Wuthering

Wuthering is the significant provincial adjective that names the atmospheric condition of the dwelling called Wuthering Heights. The novel's narrator, Mr. Lockwood, explains it directly: it is descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which the house's station is exposed in stormy weather. The word is not merely a local curiosity but the key to the entire book's climate, both literal and figurative. The house stands exposed to the full force of the north wind, and the evidence of this exposure is written on the landscape itself: a few stunted firs at the end of the house lean at an excessive slant, and a range of gaunt thorns stretch all their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. The architect, Lockwood observes, had the foresight to build the house strong against this assault, with narrow windows deeply set in the wall and corners defended with large jutting stones. The word thus names a condition of perpetual, violent exposure, and everything that happens within the house and to its people unfolds under this sign.

The Word as Architectural and Natural Force

The adjective wuthering is the first thing the reader learns about the house, and it establishes the building as a structure under siege. The pure, bracing ventilation that Lockwood notes is the positive face of the same force that slants the firs and strips the thorns. The house is built to withstand the wind, but the wind never stops. This constant atmospheric tumult is the physical counterpart to the emotional and psychological storms that will occupy the narrative. The house is not a refuge from the elements but a structure locked in permanent combat with them, and this combat is the model for the human conflicts within. The stunted firs and the gaunt thorns, all bending one way, are the landscape's permanent posture of resistance and submission, a visual emblem of lives shaped by an overpowering force. The word wuthering, then, is not decoration but diagnosis: it names the condition under which every character in the house lives, a condition of being perpetually blown upon, bent, and stripped.

The Storm Within: Passion and Anguish

The atmospheric wuthering finds its human echo in the uncontrollable passions of the house's master, Heathcliff. When Lockwood, having endured a nightmare in the oak-panelled bed, wakes the household, Heathcliff comes to the chamber and, in a moment of unbearable anguish, wrenches open the lattice and bursts into an uncontrollable passion of tears, sobbing for Catherine to come in once more. The snow and wind whirl wildly through the open window, blowing out the light, as if the storm outside and the storm inside him are the same weather. This is wuthering made human: the violent, uncontrolled, self-exposing force that cannot be contained. Later, after Catherine Earnshaw's death, Heathcliff's grief takes the form of a curse that is itself a kind of storm. Learning that she died without recognizing anyone, he cries out with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion, praying that she may not rest as long as he is living, and begging her to haunt him, to take any form, to drive him mad, rather than leave him in the abyss where he cannot find her. He dashes his head against a knotted trunk and howls not like a man but like a savage beast. The word wuthering names this quality of being: a soul perpetually exposed to a gale of feeling that will not relent.

The Haunted Wind: Ghosts and the Supernatural

The wuthering wind is also the medium of the supernatural. In Lockwood's nightmare, the storm outside becomes the vehicle for Catherine's ghost. He hears the gusty wind and the driving of the snow, and the fir bough repeating its teasing sound against the lattice. When he breaks the window to seize the branch, his fingers close instead on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand, and a melancholy voice sobs, 'Let me in—let me in!' The ghost identifies itself as Catherine Linton, come home, having lost her way on the moor. The wind and the snow are the ghost's element; they are what carries her voice and what she has been exposed to for twenty years as a waif. The wuthering that batters the living also batters the dead, and the boundary between the two is as porous as a window broken by a desperate hand. Heathcliff's own conviction of Catherine's presence is likewise bound to the wind and the weather. He tells of going to the churchyard on the day she was buried, when there came a fall of snow and it blew bleak as winter. Alone, with two yards of loose earth the sole barrier between them, he resolves to have her in his arms again, and begins to dig. He feels her presence not under the earth but on it, and the sense of relief flows through him. The wuthering world is one where the dead are not gone but merely blown about, waiting at the window, walking the moor, and the wind is the proof that they are still near.

The Storm's End: Death and the Return of Order

The wuthering that defines the house and its master finally exhausts itself in Heathcliff's death. He is found dead in the oak-panelled bed, laid on his back, his face and throat washed with rain, the bed-clothes dripping, the lattice flapping to and fro. The storm has finally entered the room and stilled the man who was its human embodiment. His eyes, which will not shut, seem to sneer, and his parted lips and sharp white teeth sneer too. Joseph, the old servant, declares that the devil has harried off his soul, and that he may have his carcass into the bargain. The word harried is itself a wuthering word: it names the violent, relentless driving that has characterized the house and its master. But with Heathcliff's death, the ancient stock is restored to its rights, and the wuthering begins to subside. The burial is conducted to the scandal of the whole neighbourhood, with only Hareton, the sexton, and six men to carry the coffin. Hareton, with a streaming face, digs green sods and lays them over the brown mould himself. Yet the wuthering does not entirely cease. The country folks swear on the Bible that Heathcliff 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 the death. The wind that gave the house its name continues to carry its ghosts, and the word wuthering remains the name for a world where the storm never fully passes, only changes its form.