Catherine's dilemma¹ between love and marriage in Wuthering Heights
——The Psychoanalysis of love triangle relationship with Freud’s theory of personality

Abstract：
Wuthering Heights tells a story of superhuman love and revenge enacted² on the English

moors⁴. In this thesis, an attempt is made to analyze⁵ the love triangle relationship which

leads to Catherine's dilemma between love and marriage in Wuthering Heights by virtue⁶ of

Freud’s theory of personality.

Key words：
Wuthering Heights   Freud’s theory of personality   love triangle relationship

In Catherine's heart she knows what is right, but chooses what is wrong. It is her wrong

decision that pushes her into the inextricable [LunWenJia.Com]dilemma between her love and

marriage; it is her wrong choice that plunges⁷ the two families into chaos⁸. In the mind, she

is truly out of her way.

According to Sigmund Freud(1856—1939), the structure of the mind or personality consists

three portions: the id, the ego⁹, and the superego.“The id, which is the reservoir of

biological impulses, constitutes the entire personality of the infant at birth. Its

principle of operation, to guard the person from painful tension, is termed the pleasure

principle. Inevitable¹⁰ frustrations¹² of the id, together with what the child learns from his

encounters with external reality, generate the ego, which is essentially¹³ a mechanism¹⁴ to

minimize frustrations of the biological drives in the long run. It operates according to

the reality principle … [LunWenNet.Com]The superego comprises the conscience, a partly

conscious system of introjected moral inhibitions, and the ego-ideal, the source of the

individual's standards for his own behavior. Like external reality, from which it derives¹⁵,

the superego often presents obstacles to the satisfaction of biological drives.”“In the

mentally healthy person, these three systems form a unified¹⁶ and harmon
ious organization. Conversely, when the three systems of personality are at odds¹⁸ with one

another the person is said to be maladjusted.” Here Catherine's tragic¹⁹ psychological

process may be well illustrated²⁰ by Freudian psychoanalysis.

“I cannot express it; but surely you and everybody have a notion that there is, or should

be, an existence of yours beyond you. What were the use of my creation, if I were entirely²¹

contained here？” Catherine's strange words reflect that the intelligent Emily Bronte had

been earlier pondering over a same question in her work. What on earth is“the existence of

Catherine's beyond Catherine”？

Here we may believe that Heathcliff stands for Catherine's instinctual nature and the

strongest desire—her “id” in the depths of her soul; Edgar, her ideal “superego”,

represents another part of her personality: the well-bred gracefulness²² and the superiority

of a wealthy family; and she, herself is the “ego” tortured by the friction²³ between the

two in the disharmonious situation.

In the light of Freud's theory of personality, “the superego is the representation in the

personality of the traditional values and ideals of society as they are handed down from

parents to children.”  Catherine's choice of Edgar as her husband is to satisfy her ideal

“superego” to get wealth and high social position, which are the symbol of her class, on

the basis of the education by her family and reality from her early childhood. She is a

Miss of a noble family with a long history of about three hundred years. Only the marriage

well-matched in social and economic status could be a satisfaction for all: her family, the

society and even her practical self. “It would degrade me to many Heathcliff now ... if

Heathcliff and I married, we should be beggars？” This is her actual worry for her future.

Catherine yields to the pressure from her brother, and alike, in truth, she is yielding to

the moral rules of society, without the approval and identification of which, she could not

live a better life or even exist i
n it at all.

However, Catherine underestimates what her other more intrinsic self would have effect on

her. The most remarkable²⁴ claim by Catherine herself may be the best convincing evidence to

distinguish the different roles of Heathcliff and Edgar—her “id” and her “superego”:

“My great miseries²⁵ in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt

each from the beginning: my great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and

he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else perished, and he was

annihilated²⁶, the universe would turn to a mighty²⁷ stranger: I should not seem a part of it.

My love for Linton is like foliage²⁸ in the woods: time will change it. I'm well aware, as

winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath: a

source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I'm Heathcliff! He's always, always

in my mind: not as a pleasure and more than I am always a pleasure to me, but as my own

being. So don't talk of our separation again: it is impracticable.”

It was a happy thought to make her love the kind, wealthy, weak, elegant Edgar, yet in

submission²⁹ to her superego to oppose against her id, she would fall into a loss of the

self. Since the id is the most primitive³⁰ basis of personality, and the ego is formed out of

the id, Catherine's life depends wholly on Heathcliff， as the whole connotation and truth

of her life in the cosmic world, for its existence and further more for the significance of

her existence. Heathcliff is the most necessary part of her being. She marries Edgar, but

Heathcliff still clutches her soul in his passionate³¹ embrace. Although she is a bit ashamed

of her early playmate, she loves him with a passionate abandonment that sets culture,

education, the world at defiance³². Catherine's wrong choice for marriage violates her inner

desires. The choice is a victory for self-indulgence—a sacrifice of  primary to secondary

things. And she pays for it.

