Sufyaan Mohammed
Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights portrays the character Catherine Earnshaw as enthralled by an all-consuming, passionate, insurmountable, and destructive love. But is love really the root cause of her tragic death?

The intensity and impact of the legendary affair between Heathcliff and Catherine is unequivocal; it leaves emotional and psychological debris ricocheting around the Yorkshire moors for generations, with the two characters said to even haunt the landscape. Catherine herself proclaims that Heathcliff is “more myself than I am.”¹ On her deathbed she even asserts “you have killed me”² to Heathcliff, who then proceeds to beg her to haunt him in his desperate lamentations after her death, stating, “The murdered do haunt their murderers.”³ Brontë’s language repeatedly blurs the boundary between emotional and physical pain.

In the novel, Catherine is officially diagnosed with “brain fever.”⁴ At the end of the eighteenth century, a disease involving the inflammation of the brain was a recognized medical convention. This was initially known as “phrensy,” but gradually developed into the term “brain fever” in later medical vernacular. Real contemporary physicians believed it was possible for one to suffer from brain fever due to severe emotional stress and would potentially have diagnosed Catherine in this way. Symptoms were believed to include delirium, screaming, and erratic behavior.⁵ Catherine acquires brain fever after Heathcliff’s return, when she is married to Edgar Linton, whom she also claims to love, despite remaining evidently besotted with Heathcliff.⁶ In a rage, Edgar issues an ultimatum to Catherine, forcing her to choose between the man she regards as fundamentally part of herself, and her lawful husband. In contemporary medicine, it would be plausible to read this as a potential cause of her subsequent “brain fever”: she has just been delivered a devastating emotional shock, and, following this, she is described as indulging in “senseless, wicked rages,” even locking herself away and fasting for three days.⁷ Although she somewhat recovers, she remains permanently impaired, especially mentally, and dies two months later.

The postulation that emotional experiences can manifest in physical illness remains relevant to modern medicine. Elmer Green, a pioneer in biofeedback, highlights the importance of emotional wellbeing on health, stating that “every change in the emotional state, conscious or unconscious, is accompanied by an appropriate change in the physiological state.”⁸ Significant emotional distress has been observed to cause chest pain, a symptom usually attributed to cardiac stress or cardiovascular disorders.⁹ The loss of a loved one is also linked to an increased risk of mortality (known commonly as the widowhood effect), although in most cases it is ambiguous whether this is due to grief-related mechanisms or a combination of social, financial, and contextual factors.¹⁰ Levels of stress hormones may also increase in response to bereavement or heartbreak, and although this is an understudied area, current studies have indicated that higher cortisol levels are associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.¹¹ One such study even concluded that individuals with higher levels of urinary cortisol had a fivefold higher risk of cardiovascular death compared to those in the group with the lowest cortisol levels.¹²

It is entirely possible that the passionately chaotic love Catherine experiences is a major contributor to her death; Brontë’s depiction of love makes it difficult to distinguish emotional from physical pain. More broadly speaking, while this is not always the case in real life, Brontë’s Heathcliff and Catherine can certainly be interpreted as a dramatic lesson of the translation of emotional suffering into bodily illness.

References

1. Brontë E. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics; 2003:81.
2. Brontë E. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics; 2003:160.
3. Brontë E. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics; 2003:169.
4. Brontë E. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics; 2003:134.
5. Peterson AC. Brain fever in nineteenth-century literature: fact and fiction. Vict Stud. 1976;19(4):446-449. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3826384
6. Brontë E. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics; 2003:78-79.
7. Brontë E. Wuthering Heights. Penguin Classics; 2003:118.
8. Pert CB. Molecules of Emotion. Pocket Books; 1999:137.
9. Evstigneev SR, Wilhelm FH, Slavich GM, Blum D, Seiler A. Grief-Related Chest Pain: A Review, Conceptual Analysis, and Integrative Model. Psychophysiology. 2026;63(2):e70248. doi:10.1111/psyp.70248
10. Shor E, Roelfs DJ, Curreli M, Clemow L, Burg MM, Schwartz JE. Widowhood and mortality: a meta-analysis and meta-regression. Demography. 2012;49(2):575-606.
11. Tsai SY, Hsu JY, Lin CH, et al. Association of stress hormones and the risk of cardiovascular diseases systematic review and meta-analysis. Int J Cardiol Cardiovasc Risk Prev. 2024;23:200305. Published 2024 Jul 10. doi:10.1016/j.ijcrp.2024.200305
12. Vogelzangs N, Beekman AT, Milaneschi Y, Bandinelli S, Ferrucci L, Penninx BW. Urinary cortisol and six-year risk of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. J Clin Endocrinol Metab. 2010;95(11):4959-4964. doi:10.1210/jc.2010-0192