Narcissistic Love I: Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is an auto-erotic love story. The love between Catherine and Heathcliff, which is epitomized by Catherine’s ‘I am Heathcliff’ comment, involves a sort of narcissistic identification (or mirroring). Catherine feels as though she is Heathcliff; to her, they are two bodies with one spirit, and they cannot be separated by distance or death (she even haunts Heathcliff in the afterlife). ‘I am Heathcliff’ is an extreme expression of love (‘I am you’ trumps ‘I love you’), but it is not, as one might assume, an expression of parity. It is not simply I equal Heathcliff. There is also a crucial sense of superiority and inferiority toward each other — which, as we will see, transforms them both. But first, some backstory:

Catherine and Heathcliff grow up in the same household. Catherine’s father, Mr Earnshaw, ‘adopts’ Heathcliff after discovering him somewhere between Wuthering Heights and Liverpool. Although Heathcliff is, quite literally, wild and unruly, Mr Earnshaw indulges him, neglecting Catherine and her brother, Hindley. Despite their superficial differences, Catherine and Heathcliff grow close — especially after the passing of Catherine’s father. Together, they behave like two little wildling boys, roaming the moorlands, and ‘growing more reckless daily’. When the nearby Lintons take Catherine in as a ward, Heathcliff is left alone with Hindley — who severely mistreats him. As the servant Nelly observes, ‘if he were careless and uncared for before Catherine’s absence, he had been ten times more so since’. When Catherine eventually returns, she finds Heathcliff has visibly regressed (he is unwashed and much wilder in temperament), while she herself has ascended. The Lintons, who belong to a higher class than the Earnshaws, have a civilising effect on her. Her brother Hindley barely recognises this new Catherine: ‘Why, Cathy, you are quite a beauty! I should scarcely have known you: you look like a lady now’. Eventually, the Linton heir, Edgar, proposes to Catherine. She accepts but seeks reassurance about her decision from Nelly. It is in this conversation that she first admits she loves Heathcliff:

I’ve no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if [Hindley] 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: 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 moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire

All at once, she feels all three states of relation: Superiority: it would ‘degrade’ Catherine to marry Heathcliff; inferiority: he is ‘more’ her than she is; and equality: their souls are made of the ‘same’ stuff. This triptych relation transforms Catherine and Heathcliff from proximate beasts into more interesting and agreeable versions of themselves. This is because they are continuously trying to account for these three contradictory feelings — not all of which are positive. As Catherine puts it, her love for Heathcliff is a ‘source of little visible delight’: ‘He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being’. Catherine is intimately aware of Heathcliff’s flaws because they are also her own. To account for these flaws, Catherine must surpass herself, and when she does, Heathcliff is compelled to catch up— not out of envy: ‘the notion of envying Catherine was incomprehensible to him’, but in order to feel worthy of her.

Early in the novel, it is Heathcliff who has a ‘sense of superiority, instilled into him by the favours of old Mr. Earnshaw’. After Mr. Earnshaw passes, the dynamic between Heathcliff and Catherine switches. When Catherine first meets the Lintons, Heathcliff comment on how her ‘enchanting face’ kindles ‘a spark of spirit in the vacant blue eyes of the Lintons’ (the eyes are crucial to the sense of identity in Wuthering Heights): ‘I saw they were full of stupid admiration; she is so immeasurably superior to them — to everybody on earth, is she not, Nelly?’. When Catherine returns from the Lintons, she returns far more refined. She drops her boyish deportment, and to Nelly’s consternation, she begins to act with an aristocratic conceit. The Lintons civilise her — which is another way of saying they feminise her. This transformation leads her away from Heathcliff and forces her to adopt a ‘double character’:

In the place where she heard Heathcliff termed a ‘vulgar young ruffian,’ and ‘worse than a brute,’ she took care not to act like him; but at home she had small inclination to practise politeness that would only be laughed at, and restrain an unruly nature when it would bring her neither credit nor praise

Catherine also becomes more critical of Heathcliff, judging his company and his hygiene. When Heathcliff exclaims in ‘much agitation’ that she never used to complain about his company, Catherine responds: ‘It’s no company at all, when people know nothing and say nothing’. It is not that she is bored of Heathcliff, it is that she is as familiar with him as she is herself; being with Heathcliff is like being by herself: it is ‘no company at all’. Catherine is made conscious of this familiarity through her exposure to the Lintons. At this point in their relationship, Heathcliff’s ‘sense of superiority’ has ‘faded away’, and he struggles ‘to keep up an equality with Catherine’.

