Two kinds of love found in Wuthering Heights are more proof that the novel uses Romantic ideas to deny the values of Romanticism. I will focus upon the two truest types of love in the novel, that of Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff and that of Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw. The first will be passionate love, the second stable love.
The first, with all its tumult and chaos, was a clear favorite of the Romantics. Bronte, however, creates a terrible, destructive love shared by Catherine and Heathcliff. One of the most significant scenes in their relationship--that in which Catherine says, not knowing that Heathcliff is listening, " 'I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff, now; so he shall never know how I love him" (Bronte 80)--causes Heathcliff to run away for three years to seek his fortune. When he returns, Catherine is married to Edgar, dashing all of Heathcliff's dreams and destroying him. A Romantic would love it if some twist of cruel, cruel fate--the need for money to save the family homestead, a rape resulting in a pregnancy, a death--had caused the marriage, but the truth as Bronte tells it is that Catherine is simply too ambitious to follow her heart and too selfish to realize what she has done. In their final scene together, Heathcliff and Catherine share a frenzied embrace before Catherine's husband Linton comes. The love here is violent, destructive. Catherine rips out Heathcliff's hair. Heathcliff holds the fainted Catherine and "he gnashed at me (Nelly), and foamed like a mad dog, and gathered her to him with greedy jealousy" (Bronte 160). Bronte takes the passion of their love to an illogical extreme, where the two lovers cause each other pain in their agitation to be nearer one another.
Catherine Linton and Hareton, however, have a normal, healthy love. It is begun with teasing and ends in a quiet passion. They walk together in the moonlight (unlike Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff, who walk on the moors in stormy weather, as Ms. Oates noted (Oates 4)) and share sweet kisses. Their love creates the renewal at the end of the story, washing away all of the pain and sin of past generations. They even choose to move away from Wuthering Heights--the symbol of chaos--to Thrushcross Grange, where order prevails.
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