‘I wish I could hold you,’ she continued, bitterly, ’till we were both dead! I shouldn’t care what you suffered. I care nothing for your sufferings. Why shouldn’t you suffer? I do! Will you forget me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say twenty years hence, “That’s the grave of Catherine Earnshaw? I loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past. I’ve loved many others since: my children are dearer to me than she was; and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I are going to her: I shall be sorry that I must leave them!” Will you say so, Heathcliff?’
‘Don’t torture me till I’m as mad as yourself,’ cried he, wrenching his head free, and grinding his teeth.
The two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and fearful picture. Well might Catherine deem that heaven would be a land of exile to her, unless with her mortal body she cast away her moral character also. Her present countenance had a wild vindictiveness in its white cheek, and a bloodless lip and scintillating eye; and she retained in her closed fingers a portion of the locks she had been grasping. As to her companion, while raising himself with one hand, he had taken her arm with the other; and so inadequate was his stock of gentleness to the requirements of her condition, that on his letting go I saw four distinct impressions left blue in the colourless skin.
Mortality haunts every fibre of Wuthering Heights: indeed it is one of the most excessive and hyperbolic universes ever created. Its antisociality is physically felt not only in the isolation and grandeur of the natural landscape but also through the savage knowingness of its ‘fated’ intimacies. For Passion is not for the faint hearted. It is a beyond and a beneath universe that few would care to visit , let alone linger within!
This final, vehement avowal of intimacy between Catherine and Heathcliff is presented through a register of frantic interrogation and jealousy. Catherine does not want to imagine Heathcliff living and functioning without her – beyond her. The intensely expressed rage and regret of Cathy for her non-consummated passion for Heathcliff appears uncompromising in its brutality and insanely felt desire. How many writers would dare to confront the utter abjection of grief through sexual need as palpable as this? How many writers present approaching death as utterly unpeaceful?
Ironically this scene is seen and constructed through the register of Nelly Dean whose own bitterness at the non-consummation of her desire for Hindley makes her the ideal ‘savage’ to tell this scene!
So both Cathy and Heathcliff want each other so much that they want to tear pieces off each other.They want to become each other,to violate each other, to have each other entirely. Their unconsummated ‘immature’ feelings for each other have remained contained until this moment. The sexual nullity and aridity of Edgar has ironically killed her through this deadly pregnancy and such a prospect of everlasting sexual frustration is hell ! Here, Heathcliff and Cathy literally are trying to possess and devour each other in any desperate way that they can:flesh has become talismanic! Raw passion has no subtlety. It needs to release itself through the ecstatic relief of expression. Verbalising the wantonness of final want this is truly Paradise Lost!