“I'll Try to Break their Hearts by Breaking My Own”: Catherine’s Heterodoxic Love Triangle

Abstract

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) resists conventional interpretations of love, morality, religion, and social order, presenting an unorthodox, romantic triangle among Catherine Earnshaw, Heathcliff, and Edgar Linton that challenges Victorian ideals of marriage and domesticity. The novel reflects nineteenth-century declining confidence in ecclesiastical authority, constructing a narrative in which obsessive love transcends conventional distinctions between virtue and sin, life and death, and sacred and profane. From her early childhood, Catherine (along with Heathcliff) tosses the bible aside, identifying herself as willful, unreligious, and independent. While Heathcliff cannot accept sharing her with Edgar and takes every opportunity to discredit him as a “milk-sop,” the latter describes him as a “moral poison” and a “most diabolical man” before he declares the termination of the love triangle, giving Catherine a final ultimatum to choose between him or Heathcliff. Aside from its failure, proposing an emotional triadic relationship to Victorian audiences reveals Bronte’s attempt to join her non-conformism with female liberty to challenge the conventional understanding of domesticity.