Changing the Names: the Two Catherines

Abstract

These books discovered by Lockwood are the only self-authored records left by Catherine Earnshaw-Linton. Catherine’s diary is a text of discontent and rebellion, recording and speaking out against the domestic tyranny of Hindley and the religious tyranny of Joseph. It is also quite literally a marginal text, scrawled in the margins and on the fly-sheets of her well-used library. The childish scribblings arouse in Lockwood an ‘immediate interest for the unknown Catherine, and I began, forthwith, to decypher her faded hieroglyphics’. The process of deciphering begun by Lockwood is continued in Nelly’s narrative and is repeated by the reader who, like Lockwood, experiences Catherine as a text. Indeed much of Wuthering Heights is concerned with deciphering the traces of Catherine Earnshaw. The writing Lockwood finds scratched into the paint on the ledge of his sleeping quarters at the Heights foreshadows an important strand of the narrative structure.

This writing was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of characters, large and small — Catherine Earnshaw, here and there varied to Catherine Heathcliff, and then again to Catherine Linton. (WH, 61)

It was a Testament, in lean type, and smelling dreadfully musty: a fly-leaf bore the inscription — “Catherine Earnshaw, her book”, and a date some quarter of a century back.

I shut it, and took up another, and another, till I had examined all. Catherine’s library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it to have been well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose; scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen and ink commentary — at least, the appearance of one — covering every morsel of blank that the printer had left. Some were detached sentences; other parts took the form of a regular diary….(WH, 62)