[Said by Catherine:] I am Heathcliff.

Catherine Earnshaw’s declaration occurs in Emily Brontë’s novel *Wuthering Heights* (1847), during Catherine’s intimate conversation with Nelly Dean after Catherine has married Edgar Linton. Reflecting on her bond with Heathcliff—her childhood companion and the novel’s central outsider—Catherine tries to explain that her attachment to Heathcliff is not merely romantic preference but something elemental and identity-defining. The line comes amid her conflicted reasoning about why she chose Edgar for social security and status while insisting that her deepest self remains inseparable from Heathcliff, a claim that foreshadows the destructive consequences of her divided loyalties.

“I am Heathcliff” expresses an extreme vision of love and kinship as ontological unity: Catherine claims that Heathcliff is not an external beloved but part of her very being. The statement collapses boundaries between self and other, suggesting a bond prior to social roles, property, and moral convention. In the novel’s Gothic and Romantic framework, this fusion is both exalted and ominous—an assertion of authentic nature against the constraints of class and marriage, yet also a refusal of separateness that fuels obsession, jealousy, and revenge. The line crystallizes the book’s central tension between social identity and elemental passion.