twisted the two, and enclosed them together.
The way this paragraph simplifies the entire story down to its bare bones. Heathcliff being so obsessive that he replaces Edgar's lock of hair with his own, in an attempt to erase Edgar from Cathy's life (or death). Cathy having a lock of Edgar's hair in her locket in the first place, in an attempt to erase her association with Heathcliff and live a normal life with her husband. Nelly twisting the locks together, because Cathy is forever intertwined with both of them no matter how much anyone tries to change that.
Then of course there's the visual contrast of the two locks of hair! Edgar's blonde hair intertwined with Heathcliff's dark hair! Edgar being gentlemanly, cordial, nonthreatening; Heathcliff being ill-mannered, intense, violent! The blond gentleman from a reputable family that by all rational means she should want to marry, versus her irrational love for the dark-haired nobody her father found on the streets!
It's also worth noting that Nelly twisting the strands together could be just as presumptuous as Heathcliff switching them. We see the story from Nelly's perspective, so it's easy for us to agree that Cathy would want both strands in her locket. But given how Cathy spoke of her love for Heathcliff in the past, what if she would've only wanted his hair in her locket? What if she was completely over Heathcliff and only wanted Edgar's?
This shows that both Heathcliff and Nelly were doing what the thought Cathy would want. Yes, Heathcliff was doing this out of his own selfishness, but he also believes that Cathy loves him far more than she lets on. This is an example of them both trying to define Cathy's love on her behalf, deciding on her behalf how much she loves or doesn't love Edgar and Heathcliff. Which of course Heathcliff does this blatantly throughout the book, but it's interesting to see that, in much more subtle ways, everyone else in the story is doing it too.
On Heathcliff’s presumptuousness regarding his knowledge of what others (and especially Cathy) feel and think:
(From Graeme Tytler’s essay “The Parameters of Reason in Wuthering Heights”)
OP I would recommend Tytler’s essays to you. I think they might be your jam. He examines Cathy and Heathcliff as two separate human individuals who are often wrong about each other rather than as twin souls who can basically telepathize. He brings a much-needed empiricist way of reading to Wuthering Heights criticism. Many of his essays on Wuthering Heights (including the one above) are in a collection called Facets of Wuthering Heights but he is continuing to publish new essays on the book every year.
I once read a post (I think it was on here, I really don’t remember, sorry) that said:
“Wuthering Heights is about what Heathcliff and Cathy are to each other and the answer is more painful than words can express”.
I think this is a beautiful way of putting it (and I think the original sentence was much more beautiful, I am paraphrasing it) and it has been haunting me ever since I read it.
But is it true? I think the context was that Heathcliff was Cathy’s biological brother in this poster’s view. And I truly love the above sentence so much that I want to momentarily believe in this theory that I usually don’t favor.
(As an aside, Wuthering Heights is about two things: Heathcliff and Cathy’s bond and the more conventional revenge plot motivated by that bond. Heathcliff being Mr. Earnshaw’s son is detrimental to the latter aspect of the story in my view. My problem is not so much with Cathcliff being incestuous as much as with this rendering Heathcliff’s revenge on the social forces which separated them moot).
But even if Heathcliff and Cathy are biologically related, does that inherently make “what they are to each other” “painful”? They are not Oedipus and Jocasta, having four children and ruling a kingdom together. Their relationship is sexless enough that many critics view it as a wholly asexual relationship. I don’t agree that it is asexual but I do think that it was unconsummated. And frankly, Cathy and Heathcliff (attempt to) devour their own children and defeat death to be able to embrace each other again, I don’t think that they would care about incest that much. What makes Oedipus so painful is that Oedipus and Jocasta care.
Anyway, I love the sentence. I absolutely love it conceptually. But is it applicable to Wuthering Heights?
The person who came up with the sentence, I truly genuinely don’t remember who you are. If you see this post, feel free to reclaim your sentence and to explain it and to argue with me.
We need an American Girl doll who stays at Thrushcross Grange for five weeks and returns a snob
One thing about upstart fictional men is that they will often be obsessed with an upper class woman who symbolizes social mobility to them: Gatsby and Daisy, Pip and Estella, Adnan and Belkıs (characters from the Turkish novel Üç İstanbul), an example I won’t give…
Heathcliff and Catherine break the mould: Heathcliff is obsessed with social mobility and revenge because he already loves Cathy rather than loving her because he wants social mobility.
Edit: Now that I think about it, we do first see Heathcliff being greedy and manipulative in a context unrelated to Catherine:
I still think he wouldn’t care that much about social mobility if it weren’t for him losing Cathy though.
