The Two Faces of Love in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

The character of Catherine Earnshaw in Emily Brontë’s novel struggles against misinterpretations of her two loves. It is as though she draws a Kantian distinction between the empirical and the transcendental. Where Heathcliff is the transcendental face of love, Linton is its empirical face. Heathcliff and Catherine are each other’s first as well as last love: this permanence makes it difficult to conceive a difference between the object of love and love itself. Nothing empirical can disturb their love, and Catherine sets out to demonstrate its transcendental status by removing what might be taken for its empirical foundations. She maltreats Heathcliff. She marries Linton. Emily Brontë breaks love down into two parts. In being removed from the moderating effect of its complement, each part shows up in extreme behaviour. Yet in being isolated they shed light on the general experience of love, on the passion and trust that are reducible neither to the empirical nor the transcendental.