On one hand, Catherine doesn't find the heavenly happiness she was longing³³ for. Though as a

girl “full of ambition”and “to be the greatest woman of the neighborhood” would be her

pride, the enviable marriage could only flatter her vanity for a second. After her

marriage, the comfortable and peaceful life in the Grange was just a monotonous³⁴ and

lifeless confinement³⁵ of her soul. She feels chocked by the artificial and unnatural³⁶

conditions in the closed Thrushcross Grange— a world in which the mind has hardened and

become unalterable.“If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable³⁷. ”

Catherine eventually knows that the Lintons' heaven is not her ideal heaven. She and

Heathcliff really possess their common heaven. Just as Catherine says,“Whatever our souls

are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from

lightning, or frost from fire.”

Catherine doesn't want to live in the Lintons' heaven; on the other hand, she has lost her

own paradise that she ever had with Heathcliff on the bare hard moor³ in their childhood.

The deepest bent³⁸ of her nature announces her destiny—a wanderer between the two worlds.

When she is alive, she occupies a position midway between the two. She belongs in a sense

to both and is constantly drawn³⁹ first in Heathcliff's direction, then in Edgar's, and then

in Heathcliff's again and at last she loses herself completely. Her childish illusion to

use her husband's money to aid Heatllcliff to rise out of her brother's power has vanished

in thin air. And her constant struggle to reconcile two irreconcilable⁴⁰ ways of life is in

vain too, which only caused more disorder⁴¹ in the two worlds and in herself as well.

In Freudian principles, should the ego continually fail in its task of satisfying the

demands of the id, these three factors together—the painful repression⁴² of the id's

instinctual desires, the guilt⁴³ conscience of revolt against the superego's wishes, and the

frustration¹¹ of failure in finding outlets⁴⁴ in the external world- would contribute to ever-

increasing anxiety. The anxiety piles up and finally overwhelms the person. When this

happens, the person is said to leave hallucinatory wish-fulfillment, then a nervous radical⁴⁵

breakdown⁴⁶, and in the end may finish the person off. Catherine is destroyed into psychic⁴⁷

fragmentation by the friction between the two. At the height of her Edgan-Heathcliff

torment⁴⁸, Catherine lies delirious⁴⁹ on the floor at the Grange. She dreams that she is back

in her own old bed at Wuthering Heights “enclosed in the oak-paneled bed at home, and my

heart ached with some great grief…my misery⁵¹ arose from the separation that Hindley had

ordered between me and Heathcliff.”Still dreaming, she t
ries to push back the panels of the oak bed, only to find herself touching⁵² the table and

the carpet at the Grange:“My late anguish⁵³ was swallowed in a paroxysm of despair. I cannot

say why I was so wildly wretched ... and my all in all, as Heathcliff was at that time, and

been converted at a stroke into Mrs. Linton...the wife of a stranger: an exile, and

outcast.” She attempts to forget the lengthy⁵⁴ days of years of life without her soul even

in her temporary derangement⁵⁵.“Most strangely, the whole last seven years of my life grew a

blank! I did not recall that they had been at all.” Her mental and physical decay rapidly

leads to the body's mortal end. She dies and seems to have none into perfect peace.

But even after her death, she is still a wandering ghost. In Chapter 3, Lockwood, the

lodger⁵⁶ in Catherine's oak-paneledbed at Wuthering Heights dreams about the little wailing⁵⁷

ghost:

“The intense horror of nightmare came over me: I tried to draw back my arm, but the hand

clung to it, and a most melancholy⁵⁸ voice sobbed⁵⁹, ‘Let me in-Let me in’.‘ Who are you?’

…‘Catherine Linton’, it replied, shiveringly…‘I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the

moor!’…Terror made me cruel; and finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off,

I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane⁵⁰, and rubbed it to and fro till then blood ran down

and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed⁶⁰, ‘Let me in!’…it is twenty years, twenty

years. I've been a waif for twenty years!”

Catherine aspires⁶¹ to be back in her heaven even being a spirit. But leer self-deceptive

decision has made her fall from her and Heathcliff's heaven full of demonic love and her

never docile⁶² or submissive nature has drawn her out of her and Edgar's heaven filled with

civilized⁶³ emptiness in the meantime. She pushes herself into her tragedy, the endless

dilemma between her love and marriage, which won't end up with her death.

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