'A Scamper on the Moors'
All Day Flooding, The Decomposing Dead, 3 is a Magic Number, A Ghost-Child and One Billowy, White Ocean
The Nature & Folklore Edition
☛ Content Warning
Wuthering Heights contains Gothic narrative themes and episodes including, but not limited to: paranormal activity, grief, trauma, death, domestic violence, and madness.
As I read Wuthering Heights this season, I invite you to read-along, making special note of Emily Jane Brontë’s references to the natural world: weather, seasons, flora, fauna, fungi…and also, folklore. It’s there…look closely. ♡
In each of these essays I’ll focus on a few themes I think deserve attention…
Chapter Three - Autumn 1801
As we completed the last chapter, the genteel Mr. Lockwood was dizzy and faint. Heathcliff commanded he be given a glass of brandy and finally, the housekeeper Zillah ushered him to bed.
As this season’s read-along focuses solely on Nature and folklore, I will not revisit my lengthy analyses of the furniture of Wuthering Heights, or Emily Brontë’s opinion on religion, or any of the myriad interesting themes which arise in this chapter.1
Instead, I will focus on the diarying of Catherine Earnshaw and Lockwood’s dream, in which rain, snow, peat, decaying corpses, a fir-bough, an apparition and a pyramid of books will certainly provide enough to meet my criteria.
‘Catherine Earnshaw, Her Book’ — 1777
If you read-with-me earlier this year you know Lockwood is mysteriously ushered by Zillah into a chamber she essentially confesses: gives her the creeps. His bed is a box, a literal piece of furniture that acts as its own private quarters. This box bed is where young Catherine Earnshaw slept as a child and her belongings are in it, still.
If while reading, you became a bit confused during this episode, you are not alone. As you begin to recognize Brontë’s narrative crosses through decades, the story becomes easier to decipher. I’ve seen the structure of Wuthering Heights likened to nesting dolls. One character reveals another and another. Eventually, the Story of Heathcliff will be displayed before us. I won’t lie: we’ll still have unanswered questions.
Catherine and Heathcliff are twelve and thirteen-years-old when we meet them in this chapter, or rather, it is Lockwood who is introduced to them. He discovers their story when he looks through young Catherine’s dusty tomes. She has used every spare inch of white margin on which to sketch, scrawl and record her thoughts.
All day had been flooding with rain; we could not go to church, so Joseph must needs get up a congregation in the garret…
Heathcliff, myself, and the unhappy plough-boy were commanded to take out Prayer-books, and mount. We were ranged in a row, on a sack of corn, groaning and shivering…
A diary entry written more than two decades prior provides us a glimpse into the lives of the family at Wuthering Heights. The Earnshaws are regular church-goers, rain has prevented them from traveling to town and, they grow corn. We also learn a lot about Catherine’s older brother, Hindley.
When Catherine and Heathcliff are punished for misbehaving, they plan their escape. In Chapter III Brontë provides readers with a (first-hand narration) glimpse into the budding relationship of two of English literature’s most well-recognized characters.
…my companion is impatient and proposes that we should appropriate the dairy woman’s cloak, and have a scamper on the moors, under its shelter…we cannot be damper, or colder, in the rain than we are here.
Anyone who loves the outdoors, enjoys it rain or shine. I imagine Emily Jane Brontë was likely as happy rambling in rain as she was in snow. She sauntered under warm sun and beneath the cold moon. In Wuthering Heights she creates dual characters who are as enamored with the out-of-doors as she—tell me, did you notice, she takes care not to divulge the intimate details of their wanderings. It is this omission of Nature so many illustrators, cover designers and screenwriters inaccurately construct. First-time readers are disappointed when Catherine and Heathcliff spend more time together in the kitchen than they do, rambling the moors hand-in-hand beneath moody, overcast skies. Maybe this is intentional? Maybe Brontë recognizes the power of omission in storytelling? Is less…more?
When Catherine teases that Joseph will believe his prophesy verified, she is referring to his threat that their misbehavior during his barn-loft sermon will earn them a visit from the devil (or, ‘owd Nick). Remember him casting judgement on the young widow in the last chapter—in 1801? Joseph’s hypocrisy and superstition have been on display since the late-18th century. Back then, he was the one conjuring evil forces.2
‘The Few Corpses Deposited There’ — 1801
Lockwood drifts off to sleep and dreams. It is one of the most yawn-inducing episodes in the entire novel. That’s kind of the point. Two Gothic elements bookend his dream: corpses and a ghost. Ah, yes! That gets our attention.
