A window in Wuthering Heights can promise reunion, divide an outsider from a household, or mark the distance between a remembered childhood and an adult life. Read two scenes together, keeping the voices that deliver them in view. This guide discusses events in chapters III and XII.
Start with a map of the voices
For these passages, keep three positions separate: Emily Brontë, the author; Lockwood, the framing narrator; and Nelly Dean, who tells much of the earlier household history to Lockwood. Within their accounts, characters speak again. A sentence can therefore reach us through several acts of telling.
This is a reading tool, not a verdict that every statement is false. Before deciding whether to trust an account, ask what its teller could observe, what they infer and what they have at stake.
Chapter III: the visitor at the window
In chapter III, Lockwood describes a nightmare in which a child identifying herself as Catherine Linton asks for entry:
Let me in—let me in!
He responds with violence at the broken pane, then blocks the opening with books. His own account includes this admission:
Terror made me cruel
The scene makes the person inside the room an agent of exclusion. It also gives us a dream reported by its dreamer, rather than a neutral account settling what exists beyond the window. Read the subsequent response of Heathcliff before turning the episode into a simple ghost-story quotation.
Reading question: How does the same opening look from the positions of someone seeking shelter, someone defending a room and someone longing for a lost person? Mark which of those positions the words actually let you enter.
Chapter XII: the window toward an earlier self
In chapter XII, Catherine’s illness and distressed recollection place the window in another situation. Speaking to Nelly, she longs for her childhood:
I wish I were a girl again
She opens the window despite Nelly’s resistance. Nelly describes her behavior as delirious and contests what she claims to see. The scene reaches us through Nelly’s account to Lockwood; Catherine’s words and Nelly’s interpretation should remain distinguishable.
Reading question: What would count as home for the person speaking here: a building, an earlier relationship, a landscape or a version of herself? Test each possibility against a particular detail before choosing one.
Compare without making the window mean only one thing
Position
Draw two simple boxes for inside and outside. Place each person where the passage locates them. Then mark who wants the boundary opened and who wants it closed.
Voice
Underline direct speech once and the narrator’s descriptions twice. Circle a word that interprets someone else’s state of mind. What evidence supports that interpretation?
Time
Distinguish the time of an event, a remembered earlier life and the later act of telling. A speaker can occupy one room while speaking toward another time.
Now write a comparison with this structure: “In chapter III, the window ___, as reported by ___. In chapter XII, it ___, as reported by ___.” Fill both blanks with an action before adding an abstract term such as freedom, haunting or exile. This keeps the interpretation attached to the scene.
A useful discussion can leave two readings in tension. The point is to show how you arrived at them and what each fails to explain. Avoid treating an isolated sentence as Brontë’s personal confession or using a character’s declaration to summarize the whole novel.
Continue with Charlotte Brontë for a different first-person reading experience, or Conrad’s Youth to compare another story told within a frame.
About these selections
Source notes identify the wording and edition used. Interpretations and exercises are Yenra’s. Follow the linked text when citing or comparing a passage.