The Theme of Loss: Wuthering Heights and Tess of the D'Urbervilles

In Wuthering Heights and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the authors present a female character’s displacement from home as a loss of an aspect of her identity: perhaps suggesting the view that women lose some of their cultural identity when married, as well as their family identity – their last name. Cathy and Tess both leave their homes for their future husbands, ‘betraying’ an aspect of themselves, their origins; both female characters also face dire consequences due to their removal from their origins, such as death and madness in the long-term, but also other aspects of their identity – such as Cathy’s ‘savage’ nature, and Tess’ naivety. In Wuthering Heights, Cathy faces a turning point when she is first allowed inside Thrushcross Grange and meets the Lintons, where Heathcliff isn’t; by crossing the boundary here, not only is she betraying Heathcliff who is her self-declared self – ‘I am Heathcliff’, but also her own homeland. The clear liminality of the novel, and both houses’ descriptions focusing on ‘large windows’ and ‘locked gates’ suggests that Cathy is disrupting the natural seclusion of the houses, and changes because of this, arriving back at Wuthering Heights ‘instead of a wild, hatless little savage jumping into the house, there lighted from a handsome black pony a very dignified person’. It could be said that Cathy has begun to realise that she will marry Linton, as a marriage to Heathcliff would ‘degrade [her]’ and so aspects of her character are reformed and made ‘dignified’ – suggesting that she is making a false change, which we are intended to look on with betrayal, and sympathy for Heathcliff. Similarly, she faces a similar crumbling of identity when she leaves the liminal space of her home and enters that of the D’Urbervilles and meets Alec – not only is her innocence lost from her, through her rape, but she also seems to lose both the originality of her features and her social identity, in the ‘resemblance’ of Tess to the D’Urberville women’s portraits, which Angel notes – perhaps suggesting that her identity is being corrupted and lost further, now that Tess is married to Alec, another man.