1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with. This is certainly a beautiful country! In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven – and Mr Heathcliff and I are such a suitable pair to divide the desolation between us. A capital fellow! He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, as I rode up, and when his fingers sheltered themselves, with a jealous resolution, still further in his waistcoat, as I announced my name.

I don’t think I like you. And possibly not Mr Heathcliff, either. Why are you here?

Close Reading

Last week I was, perhaps, skirting around the idea of the ‘unreliable narrator’ – a man who said plenty but told us little. ‘Unreliable’ doesn’t mean a liar, by the way.

This week, I think we have some similarities, but I’m veering towards adjectives like ‘untrustworthy’ and ‘disreputable’ to describe someone similarly voluble, but equally closed. If you saw me now, you’d see the kind of expression usually reserved for toddlers tricked into sucking a lemon. This man could very easily be a liar, so I’m on my guard.

How does Emily Brontë do that? Well, that’s the whole purpose of the article, right? Let’s get a bit closer.

I’m going to begin with the question, ‘What am I reading?’

Why begin with just the year, ‘1801’? A letter (see Frankenstein), or a diary entry (see Dracula) would be much more specific. This is almost deliberately opaque, or maybe simply lazy, slapdash – as a signifier it’s almost meaningless. Just the month would have been more helpful in setting mood and tone.

Frankly, I’m irritated. And whilst I definitely don’t need to like my narrator, I don’t enjoy being wound up by them.

This is a first 100 words project though, not simply a first word…

Let’s look at this sense of deliberate ‘self-othering’ our narrator seems to be embracing with such relish.

He talks about his landlord being ‘the solitary neighbour I shall be troubled with’. But he is the one who made the visit. Why go out of his way to seek someone out if their company is going to be ‘troubling’? (In the background, I should say that this extreme solitude, coupled with the beauty of the landscape, is whispering ‘Gothic novel’ in my ear.)

But, right now, I am trying to decide what to make of our guide.

When he comments that he has successfully ‘fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society’, it’s the verbs which interest me. ‘Fixed’ gives me the sense that this is his decision, and there’s something very strong, very definite about ‘removed’. It’s not the primary meaning of the verb here, but the narrator could easily have chosen a softer synonym. I’m frowning again, thinking about the ‘stir of society’ but honestly? I think it’s too early to pin anything certain to it. Just unease.

I suspect our attitudes to society vary along a spectrum from John Donne’s ‘No man is an island’ to Sartre’s ‘Hell is other people’ when it comes to company.^{1 2} I know mine do, often during the course of the day! 

But this place the narrator has ‘fixed’ upon is a ‘perfect misanthropist’s Heaven’. It’s such a strange, oxymoronic phrase, and what I take from it isn’t a desire to be alone, but a desire to be left alone.

I don’t think that’s the same thing.

Can misanthropists ever form a ‘suitable pair’? Is the location a ‘beautiful country’ or a ‘desolation’? How can anyone be a ‘capital fellow’ when you seem to have sworn off society with every indication that it’s a good thing? How can your ‘heart warm to him’? Unless everything you say is to be interpreted as sardonic, and unpleasant. Remember the difference between unreliable and untrustworthy I outlined at the opening? This is the seat of my mistrust.

There we are.

My thought process has arrived at words like sardonic, spiteful, acid, arch. I’m metaphorically sucking the lemon again. And with that, the question returns:

Why are you here?

I think the first 100 words are all about the narrator, but as the only named person so far, it’d be rude to ignore Mr Heathcliff (however much both our misanthropists might prefer that). There’s little to tell, perhaps, except that his reaction to this visit appears to be a scowl, not a smile. So many of the novels of this period I’ve read react to strangers hospitably that this is an outlier, and the ‘black eyes’ and ‘brow’ combine not just to give the lie to that hospitable tradition, but almost suggest something troglodytic.

Is it true, though? I described the narrator as ‘arch’ earlier. I can well imagine this being the first of many nasty caricatures he writes over the course of the novel. In fact, I can almost imagine him sniggering at his own cleverness in describing the landlord as ‘a capital fellow!’

Its overtly complimentary meaning jars with everything else we’ve been told about Mr Heathcliff. The phrase sounds almost deliberately glib: he has described a man who hides his eyes, retreats beneath his brows and retreats further into his clothing – and then calls him ‘a capital fellow!’

Is he being sincere? Sardonic? Or simply pleased with his own cleverness? The rudest insults are often the ones which look like compliments on the surface. And in this case, we aren’t invited to share the joke.

Things to look out for as you read on.

How big a part the landscape plays. Beautiful and desolate, too. Does it become a character in its own right?

What we learn about the narrator. Is he the nasty piece of work, I’m beginning to suspect he is, or has my first impression gone wrong?

Donne vs Sartre. Where does the novel sit on this spectrum, and the individual characters, too? Can the narrator really isolate himself from the world – or does he need other people to define his isolation?

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References

1. John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 1624 ↩︎
2. Jean Paul Sartre, No Exit, 1944 ↩︎