Plot Summary
In Chapter II, Mr. Lockwood makes his second visit to Wuthering Heights on a cold, misty afternoon. Finding his study fire extinguished by a servant, he decides to walk the four miles to Heathcliff's residence, arriving just as snow begins to fall. He knocks repeatedly but cannot gain entry—Joseph, the surly old servant, refuses to help and tells him the master is in the fold. When a coatless young man carrying a pitchfork finally leads Lockwood inside through the back passages, he finds himself in the warm kitchen with a beautiful but hostile young woman he mistakes for Mrs. Heathcliff.
Lockwood's attempts at polite conversation fail spectacularly. The young woman rebuffs every pleasantry, and he embarrasses himself by mistaking a pile of dead rabbits for cats. When Heathcliff arrives, Lockwood compounds his blunders by assuming the young woman is Heathcliff's wife, then guessing the young man is her husband. Heathcliff coldly reveals that the woman is his daughter-in-law, widowed because his son is dead, and the young man—Hareton Earnshaw—is not his son at all. As a snowstorm traps Lockwood at the Heights, Heathcliff refuses to provide a guide or lodging. Lockwood seizes Joseph's lantern and attempts to flee, but is attacked by the dogs, suffers a nosebleed, and is finally rescued by Zillah, the housekeeper, who gives him brandy and a bed for the night.
Character Development
This chapter introduces three crucial characters. The young Catherine Heathcliff—beautiful, sharp-tongued, and visibly miserable—emerges as a figure of thwarted spirit, her scorn masking deep unhappiness. Hareton Earnshaw is presented as rough, uneducated, and proud, a young man whose social station is ambiguous and whose dignity clashes with his coarse manners. Heathcliff himself deepens from the merely gruff landlord of Chapter I into something more menacing: his savage tone with Catherine, his look of hatred, and his cruel laughter at Lockwood's suffering reveal a genuinely oppressive nature. Even Joseph is fleshed out through his Yorkshire dialect and superstitious moralizing, while Zillah provides the sole note of ordinary human compassion.
Themes and Motifs
The chapter develops the novel's central contrast between civilized society and untamed passion. Lockwood, the mannered Victorian gentleman, is systematically humiliated as his social conventions prove useless at Wuthering Heights. The snowstorm functions as both literal trap and symbolic boundary, sealing Lockwood inside a world governed by hostility rather than hospitality. Class confusion pervades the chapter—Lockwood cannot determine who is master, servant, or family—reflecting how Heathcliff's household defies normal social hierarchies. The motif of entrapment recurs: locked gates, barred doors, attacking dogs, and the blinding storm all reinforce the sense that Wuthering Heights is a prison for everyone within it.
Literary Devices
Bronte employs dramatic irony throughout, as Lockwood's misidentifications of family relationships create comic tension that simultaneously reveals the household's dysfunction. His first-person narration is unreliable in its social assumptions, forcing the reader to see more than Lockwood himself understands. The King Lear allusion near the chapter's end—when Lockwood compares his own impotent threats to Lear's—adds both humor and literary depth, linking his powerlessness to Shakespeare's tragedy of disinherited authority. Vivid sensory imagery dominates: the "black frost," the "feathery flakes," the "immense fire" contrasted against bitter cold, and the dogs that "flew at my throat" all heighten the gothic atmosphere. The chapter's nested social misunderstandings serve as foreshadowing, hinting at the tangled family history that will be gradually revealed.