I love the dialogue in this, my heart went out too Catherine

I don't think Catherine can be perceived as weak. I feel extremely drawn to her and I want to think I understand her. Catherine throuout the movie was a frail, shy girl who believed that all it takes to attract love is to obey, be good and wait for it patiently. She was the one who believed heartily in victorian virtues, and accepted them with love, as they were exercised on her by her father, whom she wanted to believe loved her and did what was best for her. Her extreme trust in him in shown as she daily helped him with his boots. There she was totally submissive, but also happy. She did believe that this was the way of the world, and women were supposed to be the way she was molded to be. She believed it was more natural for them to giggle and daydream, than challenge and reach towards independence, trusted her providers, had faith in their love, and never questionned it. All she received, before she met Morris, seemed to be all she thought she deserved, all that was due, and if she ever wanted more, it would be granted upon her as a medal for her patience and virtuosity: in other words, for her inner strenght invested in maintaining the status quo. She might seem a little childlish and insecure at the beginning of the story, but so is any person with no worries at all. Whose mind is clear. As she met Morris, her theory concerning life seemed to be right and attractive to him. If only Morris was a little different, and Catheines father more loving, the story would have ended differently as so our judgement of her values. It would have been just another nostalgic story of a girl with neither a personality nor real problems, living in a sheltered world long gone. It would have been another forgetful old fashioned romance. But thanks to those subtle flaws in these gentlemen's nature, we are forced to look at Catherine's case from a different perspective. She is no different than we are today. She simply believes in what she was taught, and holds to it as a way of winning love: both, her fathers, as Morris'.
She proves her strength and resillence by enduring the disillusionment, and at the end, not becoming bitter. For at the end, we see a woman whose life was entirely submitted to the idea of gaining the ultimate feeling, consciously gave it up. The end of the movie is very different from the Olivia de Havilland version, it is less focused on revenge. There isn't any, actually. Morris in not being left outside the house in the rain, crying for Catherine, but gently asked to abandon the pursuit. Catherine is not cold, cynical and overly aware of her flaws, but reflective and mature. Profoundly different. Wise.
The whole Agnieszka Holland's story can be interpreted as visual dissertation on a nature of romantic love. Catherine stands for traditional concept of love being granted in exchange for submissiveness and pure heart. A we get to know the people whom she expects it from, we see that they are unable to provide her with it. They are weak and somewhat shallow, do not think of her and her investment very highly, not to say have little respect to her for letting herself go so easily in exchange for a mere promise of future love. They also are unable to be loved the way Catherine wants to love, that is thorugh idealization. Catherine has no other interests and passions that the one to gain what she thinks is the ultimate destiny of a woman. I do respect her though, for even if we might think that her approach to things was naive and unrealistic, one learns life and reality through experience, and she, living the life of a wealthy heiress, was denied this lesson. She was denied reality, as we can assume deliberately by her father, who did this to punish her for "killing" her mother (who died shortly after her birth), and protect himself from being exposed as an unloving parent. She still, being given such a mediocre basis, manages to emancipate herself emotionally and grow. In the field of romantic love Catherine looses, for she is unable to find out the real nature of any of those mens feelings at the right time, therefore prevent them from hurting her so deeply. She is unable to see through her own imaginantion, for she has never before looked into reality and neither really got to know the nature of those she loved. But while having lost this frame of mind, she wins, in a way by not turning herself into a bitter spinster, but, as we are suggested, conciously choosing singledom, therefore independence. By this move she chose to have no shield of illusion between herself and the world. Which was, and still is, an extremely courageous thing to do.