Let me in—let me in!

“Let me in—let me in!” is the desperate plea of Catherine Earnshaw's ghost at the window of Wuthering Heights, first heard by Mr. Lockwood in his nightmare and later echoed by Heathcliff in his anguished longing. It crystallizes the novel's central drama of separation, haunting, and the refusal of the dead to be forgotten.

The Nightmare at the Window

The phrase first appears during Mr. Lockwood's second nightmare, when he lies in the oak-panelled bed at Wuthering Heights. He hears the gusty wind and the driving snow, and the fir bough tapping against the lattice. Resolving to silence it, he rises and tries to unhasp the casement, but the hook is soldered into the staple. He knocks his knuckles through the glass and stretches out his arm to seize the importunate branch. Instead, his fingers close on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand. A most melancholy voice sobs, “Let me in—let me in!” When he asks who she is, the voice replies, shiveringly, “Catherine Linton,” adding, “I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!” Lockwood notes that he had read “Earnshaw” twenty times for “Linton,” a slip that points to the ghost's true identity. Terror makes him cruel: he pulls the wrist onto the broken pane and rubs it to and fro till the blood runs down and soaks the bedclothes, yet the voice still wails, “Let me in!” and maintains its tenacious grip. When he finally lets go and piles books in a pyramid against the window, the cry continues, and the voice mourns, “It is twenty years… I've been a waif for twenty years!” The nightmare ends only when Heathcliff, hearing Lockwood's yell, comes to the chamber.

Heathcliff's Echo of the Plea

After Lockwood recounts his nightmare, Heathcliff is visibly shaken. When Lockwood leaves the chamber, he witnesses Heathcliff get onto the bed, wrench open the lattice, and burst into an uncontrollable passion of tears. “Come in! come in!” he sobs. “Cathy, do come. Oh, do—once more! Oh! my heart's darling! hear me this time, Catherine, at last!” The spectre gives no sign of being, but the snow and wind whirl wildly through, blowing out the light. Lockwood, half angry at having listened, draws off, his compassion overcoming his judgment of the folly. This moment reveals that the plea is not only the ghost's but also Heathcliff's own—a reciprocal cry across the boundary of death.

The Plea as a Curse and a Prayer

Heathcliff's relationship to the phrase is bound up with his curse upon Catherine. When Ellen Dean tells him that Catherine died with a sweet smile, her latest ideas wandering back to pleasant early days, Heathcliff cries out with frightful vehemence, “May she wake in torment!… Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living; you said I killed you—haunt me, then!” He prays, “Be with me always—take any form—drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” and declares, “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!” The plea to be let in is thus inverted: Heathcliff begs Catherine to haunt him, to remain present, even at the cost of his own sanity. His desire for her return is so consuming that he describes the eighteen years after her death as a slow killing, “not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths,” beguiled by the spectre of a hope.

The Grave and the Haunting

Heathcliff's obsession with the plea extends to his desecration of Catherine's grave. On the day she was buried, a fall of snow came, and in the evening he went to the churchyard. Alone, conscious that two yards of loose earth were the sole barrier between them, he said to himself, “I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I'll think it is this north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep.” He got a spade from the tool-house and began to delve with all his might, scraping the coffin and working with his hands until the wood commenced cracking about the screws. As he wrenched at it, he heard a sigh close at his ear and felt the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. He knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by, yet he felt that Cathy was there, not under him but on the earth. A sudden sense of relief flowed through him, and he relinquished his labour of agony, turned consoled, and re-filled the grave. Her presence remained with him and led him home. This experience, he later tells Ellen, removed the strange feeling that had begun after her death, though he still felt her everywhere—outside the window, sliding back the panels, entering the room, or resting her head on the same pillow as when she was a child.

The Plea as a Motif of Unfinished Longing

The phrase recurs as a motif of unfinished longing that shapes the novel's ending. After Heathcliff's death, the country folks swear on the Bible that he walks, and there are those who speak of meeting him near the church, on the moor, and even within the house. The old man by the kitchen fire affirms he has seen two of them looking out of the chamber window on every rainy night since his death. Ellen Dean dismisses these as idle tales, yet she herself encounters a little boy crying terribly at the turn of the Heights, with a sheep and two lambs before him, an odd thing that hints at the persistence of the supernatural. The plea “Let me in—let me in!” thus becomes the novel's emblem of the dead who refuse to be shut out, and of the living who cannot stop calling them back. It is the sound of a love that defies the boundaries of life and death, and of a grief that will not be consoled.