Mr. Hindley Earnshaw

Hindley Catherine Earnshaw is the old master's son and rightful heir to Wuthering Heights, a man whose nature shifts dramatically across the novel's span. Initially a boy open to companionship with the foundling Mr. Heathcliff, he undergoes a mysterious three-year absence that returns him sparer, paler, and fundamentally altered in speech and dress. Upon inheriting the Heights, he becomes tyrannically opposed to Mr. Heathcliff, driven by wounded pride and an almost sadistic need to degrade the boy who once was his equal. His marriage to a gentle, nervous woman provides no restraint; instead, her expressed dislike of Mr. Heathcliff inflames his old hatred. As master, Hindley compounds his cruelty by denying Mr. Heathcliff education and forcing him into degrading farm labor. His despair at his wife's death from consumption pushes him into reckless dissipation—drinking, gambling with increasingly unsavory companions, and abandoning all moral restraint. By the novel's latter stages, his body bears the physical marks of his self-destruction: bruised, cut, weakened, a man systematically unmade by his own bitterness and excess. His downfall becomes intertwined with Mr. Heathcliff's slow ascent, as Mr. Heathcliff methodically plays upon his recklessness to strip him of his property and his dignity.