Emily Bronte’s Mr. Lockwood: A Revaluation

Abstract

It is difficult to believe that any artist capable of exercising such obvious conscientiousness in her work, as does Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights, could allow for the existence of such a conspicuously discordant or useless figure as that of Mr. Lockwood, her novel's narrator. If he is, in fact, present merely for the sake of supplying Mrs, Dean with a listener for her story, a "personified audience," then why must Bronte dwell so painfully long upon his introduction to the Heights, and worse, make it necessary for the reader to endure his leaving for London and subsequent return before the story of Heathcliff and Catherine has run its course? Or, if her intention clearly was to make a 'motif' out of Catherine's beauty and Lockwood’s complacent susceptibility, [but]… the intention was scrapped," then why does Bronte insist upon dredging up that suggestion through almost every scene the narrator appears in, up to his return in chapter thirty-two? … and I bit my lip, in spite; at having thrown away the chance I might have had of doing something besides staring at its [Cathy II's] smiting beauty. This sort of questionable handling of Mr. Lockwood is just a sampling of the great amounts of disparaging commentary heaped upon him, and the conscientious reader need only examine C. P. Sanger's fascinating essay dealing with the structure of Wuthering Heights to determine the high seriousness of Bronte's craftsmanship, making suspicious the validity of most critical commentaries dealing with Lockwood.