Linton (The Weaker Heathcliff)

The Gothic tendency within literature pre-existed the great Romantic movement in the arts and literature, pre-eminently in the shape of the Gothic Novel. And the latter introduced a type of brooding anti-hero, such as Montoni from Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), who would go on to be identified as Byronic after the great English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824). 

 But the Byronic hero could be said to have attained its literary apogee in the shape of a brace of anti-heroes featuring in the works of two literary sisters born to an Anglican minister in the county of Yorkshire towards the beginning of the 19th Century, Emily and Charlotte Bronte. 

 These being Rochester, from Charlotte's Jane Eyre, and Heathcliff, from Emily's Wuthering Heights, both novels being first published in 1847. The latter, perhaps the most celebrated Gothic Romantic novel in literary history, has as one of its central features the introduction of the aforesaid Heathcliff into the prosperous Earnshaw family of WutheringHeights,a farmhouse situated on the Moors of Yorkshire.

 This occurs in consequence of a trip made by the master of the house to the city of Liverpool, where he encounters a homeless Romany boy whom he decides to adopt as his own son, despite the fact that he already has a son, Hindley, as well as a daughter Catherine. 

 And while Hindley goes on to experience deep resentment of his adoptive brother, his sister comes to care for him, and it's this powerful attachment that ultimately blossoms into the all-consuming love between Cathy and Heathcliff that is the novel's central theme. 

 In young adulthood, Heathcliff is the quintessential Romantic hero, in so far as he is fatally dark and handsome, and motivated by a nature so passionate that it threatens to destroy everything it comes into contact with including its possessor. And one rendered especially dangerous by virtue of Cathy's status-seeking marriage to his love rival, Edgar Linton, and his own new-found prosperity.

 Following Cathy's death, the remainder of the novel depicts his ruinous effect on all forced to co-exist with him, including his sickly and ineffectual son, Linton. And one can't help thinking that the latter's short life in some way incarnates the tragedy of sons born to strong and successful men, and how they so often spend their lives in restless and troubled pursuit of not just their father's approval, but their power.

 Linton is the unfortunate offspring of the marriage between Heathcliff and Isabella, sister of Edgar Linton, whom Heathcliff weds merely as a means of taking his revenge on his detested brother in law.  

 And Linton inherits none of his father's swarthiness and manifest manliness, being very much a Linton in appearance, blond and blue-eyed, but unlike his uncle he is something of a milksop, with a spoiled and peevish nature. But contrary to what might be expected for one so fragile, he enjoys the sufferings of the weak and powerless. 

 One might be tempted to see in this cruelty the revenge of one excluded from societal power by virtue of lack of manly character. 

 Indeed, Wuthering Heights as a whole has been described as a meditation on the nature of power, with certain characters representing its purest form by dint of advantages of birth and gender fused with lofty character; while others enjoy only relative power. And among these might be included Cathy and Heathcliff, who, despite being strong alpha figures, are excluded from true power by dint of gender and lowly origins respectively, a fact which ultimately secures their shared ruination through Cathy's marriage to Edgar Linton, a man for whom she feels only limited passion.

 Linton Heathcliff, on the other hand, is very much an omega male, petrified of his powerful father, who ultimately forces him into marrying Cathy's daughter with Edgar Linton, also called Cathy, soon after which he dies, never having truly lived in effect. Yet he is an intriguing character despite his pathetic failure to make his mark on the world, and one can't help thinking that had he been born into an environment more suited to his fragile and sensitive nature, he might have amounted to something in the end. Perhaps the coming century's end would have been more congenial, and he'd have thrived as a poet in the aesthetic tradition.