(Fritz Eichenberg’s illustration of Catherine Earnshaw)
(“Christina’s World” by Andrew Wyeth)
“I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”
(Chapter 9, Wuthering Heights)
“But, supposing at twelve years old I had been wrenched from the Heights, and every early association, and my all in all, as Heathcliff was at that time, and been converted at a stroke into Mrs. Linton, the lady of Thrushcross Grange, and the wife of a stranger: an exile, and outcast, thenceforth, from what had been my world.”
(Chapter 12, Wuthering Heights)
Forgive me if I have said this before, but in my heart the theory that Cathy's ghost stops Heathcliff's hand when he's about to try and destroy the budding relationship between Cathy and Hareton is related to that promise she extracted from him when they were children that he wouldn't kill any other lapwings. I have no proof, but no doubts either.
I think that the start of Chapter 8 is the ideal point for adaptations to age Heathcliff and Cathy up to their adult actors. They are decidedly children having a “middle school drama” amidst the Christmas celebrations in Chapter 7, whereas in Chapter 8 we are in the middle of a love triangle and there is talk of marriage. There is a three-year time jump in-between too. It really is the ideal and obvious point to age them up, but no adaptation except the 1978 BBC series chooses that point for some reason.
I have always found the point where the 1995 radio drama chose to age them up to be funny: In that adaptation they are voiced by children when Hindley demotes Heathcliff’s status after Mr. Earnshaw’s funeral and they are played by adults during their excursion to Thrushcross Grange, when there are six weeks at most between the two events.
But I think there might be an “accidental genius” to this choice too. I have always read the bulldog bite Catherine Earnshaw suffers at the age of 12 and which changes the course of her life to be a stand-in for menarche. In a way their excursion to Thrushcross Grange is an ugly “rite of passage”, so maybe there is some sense to aging them up at that point. Of course the radio adaptation doesn’t age them up after the bulldog bite, they are played by adults from the start of the scene, but still.
My vampiric girls
“The two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and fearful picture. Well might Catherine deem that heaven would be a land of exile to her, unless with her mortal body she cast away her moral character also. Her present countenance had a wild vindictiveness in its white cheek, and a bloodless lip and scintillating eye; and she retained in her closed fingers a portion of the locks she had been grasping. As to her companion, while raising himself with one hand, he had taken her arm with the other; and so inadequate was his stock of gentleness to the requirements of her condition, that on his letting go I saw four distinct impressions left blue in the colourless skin.”
(Wuthering Heights, Chapter 15)
“She would notice some things in Nihal that would wake a fear in her heart. The child had strange contradictions that eluded explanation. From her father to the rest of the household, every interaction, on any occasion, was ruled by pity, and this pitying love woke an even greater fragility, an even greater sensitivity in a child whose nerves were already sick with a congenital weakness. This enveloped her in an air of affliction and it was as if a poisonous breath spread from this air that would not kill, but would forever wither this delicate flower. For this reason, there was in Nihal the orphan’s burden of the sense of pity that she drank drop by drop from everyone’s eyes. It is possible this would not have attracted so much attention if it were not accompanied by certain contradictions. These contradictions surrounded her affliction in an even more clearly evident circle. She had such spoiled ways that it made one think Nihal had suddenly become a different child. Especially towards her father, she sometimes became a few years younger, climbed on his knees and wanted to kiss his lips under his beard, where the hairs wouldn’t scratch. As if being loved as much as she was did not satisfy her soul, she would become a pestering child in order to be loved even more. To stay somewhere for more than five minutes, to be entertained by something for more than five minutes, were not things expected from Nihal, who always seemed to be trying to escape a constant unease, a secret, soul-crushing, deep heartache.”
(Aşk-ı Memnu, Chapter 3)
There is a scene in Episode 79 where Ibrahim calls Esmanur “beautiful” four separate times in half a minute. I am not joking. That baby wouldn’t wear anything but pink and would play with the Ottoman equivalent of Barbies and would be spoiled rotten if her father raised her, no question.
Instead she learned to fish with her uncle and probably ran wild.
Reverse Catherine Earnshaw
I wonder how much the Gimmerton society knows about the Cathy and Heathcliff relationship. Zillah doesn’t seem to know about it, but she is pointedly someone Nelly didn’t know previously, she might be a newcomer to the area.
