80 pages • 2-hour read
Wuthering Heights
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Chapters 28-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child abuse, illness, child death, and bullying.
Chapter 28 Summary
Zillah, a servant at Wuthering Heights, tells Nelly that she and Cathy are believed to have drowned according to the Gimmerton village gossip. Zillah also maintains that Edgar is still living. Nelly takes advantage of her opportunity to escape the room and finds Linton, who is unwilling to cooperate with Nelly and tell her where Cathy’s room is: “He says I’m not to be soft with Catherine. She’s my wife, and it’s shameful that she should wish to leave me!” (202). Linton reports that his father is talking with the court about Thrushcross Grange, as everything Cathy has now belongs to Linton.
Nelly decides to escape Wuthering Heights and goes back to the Grange to find help. She finds Edgar, “who [lies] an image of sadness, and resignation, waiting his death” (204). Nelly tells Edgar about their imprisonment, lying slightly by saying that Heathcliff forced her inside. Edgar decides to change his will, but he is too late, and word arrives that Cathy is too ill to return home to the Grange. However, Cathy does return home soon after, and after calming herself, she goes to see her father. Within hours, with Cathy at his side, he dies peacefully. Cathy, now Mrs. Linton Heathcliff, explains that she escaped her room at Wuthering Heights with Linton’s help and then climbed out of her mother’s bedroom window to freedom.
Chapter 29 Summary
Cathy and Nelly decide that Cathy and Linton will live at the Grange, with Nelly as their housekeeper. Heathcliff barges into Thrushcross Grange, demanding that Cathy return to Wuthering Heights and not encourage his son to be disobedient. He announces his intentions to find tenants for Thrushcross Grange and tells Cathy that Linton resents her leaving. Cathy asserts her love for Linton, believing that Heathcliff is such a miserable person: “[Y]ou have nobody to love you […] nobody will cry for you when you die” (208).
When Cathy leaves to get her things, Heathcliff tells Nelly that, while the sexton was digging Linton’s grave, he ordered him to dig up Catherine’s body. He speaks of his desire for Catherine’s spirit to return to him, remembering when he dug up Catherine’s coffin the day of her burial, and he felt then that “Cathy was there: not under [him], but on the earth” (210). Later, walking on the moors and sitting in the house with Hareton, he felt sure she would return, but he was always disappointed. Seeing her in her coffin, he feels temporarily at peace. Cathy returns to the room, ready to leave for Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff and Cathy leave Nelly.
Chapter 30 Summary
Nelly says she hasn’t seen Cathy since she left the Grange, even though Nelly went once to Wuthering Heights. Shortly after Catherine’s arrival at Wuthering Heights, Linton died, and Cathy stayed upstairs for two weeks. In his will, Linton left everything to his father, so Cathy is now penniless and alone. One of the servants suggested to Nelly that Hareton has feelings for Cathy, and Nelly was irritated at the suggestion that Hareton was worthy of Cathy. Meanwhile, Hareton tried to befriend Cathy, but she was too angry and upset with her lot to feel friendly toward him, and she rejected any kindness Hareton offered her. Nelly decided that she would take a cottage and have Catherine come live with her, but Heathcliff refused to let Catherine go. This marks the end of Nelly’s story.
Lockwood reports that his health is improving, and he decides to inform his landlord that he will spend the next six months in London.
Chapters 28-30 Analysis
Heathcliff’s grown-up life is as tormented as his youthful one was despite the power he is able to exert over the individuals who trouble him. Cathy speaks to him truthfully and defiantly of his lonely life, pointing out that Heathcliff will die alone and that, thanks to his cruel treatment of others, no one will mourn his death. Only Catherine’s daughter, who is feisty and headstrong like her mother, has the nerve to speak to Heathcliff with this kind of directness. The assertiveness Heathcliff loved in Catherine Earnshaw has returned to sting him at a vulnerable time, just as he recognizes his beloved in the maturing faces of Hareton and Cathy.
While Cathy’s recognition of Heathcliff for who he is implies The Existence of Hope in a Younger Generation, her treatment of Hareton is reminiscent of Hindley’s bullying of Heathcliff in their youth. She, like Hindley, is using someone else to take the edge off her own frustration and grief. The rushed marriage to Linton, the loss of her father after her dramatic return to his bedside, and the forced removal to Wuthering Heights have sapped Cathy of any generosity she might have developed. Hareton receives the brunt of her snobbish and disrespectful anger at her situation.
Heathcliff’s casual disregard for conventional religion and spirituality is evident in his treatment of Catherine’s grave in Chapter 29. His love for Catherine has become his own brand of spirituality, and the only spirit with whom he desires a connection is hers, revealing The Dark Side of Enduring Love.
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