Obsessive Love in Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: Constructive or Destructive?

The relationship between the obsessed one and the object of obsession is not based on caring. It is based on power, a show of brutishness, a game of ego. The possession needs to be absolute, to the point of excluding everyone else, and the obsessed attempts to demonstrate it all the time to get any pleasure from it. The obsessed is not concerned if this oppresses or even hurts the object of obsession. Wuthering Heights is a psychological study of a man, named Heathcliff, whose soul is torn between the two opposing passions of love and hate. Instead of the psychologically stable world of character, based on the authority of the will and the security of accepted values, Wuthering Heights illustrates a world, psychologically, of compulsion, coercion, obsession, sadism, fanaticism, self-harm and addiction. Despite Heathcliff’s sadism, he is however satanic chiefly in his wounded pride. His obsessive love for Catherine is the single principle of his being. This passion is so enormous and so destructive, of everyone, that it seems insufficient and improper to call it love. The capacity for love is in contrast with the ability to hate. Heathcliff hates with a vengeance. He initially aims at Hindley as the object of vengeance and hate, then at Edgar, and then to a certain extent, at Catherine. Because of his hate, Heathcliff’s resort to revenge is another consequence in the novel. Hate and revenge interweave with selfishness to reveal the conflicting emotions that force people to do things that are not particularly nice or rationale. This paper is an attempt to give a clear picture of the sources and consequences of the obsessive love-hate relationship among characters in the novel, paying close attention to the concepts of Romantic love and Demonic love