Heathcliff (Wuthering Heights)

Heathcliff
Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff in 1939
Created by	Emily Brontë
Information
Spouse(s)	Isabella Linton (wife)
Children	Linton Heathcliff (son)
Relatives	Hindley Earnshaw (foster brother) Catherine Earnshaw (foster sister and a significant other)

Heathcliff is a fictional character in Emily Brontë's novel Wuthering Heights. Owing to the novel's enduring fame and popularity, he is often regarded as an archetype of the tortured romantic hero whose all-consuming passions destroy both him and those around him.

He is better known as a romantic hero, due to his love for Catherine Earnshaw, than for his final years of vengeance in the second half of the novel, in which he grows into a bitter, haunted man, and for a number of incidents in his early life that suggest that he was an upset and sometimes malicious individual from the beginning. His complicated, mesmerizing, consumable and altogether bizarre nature makes him a rare character, with components of both the hero and villain.

You teach me now how cruel you've been — cruel and false! Why did you despise me? Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? I have not one word of comfort. You deserve this. You have killed yourself. Yes, you may kiss me, and cry; and wring out my kisses and tears: they'll blight you — they'll damn you. You loved me — then what right had you to leave me? What right — answer me — for the poor fancy you felt for Linton? Because misery, and degradation, and death, and nothing God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart — you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me, that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you——oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?

A Gypsy foundling discovered on the streets of Liverpool and raised by the Earnshaw family of Wuthering Heights in Yorkshire, Heathcliff's past and early childhood before his mysterious adoption are only hinted at by Brontë. In keeping with the supernatural themes present in the novel, it is speculated that Heathcliff might be a demon or a hellish soul. His appearance would be faithfully interpreted as resembling a Roma, or Gypsy. He becomes a gentleman "in dress and aspect." Mrs. Ellen Dean states that he could be a "little Lascar or American castaway."