What happens in Chapter 2 – Lockwood's Second Visit and the Ghosts of Wuthering Heights?
Lockwood arrives back at Wuthering Heights the next day, caught in a sudden snowstorm that forces him to find shelter. His welcome is just as chilly as before: Heathcliff remains cold and uninviting, the servants are unfriendly, and the odd residents—young Cathy, Hareton Earnshaw, and Joseph—create a scene of shared resentment. With the weather worsening and no chance to leave, Lockwood is eventually directed to a bed in a room that had been locked away. There, he finds the name "Catherine" scratched into the windowsill, along with a diary tucked in the margins of old books. As he reads Catherine Earnshaw's cramped writings, he drifts into a troubled sleep. A branch scraping against the window wakes him, but in his half-dreaming state, he accidentally breaks the glass and grabs the wrist of a child-ghost who identifies herself as Catherine Linton, pleading to be let in after two decades of wandering. Lockwood screams, and Heathcliff rushes in. The chapter concludes with Heathcliff standing alone at the open window, crying out Catherine's name into the night.
Analysis
Brontë uses Chapter 2 to pull off one of the boldest shifts in Victorian fiction: a lighthearted comedy about social manners suddenly turns into Gothic horror. Lockwood's narrative voice—polished, self-mocking, and somewhat absurd—has provided a layer of irony throughout the chapter, but the dream sequence removes that layer completely. The repeated mention of "Catherine" etched into the sill marks Brontë's first clear motif of obsessive inscription: identity is literally scraped into surfaces, as if one must carve their self into the world to endure. The intertwined names—Earnshaw, Linton, Heathcliff—compressed into the window carvings subtly hint at the novel's tragic genealogical fate.
The ghost's plea to be "let in" functions on several levels: a literal haunting, Heathcliff's lingering sorrow, and the reader's own entrance into the novel's psychological depths. Lockwood's harsh act of dragging the child's wrist across broken glass is jarring precisely because it feels instinctive—Brontë draws the civilized narrator into an act of violence, complicating any straightforward moral stance.
Heathcliff's entrance and subsequent emotional breakdown represent the chapter's tonal highlight. The man who has maintained a facade of cold authority all evening is suddenly laid bare: he flings the window open and cries out into the storm with raw desperation. Brontë deliberately avoids explanation, allowing the image—a grown man weeping into darkness—to convey the full weight of a grief that the reader cannot yet grasp. This chapter thus sets up the novel's central tension: Lockwood's rational account repeatedly failing to contain the irrational force of Heathcliff's passion pushing against it.
Key quotes from Chapter 2 – Lockwood's Second Visit and the Ghosts
“I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane, and rubbed it to and fro till the blood ran down and soaked the bedclothes.”
Lockwood describes his instinctive act of violence against the child-ghost in his nightmare, a moment that shocks by its casual brutality from an otherwise genteel narrator.
“Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living! You said I killed you—haunt me, then!”
Heathcliff, alone at the open window after Lockwood's screams have driven him into the room, addresses the storm and the absent Catherine in a cry of grief that reframes every prior scene of coldness.
“Terror made me cruel; and, finding it useless to attempt shaking the creature off, I pulled its wrist on to the broken pane.”
Lockwood's self-justifying aside before the act of violence, in which Brontë quietly notes that fear, not malice, is the engine of cruelty—a moral observation that resonates far beyond the dream.