Wuthering Heights explores the nature of obsessive love through its depiction of mourning. Juxtaposed in the novel are two highly contrasted reactions to a lover's death - Hindley's hedonistic self destruction and Heathcliff's calculated, vengeful and spiritual mourning of Catherine. The two men's obsessive love in bereavement are however similar in that they both share a degree of self loathing. Hindley's ˜sorrow' is ˜of a kind that will not lament' after his wife's early death. Hindley and Frances' love is not explored in great depth but it is shown to be passionate, with the couple ˜kissing and talking nonsense by the hour.' However Bronte reveals more about the depths of Hindley's love for her in his reaction to Frances' death, his giving ˜himself up to reckless dissipation', than in the few brief scenes in which she is shown to the reader alive. In this way the character of Frances is a plot device, ˜what she was, and where she was born' is purposefully left a mystery. She is purely a catalyst for tragedy, an illustration of how low obsessive love can bring a man. Hindley is in the aftermath physically and mentally degenerated into a ˜slovenly' man with ˜all the beauty annihilated from his eyes'. The tragic and humiliating end to his life, alcoholism and gambling leaving him vulnerable to exploitation from his sworn enemy Heathcliff, transforms him from the ˜tyrannical' antagonist of the early chapters of the novel to more of a figure of pity or disgust in the reader's eye. In this tragic show of the effects of mourning in obsessive love Bronte foreshadows the agony Heathcliff feels at Cathy's death, the main crux of the plot. Heathcliff's obsessive response to Catherine's death is similar to Hindley's in that he degenerates into destructive madness, only it is more controlled. He considers ˜existence, after losing her, to be hell.' Bronte's depiction of Heathcliff's obsessive love and mourning is fused with super