In Lockwood’s dream he accompanies Heathcliff’s servant, Joseph, to a sermon given by a well-known preacher at a local church. He names the dream-church (the Chapel of Gimmerden Sough) and tells readers, “I have passed it really in my walks…”
Remember, Lockwood rented the Grange at Michaelmas, so he has been exploring the countryside for at least a month before traveling to the Heights. Gimmerton (spelled as such) is located miles from Wuthering Heights. Sometimes the chapel is the chapel, sometimes the chapel is the kirk and sometimes, it is simply: church. No matter. Each of our narrators refer to the building in which the inhabitants of both the Heights and the Grange worship, located in the nearby Village of Gimmerton.
Lockwood describes the edifice and churchyard: It lies in a hollow; near a swamp, whose peaty moisture is said to answer all the purposes of embalming on the few corpses deposited there. Let’s take a moment to dissect this scene. Lockwood, an outsider (in this part of England) informs readers, the peat of the churchyard is said to answer all the purposes of embalming. Should we assume the locals have shared this information with him?
Brontë scholar, Stevie Davies explains, in her wonderful, Emily Brontë, the Artist as a Free Woman:
As Emily Brontë was writing, she could see the Church of St. Michael and All Angels from her window; it was her father’s church, and the church of her fathers.
Inside, the unhealthy edifice, the decomposing dead endured underfoot, aromatically present to the nostrils of the congregation. It was an area of deliberate darkness and breathless air, where the injunctions not to sin; the nasty consequences of sin; the doctrine of our bad beginnings, our errant journey and our sorry end were reiterated every Sunday.3 4 5
As the Brontës’ region of Haworth is readily accepted as the setting of Wuthering Heights, it can be assumed Emily Jane’s experience living within the miasma of decaying corpses contributes to this scene within Lockwood’s dream.
We’ve all heard of bog mummies—strikingly preserved, intact human specimens discovered after being buried in peat for thousands of years. A century before the publication of Wuthering Heights, a UK peat cutter severed the preserved foot of a female buried 6-feet beneath peat near his home (she is known as Amcotts Moor Woman).
The curious, well-read Brontës certainly would have known of this discovery and I don’t doubt Emily was fascinated by the concept. When I began reading about peat preservation, I was intrigued by a detail I discovered in an article published by the National Museum of Denmark. We all understand that acidic conditions and a peat bog’s oxygen-deprived layers contribute to its preservation properties, but I did not know this:
The corpse must be sunk in water or dug into the ground and covered quickly. In addition, the deposition of the body must occur when the bog water is cold in the winter or early spring, otherwise the process of decay can begin.6
We will come back to this concept later in the novel, when Brontë describes Catherine Earnshaw’s wish to be buried, on a green slope, in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants [may climb over it] from the moor; and peat mould almost buries it. In fact, we’ll explore death and burial customs throughout the novel.
An Importunate Branch & A Pyramid of Books
The tenant of Thrushcross Grange finds himself begrudgingly staying overnight in a box bed once owned by Catherine Earnshaw. He doesn’t explicitly know this, but he drifts off to sleep reading scribbling of a girl named Catherine—Catherine Earnshaw, Catherine Heathcliff, Catherine Linton.
When his bizarre dream about a sermon in the Chapel of Gimmerden Sough morphs into a violent interaction with a ghost-child at his window, he draws the attention of his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff.
I believe I read this episode a number of times before I realized it is a dream within a dream. Again, my preconceived notion of the novel encouraged me to desire a ghostly interaction and I yearned a bit prematurely: Lockwood simply misinterprets rattling of a fir tree against his window as an attempt to gain entry by a moaning apparition. He explains, he awoke in the box bed to discover an annoying rattling of a fir-bough. Wishing to silence it, he attempts to unhasp the casement only to remember (in his dream-like stupor) while awake, he’d observed it is soldered. Using dream-logic, he shatters the glass to grab the importunate branch, which turns out to be the fingers of a little ice-cold hand!
Having been raised in an area steeped in superstition and ghost stories, the first time I read the novel I believed Lockwood was met with a ghost—the wandering spirit of Catherine Earnshaw. Honestly, it didn’t even faze me. It is the bit about running her tiny wrist to and fro over shards of broken glass and soaking the bed with her blood which made me question her validity as a ghost.
Is Catherine Earnshaw a Ghost?
Lockwood describes her as everything from the creature to eventually, the little fiend, minx, a changeling, and wicked little soul. As readers we assume a figure floating (or we imagine so) outside one’s window must be a ghost rather than say, a monster. A ghost is a soul—the essential spirit of a person, which detaches from the body of the recently deceased. According to scriptural beliefs, the soul of one who has accepted Christ as her savior is welcomed into Heaven; a non-believer will be damned to Hell.
