Heathcliff Brags About His Cruelty Unfortunately, Heathcliff's kindness to animals does not last long. Later in the book, he hangs his wife's (Isabella's) dog. Instead of showing an ounce of remorse, he brags about it during an argument with her.
Another instance happens when Heathcliff and Isabella elope, and he hangs her dog as they leave Thrushcross Grange. Nelly finds the poor thing almost dead: it symbolizes the cruelty and violence that Heathcliff will inflict upon Isabella.
Dogs Being Hanged & What This Portends
Dogs are used to symbolize Isabella's entrance and exit from Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff hangs up Isabella's little dog, Fanny, on the same night that she elopes with him.
After Catherine's marriage to Edgar, it becomes Edgar's job to try to keep Heathcliff and Catherine apart. To get revenge against Edgar for taking Catherine from him, Heathcliff marries Edgar's sister, Isabella, and treats her badly.
Heathcliff Hangs a Dog
Heathcliff has a plan to marry a woman named Isabella. He doesn't actually care for her; he's just trying to get to her brother so he can steal back his true love and get his revenge.
Unfortunately, Heathcliff's kindness to animals does not last long. Later in the book, he hangs his wife's (Isabella's) dog. Instead of showing an ounce of remorse, he brags about it during an argument with her.
Heathcliff's abuse of the innocent, Isabella, who only wants to love him, indicates that he has no boundaries when it comes to satisfying his desire for revenge.
After informing Nelly of how she pursued her escape, and paying one last visit to Thrushcross Grange, her childhood home, Isabella removes somewhere "south of London", where she gives birth to Heathcliff's son, Linton, who resembles Isabella in every aspect.
She only fell in love and married Heathcliff because she was charmed by his looks and unaware of his true nature. She ends up being abused by her husband and servants, and looked down by her brother.
Terrified, Isabella taunts Heathcliff, and he throws a knife at her.
Most of the dogs in the book are violent. Think of the names Gnasher, Wolf and Skulker. They're violent and sometimes foreshadow events that will happen later in the book. They're a symbol of change, of the inevitable, of the doom to befall pretty much everyone, and most importantly, Heathcliff's rage.
Catherine's pregnancy is significant in that it embodies the betrayal Heathcliff feels Catherine has done to him. Heathcliff loves Catherine desperately and he knows that she loves him too, but she married someone else who had a better social status than Heathcliff, and to top things off she is also pregnant.
In fact, Heathcliff takes a cruel action to warn Isabella not to marry him. The man confesses that he does not love her.
Wuthering Heights masquerades as a love story, but it is really a study of trauma. Catherine and Heathcliff both have Complex Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and also shows signs of BPD.
Isabella's Love for Heathcliff
The reader, Catherine, and Edgar know that Heathcliff is there for Catherine, but when Edgar's young sister, Isabella, becomes attracted to Heathcliff, reason flies out the window, creating dramatic irony. Like many young people in love, Isabella refuses to listen to Catherine's warnings.
Isabella Linton grows up to fall in love with the violent and vengeful outcast, Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights. While he detests Isabella, he manipulates her into marrying him so he can access her fortune and cause her brother pain.
Secondly, there is no actual evidence in the book that the two of them ever had sex. Heathcliff ran away when he was sixteen and Catherine fifteen. It seems unlikely that they would have slept together before then.
She never tells Edgar that she wishes she would never be parted from him. Heathcliff responds that he forgives her for what she has done to him, but that he can never forgive her for what she has done to herself.
Answer and Explanation: Catherine starves herself in Wuthering Heights so that she does not have to give Heathcliff and Edgar, the two men in a love triangle with her, an answer about which one she chooses to be with.
Edgar, furious, refuses to attempt to get Isabella to come back. Instead he says that Isabella is now his sister in name only, "not because I disown her, but because she has disowned me." Heathcliff has used Isabella's love or him to take revenge on Edgar.
Catherine gives birth to a daughter, Cathy, delivering her two months early—the baby is born at midnight, and Catherine passes away two hours later. Upon hearing the news from Nelly, Heathcliff seems to already be aware.
Lockwood estimates Heathcliff as about forty and Cathy as not yet seventeen.
For many years he has now lived in the village of Thornton, actually right across the road from the house in which the Brontë sisters were born, before their father, Patrick, took them to Haworth when he took up his job as minister of the village, living in the now-famous parsonage.
Heathcliff is Angry with Catherine
Catherine claims that both Edgar and Heathcliff have killed her by breaking her heart. She is angry that they both act pitiful when it was their own fault.
It's true that having been raised as siblings, Heathcliff and Cathy's infatuation is laced with a queasy tug of incest. But even without that, their relationship can easily be read as obsessive, destructive, co-dependent – in a word, toxic. Maybe it's best not to think of Wuthering Heights as a romance at all.