Page 22 - GALIET ETERNITY´S LOVE´S Epitaph: Bronte IV

the auguries of red. Red. “Are they red, Nelly?... those lipwings...” (96).
What makes Wuthering Heights red with tragedy is Catherine’s choice to marry Edgar, to marry into a lapwing’s nest “for the clouds touched the swells, and it felt rain coming” (96). By choosing class over nature, she has chosen that which totally betrays and in so doing she has not only divided herself but has mortally wounded herself. Catherine’s devastating choice fills her with foreboding. “Did he [Heathcliff] shoot my lapwings, Nelly?” (96). She is the classic captured bird dwelling inside the golden cage “this feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot...” (97) or the skeleton woman whose anima has left her, “we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons” (97) or the bleeding wolf who roams the desolate deserts of Atacama in rabid starvation. Soul starved, she becomes utterly and tragically divided and disassociated with herself and fragmented into a thousand detachments: and like a plucked bird she can’t bear or tolerate to see her ‘other’ in the mirror. It’s far too painful,
“Don’t you see that face?...gazing earnestly at the mirror. And say what I could, I was incapable of making her comprehend it to be her own; so I rose and covered it with a shawl...I was summoned by a piercing shriek... the shawl had dropped from the frame...Wake up! That is the glass 3⁄4 the mirror... trembling and bewildered Catherine held me fast, but the horror gradually passed ...its paleness gave place to a glow of shame” (96 and 97).
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