 Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
| Table of Contents CHAPTER 15
- This chapter begins with a reminder of Cathy's deathlike
Heathcliff steals into her bedroom while Edgar is at church
Though Cathy softens a bit, Heathcliff does not. He accuses her
NOTE: In a more conventional novel there would have been a clearer death-bed resolution. Cathy would have declared a love for Heathcliff that her marriage to another could never dim or she would have said that she was, above all, Edgar's wife, and that there are greater things in life than love. But she does neither. Her unwillingness to leave Heathcliff may be her final statement, but she never tells him that she regrets marrying Edgar. Note, too, that the scene isn't placed in the novel as if it were a climax. The story does not revert back to the present for reflection. There are two chapters to go before the story of the first generation ends. It will take the whole second half of the book to work out any kind of resolution. Although the focus in this scene is on the lovers, Ellen is there, too. When Catherine first loses consciousness, the housekeeper thinks, "Far better that she should be dead, than lingering a burden and misery- maker to all about her." This is the cruelest comment she has made about anyone in the book. When you consider that Cathy is dying, you have to wonder how trustworthy any of her judgments of Cathy are.
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