Who is Catherine Earnshaw and what is her importance in Wuthering Heights?
Catherine Earnshaw is the heroine of Wuthering Heights, even though she dies about halfway through the novel. Catherine is the daughter of old Mr. Earnshaw, who adopts Heathcliff and brings him home to the Heights to raise along with his own children.
Catherine and Heathcliff become inseparable playmates and eventually come to love one another passionately. However, Catherine chooses to marry Edgar Linton, a more "respectable" choice for a woman of her social status.
Catherine dies in childbirth, but not before she and Heathcliff confess their love to one another. The memory of Catherine haunts Heathcliff for the rest of his life and, after he dies, he is buried next to her.
How is Catherine Earnshaw presented in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë?
Catherine Earnshaw is given to us as a free spirit, a Romantic heroine every bit as much a child of nature as Heathcliff. As an arch-Romantic, she is governed by the dictates of her heart more than by...
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her capacity for reason. For Catherine, love is all important, not just as a powerful emotion, but also as a source of knowledge, knowledge that transcends what is provided to her by the senses. As a consequence of Catherine's passionate love for Heathcliff, she doesn't simply think that the two are soul-mates; sheknows this.
Catherine's passionate and free-spirited nature inevitably puts her at odds with society. To some extent, brooding Heathcliff can play the part of Byronic hero to his heart's content, but as a woman in a rigidly patriarchal society Catherine doesn't have that luxury. At some point, she knows she'll be expected to settle down and become a submissive wife to someone, but in the meantime, Catherine continues to rebel, throwing temper tantrums, running around the moors with gay abandon, and, of course, continuing to love Heathcliff with as much passion as she can muster.
As we saw earlier, Catherine is very much a child of nature and, as such, can never truly be tamed by society and its conventions. That she is intimately connected to the soil beneath her feet is illustrated by the alleged appearance of her ghost upon the moors. In a further conformation of her status as a Romantic heroine, it would seem that even death cannot sever the close connection between Catherine and the land that entered her very soul the moment she was born.