Emily Brontë was raised in an Evangelical home, yet Patrick Brontë encouraged all of his children to form their own beliefs. Brontë scholar Marianne Thormählen reminds us, “Emily, so pure a romantic that she reminded (poet and critic) Matthew Arnold of Byron, cared nothing about Christianity, broad or narrow.”7
Gothic English literature emerged as a reaction to the Enlightenment and Emily Jane Brontë was there for it. Scholars estimate Brontë was in the act of writing Wuthering Heights between 1845-1846, and her previous poetry is rich with imagery found in the novel…including dead lovers. Her childhood affection for ghost stories, ballads and folklore certainly inspired her poetry and prose.8 Wuthering Heights is a culmination of all these themes. Brontë’s uptight Lockwood believes himself the intellectual elite, yet he is so disturbed by a dream, for a brief moment he abandons all reason, believing he has had a literal encounter with the undead.
Brontë’s Heathcliff, in his shirt and trousers with a candle dripping over his fingers, his face as white as the wall behind him, has no doubt. He will eventually tell Nelly, “I know that ghosts have wandered on earth.”
Why a Pyramid of Books?
While it may seem random Lockwood arranges Catherine’s own books in the shape of a pyramid against [the wailing ghost-child], I think Emily Brontë is conjuring a staple of superstition: numbers. Specifically, the number 3.
Verbal charms of Europe have some very consistent features: narration, instruction (often, tucked into the narration) and a number (often, three or a multiple of three).9
“Let me in—let me in…”
The (ghost-child’s) fingers relaxed, I snatched mine through the hole, hurriedly piled the books up in a pyramid against it, and stopped my ears to exclude the lamentable prayer.
“Let me in!”
Can’t you imagine Lockwood, trapped within a dream, fastened inside an unfamiliar box bed, sequestered inside a chamber known for its queer goings on? Is he muttering a protection prayer, calling on the Holy Trinity? We have only his own retelling of the circumstance, don’t we? Maybe Brontë is inviting readers to consider the notion that even rigid intellectuals are capable of adopting supernatural or scriptural beliefs?
The ghost-child cries “Let me in!” three times—a lamentable prayer—to gain entrance to the world of the living. Lockwood declares, “Begone!” the briefest of incantations, and he forms a four-sided figure (each side of which, is a triangle).
Who offers him salvation? Heathcliff. Heathcliff arrives to discover someone is inside Catherine’s box bed. Unfortunately, it is not Catherine.
Whether Emily Jane is embracing European superstition or Yorkshire’s fascination with Ancient Egypt (spanning the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries), I have made copious notes about Brontë’s use of the number 3 in the novel and I look forward to exploring this a lot more in future essays.
‘One Billowy, White Ocean’
I’ve read Wuthering Heights many times. And, when I decided to focus my attention on the Nature and folkloric themes in the novel it was because I felt sad that many of the participants in my last read-along couldn’t unearth evidence of much-promised walks on the moors.
Reading the novel again-and-again, finding scholarly criticism to enhance my study, I am encouraged to dig deeper. While researching Emily Jane’s desk box and little stool, I found, Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture, by Deborah Lutz. Lutz writes:
Catherine and Heathcliff’s premortem love story never really gets told…in this way, their love shares qualities with the natural world in the novel, which is never much described for the reader (60).
Margaret Homan, Lutz reminds us, points out the very absence of Nature proves how central it is to the novel. Homan recognizes, “both Brontë and her Cathy (in diarying) avoid description of nature or of events in nature because there is no way to name nature without making it secondary. Primary nature neither needs to be nor can be referred to (60).”
Lutz expands on this: “Forced to imagine what is so liberating and magical about those moors, the reader must also construct a fantasy about what a Heathcliff and Catherine happy together would be like.” Invisible, the love is described by Lutz as spacious and mythic. That emptiness requires filling—and so, readers conjure that which Bronte has omitted.10
These observations came to mind while I was completing my most recent reading of this chapter. Keep in mind: the first three chapters set up a circumstance under which Mr. Lockwood invites Nelly Dean to tell him The Story of Heathcliff. These chapters (One through Three) provide readers with one of only a few glimpses into Catherine and Heathcliff rambling on the moors—the ramble ends in punishment and they are twelve and thirteen-years-old (hardly, lovers).
