Bronte’s hero/villan, Heathcliff, is clearly as much a product of the storm, as the house he occupies. Lockward says of him: “He is a dark skinned gypsy”. His childhood experiences have turned him into the monster he becomes as an adult. Unlike conventional Victorians, his origins are unknown, other than that he was a parentless gypsy boy found wandering in the streets by Mr Earnshaw, who adopts him and takes him to Wuthering Heights where he grows up with Mr Earnshaw’s children Catherine and Hindley. However, Heathcliff’s happiness, and therefore goodness, are destroyed by his cruel treatment at the hands of Hindley who after Mr Earnshaw’s death, abuses him and treats him like a servant. Catherine is his only means of pleasure in this terrible environment. Both children are wild and free like the moors and cliffs where they play together. If Heathcliff and Catherine had been allowed to grow up and marry each other, this story would not have been a gothic romance.
However, fate intervenes. After spending 5 weeks at Thrushcross Grange recovering from a dog bite Catherine returns to Wuthering Heights a changed person. She is no longer wild, free, and unconventional like Heathcliff, but has become a “Victorian lady”. She is blinded by prejudice towards people who are beneath her, which is how she now sees Heathcliff. She says to Nelly: “It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now; so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he’s handsome Nelly, but because he’s more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, His and mine are the same, and Linton’s is as different as a moon beam from lightening, or frost from fire”.
It is the loss of Catherine that turns Heathcliff into a monstrous villain, shunned by, and shunning society. In rejecting Heathcliff, and choosing to marry Edgar Linton, Catherine has chosen a status that is acceptable in conventional society. This leaves her soul mate Heathcliff alone.
Eventually, Heathcliff leaves Wuthering Heights in despair. When he returns, having made a fortune, the spirit of revenge drives him. He torments the lives of Catherine, her new husband Linton, Hindley, and the generations that follow. He wants them to suffer for the pain and suffering that he has experienced. He says to Catherine “I want you to be aware that I know you have treated me infernally!” In chapter 13 he says: “I have no pity! I have no pity! The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails…and I grind with greater energy, in proportion to the increase of pain.”
Such a monstrous statement is typical of the hero in the gothic romance. We hope that he could become less savage, but Heathcliff does not reform. Bronte almost seems to be testing us to see how many times we can witness his violence and cruelty and still hope to find good quantities in his character. But Heathcliff now embodies the devil and not the characteristics of a romantic hero. His later abuse of Isabella is purely sadistic. He amuses himself by seeing how much pain she can withstand.
In conventional society, we can easily sympathise with Heathcliff when he is a powerless child. But he becomes a villain when he acquires power and returns to Wuthering Heights with money and the appearance of a gentleman. This corresponds with the way the Victorian upper classes felt toward the lower classes. They felt sorry for them as long as they were miserable, but were afraid of them if they escaped their misery and acquired power or wealth.
Heathcliff’s evil has lead to his isolation in life, Catherine states “You have nobody to love you and, however miserable you make us we shall still have to revenge of thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery…you are miserable, like the devil, and envious like him”.
Prior to his death, when Heathcliff gets the sexton to remove the earth from the coffin and open it, he is symbolically trying to re-capture Catherine. His wanting to rejoin Catherine helps to explain most of his actions including his attempts to seize power over everyone associated with Catherine. He says “When I’m laid there…I’ll have made it so and then by the time Linton gets to us he’ll not know which is which”.
It seems that in this extreme scene when he opens the coffin, he realises that her corpse is a thing that refers to her but not the woman herself. He realises at last that he will never get through to her real presence, to the woman herself, by acquiring and ruining the people and possessions associated with her. This understanding brings Heathcliff a new tranquillity, and from this point on he begins to lose his interest in destruction.
When Heathcliff dies, his death is presented as the ultimate fulfilment of his wish not to be alone but to become one with Catherine. It is also a return to innocence which he had known with Catherine as a child. He is happy now because he is united with Catherine, the soul -mate he once had. The two still haunt the moors where they once played endlessly.
A fitting end to a Gothic tale.