Wuthering Heights overturns romantic visions of passionate and faithful love, presenting the truth of Heathcliff’s obsession with Catherine and Catherine’s love for Heathcliff in all of its violent and sometimes ugly intensity. 

The novel initially frames Catherine’s generosity toward Heathcliff and his devotion to her through the lens of childhood innocence—a pure, unaffected attachment that contrasts with the mistreatment Heathcliff endures at Hindley’s hands. Their childhood companionship grows into a more mature friendship with romantic overtones, but their personality characteristics eventually get in the way of their genuine attachment to each other. As Catherine turns away from Heathcliff and toward Edgar Linton, Heathcliff’s uncontrollable bad temper and Catherine’s sense of entitlement merge into a mutual sense of rageful frustration, so unhappiness ensues, for them and for those around them: The novel’s chaos, physical and emotional violence, misery, and heartache are largely the consequences of Catherine and Heathcliff’s love for each other. Even innocent children, in particular Linton and Cathy, are punished as Heathcliff lashes out in grief and rage. 

The implication is that the unfulfilled nature of the romance contributes substantially to both its intensity and its destructiveness. Various factors, class difference being the most obvious, converge to make marriage between Heathcliff and Catherine unrealistic. In the absence of any outlet, the characters’ love festers, only finding a potential resolution in death: At the end, Heathcliff and Catherine’s ghosts are rumored to haunt the moors, but whether this represents a return to childhood innocence or more restless wanderings remains ambiguous.

In keeping with Romantic tradition, the novel suggests a correspondence between nature and human nature. The natural landscape of Yorkshire, England, where the events of Wuthering Heights take place, is inhospitable and infertile, resistant to agricultural development but beautiful in a rugged sense. This is equally true of the characters themselves, as the novel repeatedly shows the forces of “civilization” to be powerless in the face of raw emotion. 

The central couple furnishes the clearest example. It is fitting that Heathcliff and Catherine are both linked with nature and that the moors are where they find their connection to each other: Neither individual is soft or gentle, but they are both attractive (to one another and others) in their strength and their fierce independence. Moreover, like the natural world in which they exist, Heathcliff and Catherine are too much their own individuals to be reined in by others, resisting cultivation in their own right. Catherine may return to Wuthering Heights looking different and more sophisticated after five weeks at Thrushcross Grange, but her true self cannot be altered. In a similar vein, Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heights after a three-year absence looking more like a “gentleman,” but as brutal and revenge-seeking as ever. The novel suggests that civilization is at best a thin veneer over much more primal forces.

In fact, this proves true even of those characters most closely associated with society and rationality: the Lintons. Isabella, for instance, develops a passion for Heathcliff that proves as strong and destructive as Heathcliff and Catherine’s love. Her elopement prompts an equally intense backlash from her brother, who swears that they are “eternally divided” and only relents and agrees to see her when he learns that she is dying. While this forgiveness, as well as the more temperate emotions of the younger generation, implies that some degree of “cultivation” is possible through education, convention, etc., the overall depiction of human nature is one in which anger, envy, and passion predominate.