At the end of the chapter, Heathcliff visits the moors. It’s not very romantic, though. He is simply helping navigate his tenant back toward Thrushcross Grange. Lockwood confesses:
My landlord hallooed for me to stop, ere I reached the bottom of the garden, and offered to accompany me across the moor. It was well he did, for the whole hill-back was one billowy, white ocean, the swells and falls not indicating corresponding rises and depressions in the ground: many pits, at least, were filled to a level; and entire ranges of mounds, the refuse of the quarries,11 blotted from the chart which my yesterday’s walk left pictured in my mind.
I had remarked on one side of the road, at intervals of six or seven yards, a line of upright stones, continued through the whole length of the barren: these were erected, and daubed with lime, on purpose to serve as guides in the dark, and also, when a (snow) fall, like the present, confounded the deep swamps on either hand with the firmer path: but excepting a dirty dot pointing up here and there, all traces of their existence had vanished; and (Heathcliff) my companion found it necessary to warn my frequently to steer to the right or left, when I imagined I was following, correctly, the windings of the road.
Here we have our first, rather unromantic, description of the moorland surrounding Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff navigates it with ease—even when hazards like peat bogs have been obscured by snow. Heathcliff’s very name links him with the natural world. He is of it. Nature swallows Lockwood, sinking him up to his neck in snow.
On Our Next Ramble…
Lockwood invites his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, to tell him The Story of Heathcliff and we learn more about a child who was once as uncomplaining as a lamb and grew into a man as rough as a saw-edge, and hard as whinstone!
If you missed the Spring 2025 Read-Along, the essays have been unlocked; they are available for FREE as a Readers Guide. My essays are lengthy and quite detailed (the longest is a 38 minute read). They are a good fit for first-time readers.
Is there anything else you’d like to discuss about this chapter? You are welcome to start a conversation in the Comments—ask questions, share rabbit holes, additional insights, and whatever else you might wish to contribute to this season’s read-along.
Thank you for being here—your presence makes us a community. ♡
You may preview my book guide and read a summary of Chapters 1-3 on the Read With Me page. The book guide includes a 9-week (9 essay) collection of detailed analyses of the novel.
I wrote about the devil in Wuthering Heights a few months ago (includes spoilers); Old Nick is conjured so often, he deserves a place on my character list.
Davies, Stevie. “In at the Window.” Emily Brontë, The Artist as a Free Woman. Carcanet, 1983.
Patrick Brontë served as perpetual curate from 1820-1861.
Learn More: “Salvation in the Cesspit: The Brontës, Sanitary Science and Redemptive Contagion” in Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society
“The Chemistry of the Bog Bodies.” The Woman from Huldermose (The Early Iron Age—Prehistoric Period (until 1050 AD)). The National Museum of Denmark.
Thormählen, Marianne. The Brontës and Religion. United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
I’ve been scrambling down a number of rabbit holes on this topic…more on this later. ♡
Bilardi, C. R. The Red Church or the Art of Pennsylvania German Braucherei. Pendraig Publishing, 2009.
Lutz, Deborah. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Refuse from quarries (also called spoil heaps or, tailings) includes crushed waste rock, water, and trace amounts of minerals.
Cover Image: Snow Scene, date and artist unknown, The Royal Oldham Hospital
Another fascinating episode -- thank you! That 2nd dream: our preconceived notions and yearnings, yes...and...perhaps Emily Bronte deliberately whipping up a brew of nested dreams to confuse and intoxicate Lockwood and the reader. While we can rationalize, and reread, that it was simply a fir tree against the window, Lockwood and the reader aren't dreaming and reading in a vacuum. Together, we're in Cathy’s room and bed, and at the Heights, a space soaked with memory and history and "odd notions" that could be acting as a conduit.
A stretch, but this was a fun exercise... You mentioned the years that Emily was thought to have written WH. If I calculated correctly, part of the writing journey would have related to her profected 4th house (ancient astrology timing technique) which could be interpreted "gothically" as being related to themes of a "haunted homeplace."
Another fun exercise: 70X7 (repeated many times) = 490. Numerology --> 4 + 9 + 0 = 13 (Death Card in Tarot and a number full of superstition). 13 --> 1 + 3 = 4 (4th house...haunted homeplace)
"Verbal charms of Europe have some very consistent features: narration, instruction (often, tucked into the narration) and a number (often, three or a multiple of three)...The ghost-child cries “Let me in!” three times—a lamentable prayer—to gain entrance to the world of the living." Ahhh, this reminded me of the name-invocation folklore of my childhood such as saying the name "Bloo__ M___" three times would summon her through a bathroom mirror. (Notice I won't even spell it out completely once much less say it thrice lol.) Or, Beetlejuice. Also reminds me of simple knot spells and other charms. Looking forward to your exploration of 3 in upcoming essays.
PS. Miasma is such a great word.