sufficient to prevent her from marrying Linton.
Sara Haslam (9) has asserted that in Cathy, "the passionate and reflexive relationship between the natural world and the soul is writ largea. It is written in a language unlike that of any other book, a primal language, related to need and desire, pain and instinct." The primal desire is that between Heathcliff and Cathy with the two positioned in youth as brother and sister who may possibly be truly related.
Cathy marries a rich man, said Haslam (9), for social reasons. She anticipates that this man will make up for the losses of the soul with the gains of material wealth which stands in for the loving embrace that she will not receive from Heathcliff. Dying, she encounters Heathcliff again and reveals that without him her life has been nothing.
This particular theme is also discussed by Eric Levy (159) who argued that Heathcliff and Cathy are actively at war with love in their adult lives. While Cathy genuinely loves the wildness that she knows to exist in Heathcliff, she is ultimately unwilling to face ostracism from society by marrying a man who is socially beneath her. For Heathcliff, this great betrayal is an insurmountable loss. Though he leaves Wuthering Heights and becomes a wealthy man very able to provide Cathy with all the material things that she desires, he is doomed to live his life unfulfilled.
Camille Paglia (439) stated that Wuthering Heights is not a social novel, but it does take up important social issues related to the impossibility of love outside of one's own class. The central problem of the novel is the unacceptable passionate love between C
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