Edgar
Like the world of Transylvania, the Gothic setting in Wuthering Heights suggests a wild and primitive landscape unconstrained by Orthodox norms. The reader is first introduced to Wuthering Heights, the house and its surroundings, as it appears to the middle class, Mr. Lockwood, on a stormy night. Thus, Lockwood serves the same role and Jonathan Harker as he is the bridge between the world of 19th century normal realities and the primeval world of Wuthering Heights. Just as Mr. Harker characterizes his trip to Transylvania as a journey between two atmospheres, entering the "thunderous one", Mr. Lockwood too is introduced to Wuthering Heights on a stormy night, a foreshadowing of the darkness to come. Mr. Lockwood has an arrangement to meet with his neighboring tenant, Mr. Heathcliff and after walking four miles in the snow, he reaches the Heights to find the gate closed. He stands "on that bleak hilltop [where] the earth was hard with a black frost, and the air made [him] shiver through every limb." (WH-p.29) In fact, the word "Wuthering, being a significant provincial adjective, [is] descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed to stormy weather," (WH-p.25) thus emphasizing the darkness and cruelty in nature. As in Dracula, the storm is a presence of sin and unnatural desires. After ejaculating that his "wretched inmates deserv[ed] perpetual isolation from [their] species of churlish inhospitality," (WH-p.29) for leaving the gate locked during a storm, Mr. Lockwood is let inside, by a woman whom he thinks is Mrs. Heathcliff. His experience here within this Gothic house in quite unpleasant, paralleling Harker's in the Count's dark castle. While waiting for Heathcliff in silence he notices how the women "kept her eyes on [him], in a cool regardless manner, exceedingly embarrassing and disagreeable." (WH-p.30) The arrival of Heathcliff "relieved" (WH-p.32) Mr. Lockwood momentarily, yet soon he became uneased by Heathcliff's "tone in which the...
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