Catherine's dilemma 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 enacted on the English

moors. In this thesis, an attempt is made to analyze the love triangle relationship which

leads to Catherine's dilemma between love and marriage in Wuthering Heights by virtue 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 plunges the two families into chaos. 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 ego, 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. Inevitable frustrations of the id, together with what the child learns from his

encounters with external reality, generate the ego, which is essentially a mechanism 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 derives,

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

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

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

process may be well illustrated 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 entirely

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 gracefulness and the superiority

of a wealthy family; and she, herself is the “ego” tortured by the friction 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 remarkable 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 miseries 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

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

My love for Linton is like foliage 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

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

self. Since the id is the most primitive 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 passionate 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 defiance. 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 longing 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 monotonous and

lifeless confinement of her soul. She feels chocked by the artificial and unnatural

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 miserable. ”

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 moor in their childhood.

The deepest bent 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 drawn 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 irreconcilable ways of life is in

vain too, which only caused more disorder 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 repression of the id's

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

frustration of failure in finding outlets 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 radical

breakdown, and in the end may finish the person off. Catherine is destroyed into psychic

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

torment, Catherine lies delirious 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 misery 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 touching the table and

the carpet at the Grange:“My late anguish 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 lengthy days of years of life without her soul even

in her temporary derangement.“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

lodger in Catherine's oak-paneledbed at Wuthering Heights dreams about the little wailing

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 melancholy voice sobbed, ‘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 pane, and rubbed it to and fro till then blood ran down

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

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

Catherine aspires 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 docile or submissive nature has drawn her out of her and Edgar's heaven filled with

civilized 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.

Bibliography：
1.Bronte Emily，Wuthering Heights，Beijing：Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press，

London：Oxford University Press 1995
2.Freud Sigmund，Interpretation of Dreams，Beijing：Foreign Language Teaching and Research

Press 2001
3.Travis Trysh，Heathcliff and Cathy，the Dysfunctional Couple，The Chronicle of Higher

Education，Washington，2001
4.Steinitz Rebecca，Diaries and Displacement in Wuthering Heights，Studies in the Novel，

Denton，2000
5.方平译，《呼啸山庄》，上海：上海译文出版社，2000
6.弗洛伊德，《精神分析引论新编》，北京：商务印书馆，1996
7.高宣扬，《弗洛伊德传》，北京：作家出版社，1986
8.陆扬，《精神分析文论》，济南：山东教育出版社，2001
9.扬静远译，《勃朗特姐妹研究》，北京：中国社会科学出版社，1983
10.凌晨光，《当代文学批评学》，济南：山东大学出版社，2001