5. A Strange Way of Killing (Chapters 29–34)

The first four acts of Wuthering Heights' drama, then, have brought us to a point at which the internalisation of images becomes possible. The internal ‘story’ of mental evolution has reached a stage at which transcendence and metamorphosis is in the air, rather than acting-out and breakdown, as with the first generation. The explosive confrontations which erupted when the initial ossified Linton-Earnshaw stability was disturbed by recognition of Heathcliff and the ‘rocks beneath’, are ready to have their energies transmuted on to a new level of mental reality. During the final stage of the narrative, which takes place between September 1801 and September 1802, Lockwood's time begins to correspond with that of the inner story. The Lockwood-Heathcliff tension which has sustained the drama, struggles to resolve. The two main strands of the drama, Catherine's protracted ‘strange way of killing’ Heathcliff, and her strange upbringing of her daughter, converge with Lockwood's dawning consciousness in a single or total story, which culminates in an image of internal metamorphosis or creative thought.

To review the narrative of events carrying this final development: we remember that Lockwood leaves the moor in early spring; in September 1802, he finds himself as if by accident, in the neighbourhood of Gimmerton, and is seized by a ‘sudden impulse’ to revisit Thrushcross Grange. But he finds his source, Nelly, is at the Heights, and has been since his own departure — as if to continue with the reception of the story in his absence, on his behalf. Approaching the Heights on foot, he spies and overhears Cathy and Hareton reading a book at a window, and is immediately cognisant of their changed relationship. ‘Skulking’ in envy, he creeps to the back entrance, where Nelly (while the lovers go for a moonlight ramble) describes to him Heathcliff's ‘queer’ end three months before, simultaneous with the blossoming of the young people's relationship and the bypassing of Joseph's rul