The Faces of Wuthering Heights

Heathcliff is just using her in his quest for revenge, and she ruins her life by falling in love with him. Yet, she marries him, for his money and his position in society. We get the feeling they would have all been better off if they had never seen Wuthering Heights, but they brought their own demons to the house, and only two of them could grow enough to let them go, and get on with their lives. She even agrees that if he was ugly and poor, she might have felt sorry for him, but certainly never married him. The son has always hated him, and treated him very badly. The people do not get along, and there are no genteel good manners or kind spirits. Lockwood, says, she was beautiful, but it was only skin deep, at least at the beginning of the novel, but she is one of only two characters that actually changes and grows by the end. fortunately for my susceptible heart, the only sentiment they evinced hovered between scorn, and a kind of desperation, singularly unnatural to be detected there" (Bronte Chapter 2). Instead of letting the love change him, he reverted to his old ways. He is afraid of fighting Heathcliff, and Catherine taunts him about it. Lockwood says early in the book, "Here is the consequence of being buried alive: she has thrown herself away upon that boor from sheer ignorance that better individuals existed!" (Bronte Chapter 2). Heathcliff married Heathcliff's son, but she was the child of Catherine, and she had some of her mother's selfishness and bitterness. Many of the characters called her "wild" and "evil," and her daughter seems to have inherited some of her mother's attributes.