Madness of Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-440-2_99How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Madness; Catherine; Heathcliff; Wuthering Heights

Abstract

In Wuthering Heights, Catherine and Heathcliff both possess symptoms of maniacs. Catherine went mad three times because of the emotional entanglement with Heathcliff. She became seriously ill, and finally died of mental breakdown. Heathcliff had been in a state of madness since returning back. He harassed Catherine for many times, and even dug her grave to see her after her death. He took cruel revenge on Hindley and Linton, abused Isabella, Hareton, Little Catherine, and Little Linton, and died a miserable death with “life-like gaze of exultation”. Superficially, both of them go mad because they are deeply in love but not marry each other. As a matter of fact, according to Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory, Catherine holds childish love for Heathcliff with the characteristics of perversion and narcissism. Catherine’s madness is due to not getting out of childhood, making herself unable to be separated from Heathcliff from the personal level. According to Foucault’s discourse theory, from the social level, Heathcliff’s madness is the result of the power operation at that time. He is the lower class under the patriarchal society and the money-oriented society and is disciplined by that kind of society. Nelly has the power to save them, but she uses it to her own benefit and refuses to do good to him. He is bound to be expelled from the society and inevitably leads to the final tragedy. So, both of them are condemned to turn into maniacs in the end.

Copyright

© 2025 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Wenshuo Cao
PY  - 2025
DA  - 2025/07/10
TI  - Madness of Catherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights
BT  - Proceedings of the 2025 11th International Conference on Humanities and Social Science Research（ICHSSR 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 877
EP  - 883
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-440-2_99
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-440-2_99
ID  - Cao2025
ER  -