Wuthering Heights: In Defense of Lockwood and Nellie, or The Two Witnesses, or A Question of Salt

It is easy to forget that there is a real ghost in Wuthering Heights.

From the beginning, Lockwood adopts a world-weary tone. Everything he does is mentioned casually, as though he might just as easily have chosen to do something else; he is “too stupefied to be curious” about the rumors of a ghost that surround the room he is to sleep in at Wuthering Heights, and leans against the window of his room in “vapid listlessness.” His descriptions of the household in chapter one are those of a list-maker and cataloguer, a shrewd and sophisticated observer of the human scene, if not humans specifically. Falling asleep after leafing through an old diary of Catherine’s, he is awakened by an unwelcome visitor who tests his apathy:

“'Let me in - let me in!' 'Who are you?' I asked, struggling, meanwhile, to disengage myself. 'Catherine Linton,' it replied, shiveringly (why did I think of Linton? I had read Earnshaw twenty times for Linton) - 'I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!' As it spoke, I discerned, obscurely, a child's face looking through the window. Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes: still it wailed, 'Let me in!' and maintained its tenacious gripe, almost maddening me with fear…."

At this point, his host climbs up to the room and demands to know who allowed him to stay there:

'It was your servant Zillah,' I replied, flinging myself on to the floor, and rapidly resuming my garments. 'I should not care if you did, Mr. Heathcliff; she richly deserves it. I suppose that she wanted to get another proof that the place was haunted, at my expense. Well, it is - swarming with ghosts and goblins!”

Notice how we are convinced, through the vivid detail and believable way that the normally level-headed Lockwood reacts to this supernatural event, that it did take place. Now, observe the entirely different way that Nellie also relates a ghost story:

“But the country folks, if you ask them, would swear on the Bible that [Heathcliff’s ghost] WALKS: there are those who speak to having met him near the church, and on the moor, and even within this house. Idle tales, you'll say, and so say I. Yet that old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two on 'em looking out of his chamber window on every rainy night since his death:- and an odd thing happened to me about a month ago. I was going to the Grange one evening - a dark evening, threatening thunder - and, just at the turn of the Heights, I encountered a little boy with a sheep and two lambs before him; he was crying terribly; and I supposed the lambs were skittish, and would not be guided.”

'What is the matter, my little man?' I asked.

'There's Heathcliff and a woman yonder, under t' nab,' he blubbered, 'un' I darnut pass 'em.'”

Lockwood confidently gives us his own highly emotional reaction; Nellie humbly backs up her story with the tales of other “country folks.” So we get two overlapping believable narrators of different kinds throughout the novel, each enhancing the credibility of the other with their similar stories. Two witnesses in agreement are always better than one, even though each must be taken with a sprinkling of salt.

Nellie also surpasses Lockwood in an important area – she is better at understanding people than he is. She has the housekeeper’s power of observation, and she knows the family, whereas Lockwood makes mistakes when he tries to make guesses about the family’s relations in the early chapters. Nellie is also highly moral and conventional and does not get caught up in emotion easily. We need her, therefore, to explain the family relationships to us.

So if both narrators are reliable, why have them at all? Why not tell the story through an omniscient narrator? Two reasons: not only do they serve to keep the reader’s skepticism at bay, but their biases affect the way we read the novel, rendering it multi-faceted. What the multiple narrators and voices in the book do is to allow us to filter the story differently, depending on what our mind grabs hold of on a particular reading. Like a diamond, you can hold it one way, and it appears to be a moral tale (Nelly’s point of view: passion suspect, Heathcliff morally repugnant); hold it another, and it reads like a bizarre tale of goings-on in the remote Yorkshire moors (Lockwood’s point of view); looked at from yet another point of view – Heathcliff’s -- passion must be obeyed, however destructive it might be. (I don’t know why we don’t just consider all characters narrators – their dialogue is simply narration sifted through someone else’s narration, after all.)

As for the wisdom of having a mother and daughter character with the same name (to avoid confusion, I’m following here the critical practice of calling the mother Catherine and the daughter Cathy), it is part of the puzzle of the novel, that they are alike yet different. In the end, Cathy becomes part of the peaceful solution, and she remains a reminder of Catherine, but not her – she is in in Heathcliff’s proximity but not his possession.