Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Isolation

This post contains spoilers.

My general commentary on this book is here.

On one level, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a case study on abusive people and their methods. The story’s main character is Heathcliff, who is an abusive man. While he perpetuates physical violence against his targets, his greatest harm might be psychological. He practices both emotional and verbal abuse. Moreover, he plans his cruelty and concocts elaborate schemes that run on for years with a goal of ruining people’s lives. 

One component to his abuse is the way in which he isolates people. Almost everyone who Heathcliff harms is, through his machinations, isolated from people who might protect or support him.  At one point, through complex scheming, Heathcliff manages to reduce Catherine the Younger to the status of a near vassal. He forces her out of her own home and requires her to move to Wuthering Heights, where he can control and mistreat her. Nelly describes the scene when she is forced to accompany him to her imprisonment. 

"He signed her to precede him; and casting back a look that cut my heart, she obeyed.   I watched them, from the window, walk down the garden.   Heathcliff fixed Catherine’s arm under his: though she disputed the act at first evidently; and with rapid strides he hurried her into the alley, whose trees concealed them."

I find the above to be an extremely powerful passage that symbolically describes the isolating process where Catherine the Younger is “hurried” into an alley of concealing trees. 

Heathcliff manages to isolate many other targets. 

When Isabella Linton makes the catastrophic decision to marry him, she is cut off from her family. When he brings her to Wuthering Heights, she is put into the position of a near prisoner. Heathcliff uses this opportunity to treat her with great cruelty. 

At one point in the story, Heathcliff demands that his son, Linton, come to live with him. In the process, Linton is isolated from his uncle and cousin who would have shown him compassion. Subsequently, Heathcliff introduces him to a cold existence that is completely manipulated by his father. 

Likewise, upon the death of Hindley Earnshaw, Heathcliff maneuvers to become the de facto guardian of Hindley’s son, Hareton. Under Heathcliff’s control, Hareton is raised to be illiterate and uncultured.

Both of these children, isolated by Heathcliff, are molded in ways that are harmful to them. Furthermore, Heathcliff attempts to turn them into tools to be used to harm others. 

Catherine the elder, though not really a victim and a generally unsympathetic character herself, is in the end destroyed by her relationship to Heathcliff. Her obsessive connection with him isolates her from any genuine connection with anyone else, including her own husband.

The pattern is consistent throughout the narrative. Heathcliff maneuvers again and again to gain physical and legal control of people. He keeps them as near prisoners or slaves at Wuthering Heights, and he treats them in horrible ways. He typically isolates his targets as a prelude to his abuse. 

When Catherine the Younger establishes a relationship with Hindley, the couple succeeds in breaking out of the isolation imposed by Heathcliff. This is the turning point in the story and seems to be a harbinger of Heathcliff’s decline. 

Heathcliff is a manipulative abuser. His penchant for isolating his targets is very realistic. In the real world, abusive people are often known to isolate and alienate their spouses, children, etc. from family, friends and the world at large. This is a well - known tactic of such personality types.  In this novel, Brontë is portraying an aspect of the real world in a very realistic way. 

Brontë, like many other Victorian novelists, seemed to be a keen psychologist. Her examination of this aspect of abusive people is brilliant. Though he is monstrous, Heathcliff is a complex and nuanced character that one can spend a lot of time and words exploring.   All of this is one reason of many that this book is well worth reading.