Reading the Room: Seeing and Atmosphere in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

In the very first chapter of Wuthering Heights, the reader is introduced to Lockwood and his excursion to Wuthering Heights is narrated in full detail. The reader realizes that Lockwood, in his naivety, has seriously misjudged his first visit and, contrary to Lockwood, finds the whole interaction with the residents of the Heights quite strange. The reader, essentially, interprets the situation differently than Lockwood. It is this very strangeness, that previous scholarship has alluded to but somehow failed to satisfactorily question and assess, that is analyzed in this paper. Comparing and combining Gernot Böhme’s essay, “Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics” with James Elkins book, The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing, and finally applying the combination of the two theories to the first two chapters of Wuthering Heights, this paper answers the following question: why is the atmosphere of the initial scene of Wuthering Heights strange to the reader and not to Lockwood? The main claim of the paper is that the reciprocally affectual relationship that connects seeing and atmosphere causes the discrepancy in the respective gazes of the reader and Lockwood and makes reader-identification with Lockwood extremely short. Böhme comments on the atmosphere that exists between the object and the subject and Elkins theorizes about the active nature of seeing, and how there exists a connection between the object and the subject, a connection that is dependent on both the object and subject, rendering both sides equally active. The combination of the theories helps to assess the strangeness of the first two chapters of the novel. Both theories are based on reciprocity and it is this very aspect that is examined and then applied to Wuthering Heights in order to make sense of the pervading atmosphere in the initial scenes and its receptance.

Keywords

• brontë
• atmosphere
• seeing
• lockwood
• reader