Catherine Earnshaw
She loves them both, and that is all the trouble. Oh, but she hates them as well, hates them for being as silly and serious, stupid and wise, foolhardy and cowardly as men are. She hates them for their biting words to one another, not in her name but in their own, for their honor, which prevents either of them from speaking truthfully. She loves them for their hate and hates them for their love.
If she could, she would have left them both, left the stifling parlors filled with awkward silences and the oppressive dust filled with unforgotten memories. But they are her world, and running out wildly into the empty fields, where the air is fresh and the world stretches out as far as the eye can see will be no help. If she runs from either or both of them, she would feel their love for her pulling her back, like a fisherman reeling in the day's haul.
And so she lets herself fall into the other extreme.
Her room is too fine to die in, but she has no choice, for it is the only place where she can know herself alone. And it can be horrifying at night, it can, when the shadows turn all to the images of frightful monsters, whose claws shall choke her or whose fearful jaws shall tear her to pieces. Then she can truly die, and she has, in her dreams, over and over, and each time she watches emotionlessly, not caring, not caring a bit. (She lies when she tells good Ellen that she has not slept – or rather, she twists the truth. For how can something so full of violence be called sleep?)
But the morning comes, and then she is alive again, and again she cares all too much, she loves and she hates, and she thinks that all the emotion is going to make her burst. If only she could stop the thoughts in her head, then all the emotion would be gone, and she would no longer love and hate them so painfully! And the only way to stop the thoughts and the emotions is to die, and beating her head against the wall never does anything but make her head ache, and the windows will not open, and she cannot stop herself from eating the gruel and drinking the water.
The emotions are wild, and ever changing. One moment, she hates Edgar so dreadfully, for his softness and his books, and his apathy, and the way he seems so incapable of understanding. She loves Heathcliff for his passion, for their long ago silences which said so much so eloquently. And then, the next moment, she loves Edgar for his gentleness, for his refined culture, and she hates Heathcliff for his violence, for his brutality. And then, in the moment after that, both of the feelings combine, and she knows not who it is she loves and who it is she hates!
The emotions do not kill her, and neither does her self imposed isolation or her unsuccessful starvation. But they do the next best thing; they drive her mad. And she stops fighting, stops fighting the emotions, stops fighting the world around her; she merely abandons herself to them both. And she speaks little, but, when she does, it is honest.
Perhaps the emotions do kill her in the end, the pure excess of them. But the doctors say differently, and so do Heathcliff and Edgar, making up their own explanations, blaming her or themselves or one another however much or little they are inclined to.
Isabella Linton
She still loves him. She will never, never admit to it, not to him nor to anyone else who might ask, but it is true. In her single letter, written to Ellen in her first desperate hours at Wuthering Heights, angry tears still hot upon her cheeks, only a single candle burning, and that shaded by a careful hand so as not to wake him lying there, she said that she had learned the error of her ways, that she cared for him no more, but it was all false, and she knew it even then.
She loves him when he sleeps beside her, neither of them actually touching, out of their mutual wishes. She loves him when he strides through the front door, a freshly killed animal in his hands and the only genuine smile of his she shall ever see upon his face. She loves him when he kisses her, roughly as if it were a punishment. She loves him when he makes love to her (though that term is not entirely appropriate, she cannot think of another that would not make her wince to think of it), even though he cries out Cathy's name. She loves him when the marks of his rage are upon her, purple and blue and red.
She has changed, she knows that, and one of those changes is that she keeps that love hidden, so far below the surface of her skin that at times she manages to forget about it herself. Another is that she has become…not stronger, but more brittle. She can give Joseph retorts as harsh as any he might deal out to her. She cries only when no one is around.
She can be cruel, too. She has learned that about herself; it is not a change. Isn't it funny, how another's cruelty can bring out such qualities in oneself? She is cruel to Heathcliff, though perhaps not as cruel as he is to her. She learned soon after her arrival that she cannot make him smile, or laugh (except in mockery), or show her gratitude. His attitude is always one of indifference towards her. Except, however, when she provokes him, when he raises his fist against her and his eyes blaze with rage.
She can make him angry; that is her one power over him. She exercises it all too frequently, and that must be her previously latent cruelty. For what woman would deliberately attempt to hurt her husband to make him angry, even one so cruel as Heathcliff? (Especially one so cruel as Heathcliff, a small part of her mind that is concerned with self preservation adds, but she ignores it. She abandoned self preservation the moment she left with him.)
And, likewise, the only time when she feels anything but despair (and love, but love is not an emotion, it is a state of being) is when she provokes him to cruelty and blows. Then, then she feels rage, and pain, and even, unfailingly, betrayal, red hot and burning within her with something like passion.
She will not leave yet.
Catherine Linton
She can practically feel the emotion draining out of her, excruciatingly slowly, till she is left hollow and empty and cold.
The others around her aren't like that, so she can't imagine where she's getting it. They have passions, sudden rages, long moments of cruelty. But she has lost all that (if she had much of it in the first place: for, if one can lose all their emotion so easily, how much of it could they have had to being with?), along with love and laughter and hatred and joy.
She loved and hated once. She loved her father, dear and kind as always was, but he is dead now, colder than she is, to love someone who is dead is to drive yourself insane. She loved Linton, she is almost certain of that (though she hated him too, she hated him in the long days when she wept and begged and he would not let her out, when she offered him everything she had to give and he would take no bribe, when she tried to gain his sympathy and he valued fear over compassion), though that love, she thinks calmly, was not as pure and good and right as that she held for her father. Linton is dead too, but her love for him died before he did, stifled by apathy. She hated Heathcliff, when he hit her, when he jailed her, when he (so often) spoke unkindly to her. But time in his company has made hatred unnecessarily exhausting and that too has been abandoned.
She has spent so long emotionless that the dried husk of her that remains is falling to pieces; her gold tresses becoming tangled and dirty, her dresses old and torn. She doesn't mind, not much. A few occasional tears of forgotten despair are far easier to bear than constant love and hatred.
Why, such things could almost drive someone insane!