Wuthering Heights and a Werewolf...and a Zombie too by Ralph S. King

Lockwood settles himself in an ‘old-fashioned boxbed’, which – built around a small window – ‘formed a little closet’. A servant leads Lockwood upstairs to a chamber, telling him it’s a room her ‘master had an odd notion about … and never let anybody lodge there willingly.’ During Lockwood’s second visit, the weather turns hostile: ‘on that bleak hilltop, the earth was hard with a black frost and the air made me shiver through every limb.’Ī snowstorm starts up and – as Lockwood would likely die trying to navigate through the drifts back to the house he has rented – Heathcliff reluctantly allows him to stay the night. He also discovers Wuthering Heights has its ghosts. Inside Lockwood finds a basic and cheerless dwelling and far-from-welcoming residents. He remarks on the house’s fortress-like qualities: ‘the architect had the foresight to build it strong the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, the corners defended with large jutting stones.’Īrriving at the Heights, Lockwood states, ‘Before passing the threshold I paused to admire a quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front and especially about the principal door, above which, among a wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, I detected the date 1500 and the name Hareton Earnshaw.’ Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times.’Īs he approaches Wuthering Heights on his first visit to his landlord, Lockwood notices ‘the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house and a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way as if craving the alms of the sun.’ ‘Wuthering’, Lockwood tells us, ‘is a provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Used to a kinder landscape and gentler social codes, the soon-shaken Lockwood struggles to comprehend Wuthering Heights and its inhabitants. Stronghold-like, it repels outsiders and traps its inmates in a prison of intense passions, deadly jealousies and murderous resentments.Įmily Brontë first shows us the house through the eyes of Heathcliff’s southern tenant Lockwood.

Yes, we have the strong-willed Cathy, the callously passionate Heathcliff, the robust yet sullen Hareton, but the house looms over the novel in a way perhaps no human character can.Ĭovered with gothic carvings isolated high on a gloomy moor lashed by wind, snow, sleet and rain the house of Wuthering Heights sets the harsh, claustrophobic tone that permeates the book.

In Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights, one of the most important characters is the house of Wuthering Heights itself.

Wuthering Heights and a Werewolf...and a Zombie too by Ralph S. King