Madness in Love

At first glance, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights would pass as a Romantic novel; however, her subjects undergo moments of passionate love to meet terrifying intensities of hate. This gothic-romantic story of a doomed love in a desolate landscape is created mostly through the psychologically disturbed characters which she creates.
Catherine and Heathcliff are both extreme characters, where their emotion, passion and suffering cause them to fall into mental illness. Heathcliff’s actions, fits the bill of horror story’s characters. In addition, his depressive behaviors throughout the first ten chapters of the novel illustrate how he is haunted by the past, which allows a form of self-hate to develop. Moreover, Heathcliff also plunges into a belief in evil spirits, to which he is constantly compared.   His attitude brings pain and chaos to others, and though his body seems strong from the outside, he’s killing himself from within because of his lack of class which prevented his marriage with Catherine. Bringing pain to Catherine wasn’t part of Heathcliff’s plan; nevertheless, his personality infects Catherine, so much that “For three days, Catherine did not leave her room. She refused to eat… She said she was dying…Her mind started to wander. She imagined she was a child again, back at Wuthering Heights. Then she was by the churchyard, with Heathcliff” (42). After not eating and becoming feverish, Catherine’s mind is forced to think about Heathcliff, which shows that Heathcliff caused psychological disturbance which caused Catherine to become physically and mentally ill. His character strongly resembles the style of a character in a gothic novel. Bronte cleverly links the two—gothic and romance through infatuation between Catherine and Heathcliff to cause the extreme outcome of Catherine having to lock herself in her room for three days in order to deal with Heathcliff’s hatred.
In traditional horror stories, characters push each other under as far as they can,...