There is this enigmatic exchange between Nelly and Mr. Kenneth when Cathy gets sick:
This is also relevant to know since it would determine the validity of the little shepherd boy seeing “Heathcliff and a woman” at the very end:
I think most of the townspeople probably know all about it tbh (which doesn’t necessarily mean that the ghosts aren’t real). They are good enough at gossiping to spread the news of Heathcliff and Isabella’s elopement in just one morning:
(In light of the recent debate, “nob’dy could mistake him besides” is relevant, Heathcliff looks different from everyone).
It shouldn’t be that hard to put two and two together and work out the Cathy and Heathcliff relationship. And they presumably saw them running around as children too.
Another intriguing question is how much Edgar understood the Cathcliff relationship to have a romantic dimension before Heathcliff’s return as a rich man, but that’s another topic entirely.
They’re haunting the moors together
I love this. I love how Cathy looks both creepy and pretty. I love how they kind of look alike while still obviously being ethnically different from each other. And this is roughly how I imagine Heathcliff to look like.
Bravo!
This brilliant (pun intended) post by @artemideaddams comparing Lila Cerullo and Catherine Earnshaw also made me think of how complicated it is to determine whether Heathcliff or Catherine is the truly socially advantaged one in Wuthering Heights.
On the one hand Heathcliff is the one denied an education and thus ripped apart from his childhood friend like Lila. But on the other hand Heathcliff can leave Yorkshire and make something of himself like Lenu did (though in Heathcliff’s case it is because he is a man). Whereas Catherine Earnshaw probably never ever went beyond Gimmerton, just like Lila never left Napoli (until presumably at the very end of the series).
She is disappearead and/or dead before the beginning of the book, but she still is the character that everyone remember more and focus on. Even if it's debatable if she's the "actual" main character or not.
The narrator starts the story when she was about five or six years old. She was a "bad child". She is described as having an incredible charisma and a bad attitude since her childhood. She used to act like a spoiled queen even if no one really ever spoiled her. She can be incredibly petty and say means things to hurt others people when she herself is hurt, but she is also capable of feeling an intense and absolute attachment toward the people she loves. She has a childhood friend with whom she will have an almost codependent and often conflictual relationship for all her life. During their childhood, she was the dominant one in this relationship, and the other was the follower. Every boy who used to have a crush on her when she was a young girl will be either obsessed or in love with her for all his life.
She grows up in an abusive home. Her brother becomes an addict. She isn't her father's favourite child. She is perfectly aware of the perceptions that other people have of her and she uses this to her advantage. She can changes her personality according to the person she has in front, but she always maintains a very strong presence. She can be extremely charming but also extremely dislakeable. She can be selfish but without always realizing it.
She marries a man in her teens because she wants to escape her family's life and for economic reason. The choice to marry is her own but she is pressured to do so by external factors and a lack of alternative. The desire to becomes rich, not only for her own but also for helping someone else, is a big factor in her accepting the proposal. She becomes unhappy in the marriage. Her childhood's friend goes to another city and makes a good fortune outside the place in which they grew up. She, on the other hand, will never go outside the place where she is born. It's a difficult place who is not be "pretty" in the eyes of foreigners, but it's almost a character in itself in the novel. She in some ways is treated by the narrative as a living personification of this place. After her death/disappeareance, it's seem that the place have either eaten her or made her a part of itself.
She has a daughter who inhereted all her formidables traits but not her flaws. She will never see this daughter grows up. This daughter is important from a narrative prespective, and she's frequentely described by the narrator as a flawless and perfect little girl. The narrator feels some sort of maternal feelings for said daughter despite not being related to her by blood. The little girl's father adores his daughter too. He probably love the character about whom I am talking about more than how much she loves him- even if it's not correct to say that she doesn't love him at all, because she likes him and she obviously cares about him, but their relationship is based on the fact that he adores her and she finds him not only likeable but also useful.
During her pregnancy, she has a moment in which she seems to lose control of herself and she tell to the narrator a confusing monologue that the narrator interpreted as the prove that she had lost her mind, but maybe they are the proves that she, and only she, is capable of recognizing the depth and the complexity of the situation more than all the others characters- like the prophets in ancient myths that can sees and tell the truth only in their apparent madness.
She has always had a mystical aurea around her, something that makes people obsessed, repulsed or charmed by her. This is even more evident now that she is not here anymore, because it's not really clear if she's in the realm of the dead, or still in ours world, in some places or forms. Her childhood's friend is 100% sure that she is still around in some way. Either half of the book or the narration in itself is a desperate call for her to makes an appareance.
At the end, she may gives a sign of her presence- but it's a sign that doesn't answer to any question, but makes all the situation even more misterious.
Am I speaking about Lila Cerullo of My Brilliant Friend or about the most famous and iconic female character of Wuthering Heights?
