94 pages • 3 hours read
Emily BrontëWuthering Heights
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1847A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 28-31Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary
Zillah, a servant at Wuthering Heights,tells Nelly that she and Cathy are believed to have drowned according to the Gimmerton village gossip. Zillah also maintains that Edgar is still living. Nelly takes advantage of her opportunity to escape the room and finds Linton, who is unwilling to cooperate with Nelly and tell her where Cathy’s room is: “He says I’m not to be soft with Catherine. She’s my wife, and it’s shameful that she should wish to leave me!” (202). Linton reports that his father is talking with the court about Thrushcross Grange, as “everything [Cathy] has is [Linton’s]” (203). Nelly decides to escape Wuthering Heights and goes back to the Grange to find help. She finds Edgar, “who lay an image of sadness, and resignation, waiting his death” (204). Nelly tells Edgar about their imprisonment, saying that “Heathcliff forced[her]to go in: which was not quite true” (204). Edgar decides to change his will, but he is too late, and word arrives that Cathy is too ill to return home to the Grange. Cathy arrives home, and after calming herself, she goes to see her father. Within hours, with Cathy at his side, “[h]e died blissfully[...]it was so entirely without a struggle” (206). Cathy, “Mrs. Linton Heathcliff now” (206),explains that she escaped her room at Wuthering Heights with Linton’s help, and then climbed out her mother’s bedroom window to freedom.
Chapter 29 Summary
Cathy and Nelly decide that Cathy and Linton will live at the Grange, with Nelly as their housekeeper. Heathcliff barges into Thrushcross Grange, demanding that Cathy return to Wuthering Heights, and “not to encourage [his]son to further disobedience” (208). He announces his intentions to find tenants for Thrushcross Grange and tells Cathy that Linton is “bitter as gall at your desertion and its consequences” (208). Cathy asserts her love for Linton, believing that Heathcliff is such a miserable person:“[Y]ou have nobody to love you[...]nobody will cry for you when you die”(208).
When Cathy leaves to get her things, Heathcliff takes over the narration, telling Nelly that, while the sexton was digging Linton’s grave, he ordered him to “remove the earth off her coffin-lid”(209), opening the resting place of his beloved Catherine. He speaks of his desire for Catherine’s spirit to return to him, remembering when he had dug up Catherine’s coffin the winter before, and he felt then that “Cathy was there: not under me, but on the earth” (210). Later, walking on the moors and sitting “in the house with Hareton” (210), he felt sure she would return, but he was always disappointed. Seeing her in her coffin, he feels “pacified” (211), now that not a “spectre of a hope” (211) exists that she will return to him. Cathy returns to the room, ready to leave for Wuthering Heights, and Heathcliff and Cathy leave Nelly.
Chapter 30 Summary
Nelly says she hasn’t seen Cathy since she left the Grange, even though Nelly went once to Wuthering Heights. Shortly after Catherine’s arrival to Wuthering Heights, Linton dies, and “Cathy stayed upstairs for a fortnight” (213). In his will, Linton leaves everything to his father, so Cathy is now “destitute of cash and friends” (213). One of the servants suggests to Nelly that Hareton has feelings for Cathy, and Nelly is irritated at the suggestion that Hareton is worthy of Cathy. Hareton tries to befriend Cathy, but she is too angry and upset with her lot to feel friendly towards him, and she “reject[s] any pretence of kindness” (215) Hareton offers her. Nelly decides to “take a cottage, and get Catherine to come and live with [her]” (216),but Nelly is unable to arrange matters to Heathcliff’s satisfaction. This marks the end of Nelly’s story. Lockwood reports his health is improving and he decides “to inform [his]landlord that [he]shall spend the next six months in London” (216).
Chapter 31 Summary
Lockwood rides to Wuthering Heights to deliver a note to Cathy from Nelly. She ignores Lockwood, and he thinks to himself that she is “a beauty, it is true; but not an angel” (217). When he delivers the note, Hareton takes it from her, “saying Mr. Heathcliff should look at it first” (217), causing her to become tearful, which leads Hareton to return the letter to her. Lockwood asks Cathy for a response to give to Nelly, but she explains that she has no paper on which to write and no books to read, as Heathcliff has taken them from her. She mocks Hareton for his illiteracy in this speech and they argue; eventually, he “gathered the books and hurled them on the fire” (219). Heathcliff arrives home, and when he shows concern towards Hareton, he “broke away, to enjoy his grief and anger in solitude” (220), reminding Heathcliff of Catherine: “But when I look for his father in his face, I find her every day more!” (220). Lockwood tells Heathcliff of his intentions to leave for London, and he makes his exit after dinner with the men of Wuthering Heights, thinking of “an attachment, as her good nurse desired” (221) between himself and Cathy.
Chapters 28-31 Analysis
These chapters mark the end of the story of the adult Heathcliff, who lives a grown-up life as tormented as his youth despite the power he is able to exert over the individuals who trouble him. Ironically, only Cathy speaks to him truthfully and defiantly of his lonely life, pointing out what the reader already knows: Heathcliff will die alone, and thanks to his cruel treatment of others, no one will mourn his death. Only Catherine’s daughter, who is feisty and headstrong like her mother, has the nerve to speak to Heathcliff with this kind of directness. The assertiveness Heathcliff loved in Catherine Earnshaw has the maturing faces of Hareton and Cathy.
Cathy’s treatment of Hareton is reminiscent of the wanton bullying Hindley exhibited towards Heathcliff in their youth. She, like Hindley, is using someone else to take the edge off her own frustration and grief. The rushed marriage to Linton, the loss of her father after her dramatic return to his bedside—just in time to keep him company at his most needy moment—and the forced removal to Wuthering Heights have sapped Cathy of any generosity she might have developed.Hareton receives the brunt of her snobbish and disrespectful anger at her situation.
Heathcliff’s casual disregard for conventional religion and spirituality is evident in his treatment of Catherine’s grave in Chapter 29. His love for Catherine has become his own brand of spirituality, and the only spirit with whom he desires a connection is hers.
