ABSTRACT
So begins the tale of one of literature’s most self-regarding, critically obtuse narrators: Emily Brontë’s Lockwood invites readers of Wuthering Heights to share in his metropolitan traveler’s gaze as he familiarizes himself with Yorkshire and its inhabitants, strange and wild as they turn out to be. An outsider’s view of Brontë country as both “completely removed” and a “misanthropist’s heaven” has been refl ected in critical commentary ever since the novel’s original publication in 1847. In her Editor’s Preface to the 1850 edition, Charlotte Brontë characterizes Wuthering Heights as “moorish, and wild, and knotty as a root of heath.”2 The book, she suggests, shares aspects of the land that are hard to appreciate: what Lockwood refers to as “a beautiful country” would not have seemed so to many of his contemporaries.3 As Lucasta Miller points out, the now iconic landscape of the Yorkshire moors came into view only as reception of Brontë’s novel changed over time (154). Elizabeth Gaskell opens her Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) on a similar note: it was this hostile, nonhuman terrain that shaped the imaginative resources shared by the three Brontë sisters. Haworth, writes Gaskell, is situated against the “wild, bleak moors-grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier, according to the mood of mind in which the spectator may be” (55). The moors paradoxically “suggest” a “feeling” both of being lost in too much space and of being intolerably hemmed in by the earth itself. Isolation and oppressive confi nement in relation to this “illimitable barrier” are subject to the spectator’s “mood of the mind”; consciousness in (and of) the environment functions like a Möbius strip, contributing to the notorious unreliability of Brontë’s multiple narrators.
