Wuthering Heights

01A Stranger Awakens the Sleeping Moors

Our journey begins not with the lovers themselves, but through the eyes of an outsider, a wealthy gentleman named Mr. Lockwood, who has decided to rent a grand estate called Thrushcross Grange in the remote Yorkshire moors. The year is 1801, and Lockwood is seeking isolation, fancying himself a bit of a misanthrope who wants to escape the busy, demanding society of the city. He decides to pay a visit to his new landlord, a man named Mr. Heathcliff, who lives a few miles away at an ancient, sturdy farmhouse known as Wuthering Heights. From the very moment Lockwood steps onto the property, you can almost feel the biting wind and the sheer hostility of the environment. The word "wuthering" itself is a local term used to describe the fierce, tumultuous winds that batter the house during storms. The architecture of the building reflects this harshness, with narrow windows deeply set into the stone and large, grotesque carvings hovering over the main door. When Lockwood meets Heathcliff, he is immediately struck by a fascinating contradiction. Heathcliff looks like a dark-skinned gypsy, rough and weathered, yet he carries himself with the dress and manners of a gentleman, albeit a deeply sullen and unwelcoming one. Heathcliff is not pleased to see his new tenant. He is gruff, suspicious, and openly hostile, offering Lockwood the barest minimum of politeness. Entering the house, Lockwood finds the interior just as bleak as the exterior. There is no warmth, no cheerful fire, and certainly no hospitality. Instead, he is nearly attacked by a pack of vicious, unsociable dogs the moment Heathcliff leaves him alone in the room. Despite this disastrous first impression, Lockwood, in his profound social awkwardness and stubbornness, decides to return to Wuthering Heights the very next day. This second visit sets the stage for the dark mysteries that permeate the novel. As Lockwood arrives, a massive snowstorm begins to fall, rapidly covering the moors and making travel completely impossible. He is forced to seek shelter inside, where he shares a bizarre and incredibly tense dinner with the household's inhabitants. He meets a beautiful but fiercely bitter young woman, who he mistakenly assumes is Heathcliff's wife, and a rough, uneducated young man named Hareton, whom he assumes is Heathcliff's son. Every attempt Lockwood makes at polite conversation ends in magnificent failure, met only with glares, snapping insults, and an atmosphere of suffocating hatred. No one in this house seems to love or even tolerate one another. Forced to stay the night due to the raging blizzard outside, Lockwood is sneaked into a forbidden, forgotten bedroom by a servant named Zillah. This bedroom is dominated by a massive, old-fashioned oak-paneled bed built like a large wooden closet. Seeking warmth and privacy, Lockwood climbs inside, slides the panels shut, and begins to examine his surroundings. He notices names scratched deeply into the paint on the window ledge: Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, and Catherine Linton. He also finds margins of old books filled with diary entries detailing the miserable childhood of a girl named Catherine and her companion, Heathcliff, suffering under the tyrannical rule of someone named Hindley. As Lockwood drifts off to sleep, the oppressive atmosphere of the house invades his subconscious. He suffers a series of terrifying nightmares. In the final, most horrifying dream, he hears a branch tapping against the windowpane. In his sleep, he reaches out to snap the branch, but instead, his fingers close around the ice-cold hand of a ghost. A voice wails from the darkness outside the window, crying out, "Let me in! I am come home! I have lost my way on the moor!" The ghost identifies herself as Catherine Linton. Paralyzed by absolute terror, the dream-Lockwood rubs the ghost’s wrist against the broken glass to free himself, a shocking moment of brutality born of pure fear. His screams awaken the house, and Heathcliff bursts into the room, his face pale and contorted with an emotion Lockwood cannot comprehend. When Lockwood explains the dream and mentions the name Catherine, Heathcliff’s reaction is entirely unexpected and deeply tragic. Instead of being angry at Lockwood, Heathcliff throws the window wide open to the freezing snowstorm, tears streaming down his face, and begs the empty, howling darkness for the ghost to return. "Come in! come in!" he sobs in pure agony. "Cathy, do come. Oh, do—once more—Oh! my heart's darling! hear me this time, Catherine, at last!" Witnessing this raw, bleeding grief shatters Lockwood's perception of his landlord. This is not just a grumpy, misanthropic old man; this is a human being fundamentally broken by a loss so profound it defies the boundaries of death. The next morning, as soon as the snow allows, Lockwood flees Wuthering Heights, trudging back to the safety and comfort of Thrushcross Grange. He catches a severe chill from the journey and is confined to his bed for weeks. Bored, sick, and intensely curious about the madness he has just witnessed, he begs his housekeeper, a sensible, observant woman named Nelly Dean, to tell him the history of Wuthering Heights and its deeply troubled inhabitants. Nelly, who has worked for both families and witnessed the entire tragedy unfold from the very beginning, pulls up a chair, takes out her sewing, and begins to weave the dark, spellbinding tale of Heathcliff and Catherine.