"My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff!" (80).This quote from Catherine neatly and eloquently sums up her relationships with both Edgar Linton, the man she chose to marry, and Healthcliff, the man she truly loves. Catherine realizes that her "love" of Linton is superficial, as he provides her with a comfortable home and constantly dotes on her. Her relationship with Linton is beautiful and seemingly perfect on the outside, like the colorful "foliage in the woods", but truly, Catherine and Linton do not connect on the same spiritual level that she and Heathcliff do.
The love Catherine feels for Heathcliff is drastically different than her love for Linton. She and Heathcliff had been inseperable since their childhood, and her claim that "whatever our souls are made of, [Heathcliff's] and mine are the same" (79) shows how profoundly she loves and identifies with Heathcliff. To her, even though her relationship with Heathcliff is often stormy and "a source of little visible delight", her love of him is so necessary she cannot live without it. Catherine's passionate exclamation, "I am Heathcliff!", dramatically shows her love for him and reinforces her belief in the similarity of their natures.
I chose a picture of the Yorkshire moors, where the book is set, to represent Catherine and Heathcliff's love. While the landscape is stormy and barren and has an unnatural quality about it, it is also strangely beautiful, just like Catherine's and Heathcliff's love. The rocks in the picture represent Catherine's comment about her "eternal" love for Heathcliff as well.
1 comment:
Very powerful quote to show how Catherine's relationships with Heathcliff and Linton differ in intensity to radically that Catherine actually feels one with Heathcliff.
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