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. ‘Mr. Heathcliff?’ I said.
A nod was the answer.
Lockwood’s language here at the opening of his narrative reveals his complacent lack of rapport with the world he is visiting, a ‘tourist’ to both the emotions and geography of this misanthropic, uncivilised world and its violently passionate words. His attempts to mirror and match Heathcliff’s lonely temperament are palpably hollow as he litters his narrative with exclamatory remarks and a register which may ‘name’ certain behaviours but cannot ‘know’ them in any imaginative way. Heathcliff’s autonomy and self-preservation is both concealment and barely latent threat, yet Lockwood’s artificial exhilaration treats Heathcliff as a challenge and almost a ‘tease’ . He even aligns them as a pair, bringing the essence of Heathcliff to himself as sameness when it is intensely not the case at all.
So this is a masquerade of rapport, a tourist’s excursion to another world’s otherness, where civilities have no value. The narrator, Lockwoood mistakenly belives that Heathcliff’s character is a mirror of his own and ‘sees’ Heathcliff as some rustic, awkward individual who he will align himself with and charm on this temporary visit.
Union is thus mistaken, rapport is absent, though one individual believes it approximate and nearly present. Bronte reveals her distaste for the superficial mores of a world beyond her imagination, whose words appear glancing and insubstantial.
That said, who could establish rapport with Heathcliff and what would such a rapport consist of? The physical separateness of Heathcliff and his desire for autonomy must always despise a figure like Lockwood for there is no recognition of difference here and Lockwood has no respect for the singularity of another human being, an irony which Bronte explores and exploits in the rest of the narrative.