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In Wuthering Heights the dominant female spirit is Catherine, the daughter of Mr.

and
Mrs. Earnshaw, the sister of Hindley, later the wife of Edgar Linton and since she met Heathcliff,
her lover, he is the one who charge her soul hunger. She does not love Heathcliff with a
passionate love, romantic one, between them there is not even a physical attraction, they
somehow indentify with each other: “Without Heathcliff" she says "the universe would turn to a
mighty stranger”[…]” “Nelly, I am Heathcliff”.

As we go through the novel we will see that Catherine has a double personality, her
feelings, ideals, love are split: when she is with Heathcliff she becomes wild as him, she returns
to her wild self and when she is with the Lintons she is a true lady that can keep up the
environment very easy. After her return from the Thrushcross Grange she started to worry about
how people will see her and talk about her, she told Nelly that she wanted to be “the greatest
lady in the neighborhood", Catherine also confesses to Miss Dean that her marriage to Heathcliff
would degrade her. When she marries Edgar Linton her dual personality reaches a crisis point,
she betrays her nature.

Catherine’s marriage to Edgar is her mistake because human nature cannot be denied,
you can pretend to be someone else, a denial of your true nature will eat you from the inside.
Rejecting Heathcliff she rejects herself. She was truly conscious that marrying Edgar was an
error: “I'm convinced I'm wrong - I've no more business to marry Edgar than I have to be in
heaven”. In the delirium she suffers before death, she longs for that freedom-: "I wish I were a
girl again, half savage, hardy and free." However, it is then too late.

When Heathcliff returns from an absence of three years, her true nature arouses creating a
real cataclysm. A great scene in the book is where Catherine orders two tables: one for her and
Heathcliff and one for Edgar and Isabella, symbolizing the gulf between them and the fact that
Catherine occupied an unnatural position in this civilized world. “Set two tables here, Ellen: one
for your master [Edgar] and Miss Isabella, being gentry; the other for Heathcliff and myself,
being of the lower orders.”

One of the most important features in Catherine’s character is that she wanted to have
both Heathcliff and Edgar. She is naive because she believes that her marriage will actually
advance her relationship with Heathcliff.
Catherine’s illness was predictable because she cut with her own hands her oxygen
supplies, refusing to breathe wild natural air, proper to her status, and also because of her move
from the Heights to the Grange, running from her true nature to the outdoor life. In death, she
had returned to nature and regained her freedom, the dire consequences of her failure to remain
loyal to her true self.

If Catherine accepted her wild nature and also accepted Heathcliff, her death wouldn’t be
so premature; she would have found her true meaning and all the disasters produced during the
novel would be dimmed. However, the novel would not have this success and wouldn’t deliver
the right message.

We can find Catherine’s character in nowadays life, young woman deny their true nature
wanting to have more than they are, becoming more than they are and in the end finding that
their decision were not the right one and ending their life in sadness and unfulfilled.

"The storm came rattling over the Heights in full fury. There was a violent wind as well
as thunder."

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