Heathcliff: A Victim of Villainry

Heathcliff: A Victim of Villainy

In "Wuthering Heights," we see tragedies follow one by one, most of which are focused around Heathcliff, the antihero of the novel. After the troubled childhood Heathcliff goes through, he becomes embittered towards the world and loses interest in everything but Catherine Earnshaw -his childhood sweetheart whom he had instantly fallen in love with.--and revenge upon anyone who had tried to keep them apart.

The novel begins with a few short introduction chapters which Bronte had most likely used to illustrate how incompetent the character of Lockwood was, and to foreshadow what was to come in later chapters. After these, it begins to immediately demonstrate to the reader the plight of Heathcliff's childhood and how hard a time he had had of it. The very first time that Heathcliff is mentioned, he is described as "A dirty, ragged, black-haired child, big enough both to walk and talk..." [Wuthering Heights, Chapter 4] and is referred to as "It." Mr. Earnshaw claimed to have found him starving, homeless, and abandoned on his trip to Liverpool. This sounds incredulous to say the least, considering that Mr. Earnshaw had made the trip on several other occasions without bringing back any 'surprises', and that the cities of London at the time were practically crawling with Orphans. While it never outright states so within the novel, it appears as if Heathcliff is in fact Mr. Earnshaw's illegitimate child. If this was the case, it would also provide an explanation why Catherine and Heathcliff did not express their mutual passion for another in a physical way--while at the time marrying your cousin was an accepted practice, relationships with a half-sibling were highly frowned upon.

As Heathcliff aged, his love for Catherine--first shown on the night of Mr. Earnshaws death when only the two of them can comfort each other--blossomed and bloomed not into the rose which would have been expected from such a strong, passionate love, but into the twisted thorn bush of Heathcliff's dark revenge. After Mr. Earnshaws death Catherine's elder brother, Hindley, became the new proprietor of Wuthering Heights. Under Hindley's guiding hand, Heathcliff was sent out into the fields with the servants and was no longer aloud to be educated along with Catherine. This was the first time that the two of them were separated, and it later led to Heathcliff's wreaking his revenge upon Hindley by first driving him to drink, taking his land with gambling debts, and corrupting his son Hareton in the same way that Hindley had done to Heathcliff, but to an exaggerated degree. The next "victim" of Heathcliff's revenge was Edgar Linton.

Once Heathcliff began working in the field, Hindley saw to it that his sister would never lower herself and take an orphan gypsy boy as a husband. He does this by seeing to it that Catherine spends as much time with Edgar and Isabella Linton as possible. With them, she becomes even more spoiled then she had been and escalated from 'prissy' to being an all out brat. She soon after decides to marry Edgar instead of staying with Heathcliff