Heathcliff’s initial response to this criticism is prideful spite:

personal appearance sympathised with mental deterioration: he acquired a slouching gait and ignoble look; his naturally reserved disposition was exaggerated into an almost idiotic excess of unsociable moroseness; and he took a grim pleasure, apparently, in exciting the aversion rather than the esteem of his few acquaintance

This then turns into critical self-consciousness. Heathcliff compares himself to the dainty ‘doll’, Edgar Linton, with his ‘great blue eyes and even forehead’. Eventually, he asks Nelly to make him look ‘decent’ and ‘good’. What follows is an intimate appraisal of Heathcliff’s characteristics; or rather, how his character is affecting his appearance:

Come to the [mirror], and I’ll let you see what you should wish. Do you mark those two lines between your eyes; and those thick brows, that, instead of rising arched, sink in the middle; and that couple of black fiends, so deeply buried, who never open their windows boldly, but lurk glinting under them, like devil’s spies? Wish and learn to smooth away the surly wrinkles, to raise your lids frankly, and change the fiends to confident, innocent angels, suspecting and doubting nothing, and always seeing friends where they are not sure of foes

Heathcliff’s orbital area, and even his expression, is a demonstration of gender dimorphism. What Nelly does is try to coax out a more agreeable, feminised countenance; one with open, neotonous lids and a creaseless brow.

When Heathcliff overhears Catherine saying, ‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff’, he immediately leaves the Earnshaw estate. Three years later, he returns a transformed man:

Now, fully revealed by the fire and candlelight, I was amazed, more than ever, to behold the transformation of Heathcliff. He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man; beside whom [Edgar] seemed quite slender and youth-like. His upright carriage suggested the idea of his having been in the army. His countenance was much older in expression and decision of feature than Mr. Linton’s; it looked intelligent, and retained no marks of former degradation. A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified: quite divested of roughness, though stern for grace

This is basically Beauty and the Beast. Heathcliff transforms himself from an aggressive, proud and anti-social ‘brute’, into a upright man with the deportment of a ‘born and bred gentleman’. We never find out how Heathcliff changes his lot, but we do know why he does; it is for Catherine: ‘I’ve fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice; and you must forgive me, for I struggled only for you!’. When popular psychologist Jordan Peterson says, ‘Men use the image of female perfection to motivate themselves’, this is what he is talking about.

Crucially, however, Heathcliff does not lose all of his brutish traits: ‘A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire’. In contrast to the tame Lintons, Heathcliff retains elements of his hyper-masculinity, which Nelly recognises in his ‘deep-set and singular’ eyes. According to Catherine, Heathcliff remains an ‘unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone’. Catherine says this to Isabella Linton (Edgar’s sister) to try to dissuade her from pursuing Heathcliff romantically. It is usually interpreted as jealous meddling, but, in her own words, Catherine is not envious of Isabella, even with her good looks and ‘dainty elegance’. When Heathcliff accuses Catherine of jealousy, she says, ‘I’m not jealous of you […] I’m jealous for you’. Once again, the notion of envying one another is incomprehensible to Catherine and Heathcliff. But there is also a sense in which Catherine actually admires Heathcliff’s shortcomings. Unlike Catherine, who assimilates well with the Lintons, Heathcliff stays true to their shared nature. Despite his improvements, he remains a ‘wolfish man’. If Catherine is jealous of anything, it is that Heathcliff is more her than she is.

Catherine and Heathcliff’s love is a force of nature. It cannot be compared to others; even that of Catherine and her husband Edgar. According to Heathcliff,

If [Edgar] loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have: the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough as her whole affection be monopolised by him

Their love is this intense for two reasons: their narcissistic mirroring and the lack of consummation. It remains a suspended desire, sublimated by Heathcliff into a vitalizing force, transforming him from an orphan beast to the owner of Wuthering Heights and the Linton’s Thrushcross Grange. If Catherine chose Heathcliff, their love would surely have suffered. As Anne Carson writes in Eros the Bittersweet, ‘The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting’. Catherine’s death makes their love story a tragedy, but it also makes it ideal (in both senses of the word). If consummation is completion, Catherine and Heathcliff are never fully complete.

It is like Plato’s account of love as a pursuit of wholeness. According to this account: ‘people were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost’. Love is not the acquisition, it is the pursuit. Tragically, even in death, Heathcliff is in pursuit of his other half:

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. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. 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!