In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, the reader is introduced to the characters of Heathcliff and Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw Linton -- two people who, despite significant differences in their social class and relative status, love one another with a passion that defies convention. As Deborah Epstein Nord (190) suggests, Heathcliff is depicted by Bronte as the romantic yet dangerous gypsy, a person who enters Wuthering Heights as a parentless street urchin. Cathy, in contrast, is the daughter of the house, is a de facto "lady" who is nevertheless a "wild, wicked slip" (Bronte, 46). It is inevitable that these two young people would grow to love one another, and equally inevitable that Cathy would reject the street urchin for respectability as the wife of a neighboring gentleman. Their tragedy is that love -- in the era in which the novel was written -- was subordinate to class, thus creating the tragedy that would befall the Earnshaws and Lintons.
Heathcliff is described by housekeeper Nelly Dean on his unexpected entry into the Earnshaw household as "a gypsy brat" speaking in "gibberish" who was literally "picked up" off the streets by Mr. Earnshaw and brought home to be reared with his own children. Heathcliff (the name of the Earnshaws' deceased son) become a member of the household who is nevertheless never fully accepted by Nelly Dean, who with Hindley Earnshaw (the legitimate heir) "plagued and went on with him shamefully" (Bronte, 41). Nelly Dean never loses her antipathy for Heathcliff, an antipathy based on her recognition that a young child of his class and background has no place in the family she serves.
Nevertheless, as Heathcliff and Cathy grow to maturity, their intellectual curiosity and their sensual natures bring them more and more frequently together. Cathy "taught him what she learnt" and "they both promised fair to grow up as rude as savages" (Bronte, 51). However, Cathy's love for Heathcliff is not ...