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Victorian literature was dominated by female writers; the Brontë sisters. The three of them, Charlotte, Emily, and Agnes made a name for themselves with several novels of their own, debuting with many unique traits. Despite the others’ popularity, Wuthering Heights, Emily’s novel about a post-gothic heart-wrenching drama stood out the most. Because of its complicated composition, Emily Brontë succeeded in representing gothic influences and romantic ones into an outstanding piece of literature, introducing a new characteristic of the narrator: reliability. She makes the readers question her narrators and their actions together with the whole novel.
Brontë’s creation is a romantic love story, if we can say so because the novel takes a turn of events for the worse, events that we look at from two different points of view: that of Lockwood, the stranger character, and that of Ellen ‘Nelly’ Dean, who somehow experiences events inside the action as an insider, being one of the servants at Wuthering Heights. Even so, Nelly Dean is the kind of narrator that tells the events she did not have, she tells the events as she perceived them, with subjectivity, rather than objectivity. The novel starts with its first character, Lockwood, a secondary narrator of the story. The Lockwood narrator recounts the novel’s action through the intimacy of his journal. Thus, as in Nelly’s case, we have a subjective narrator, the reader feeling all the emotions transmitted.
In my opinion, Wuthering Heights is a novel of the present that is brought back to the past through Nelly, the main narrator. The novel has two narratives that differ in the way how to tell the story, to the behavior and language: ‘Lockwood is a sophisticated, educated, rich gentleman, he is an outsider, a city man’. ‘Nelly is an intelligent, self-educated servant, a local Yorkshire woman who never traveled beyond the Wuthering Heights-Thrushcross Grange-Gimmerton area. Nelly, thus, belongs to Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange in a way that the affluent Lockwood Heathcliff never does.” (www.shmoop.com) Brontë tries with the two narrators to introduce us inside the fire, the passion that grinds the novel. The novel is a scene of a crazy passion between Catherine and Heathcliff, which Nelly takes part in. She narrates the story from her point of view, that of a maid that influenced Catherine’s actions throughout the novel, being her confident and her listener. A moment when Nelly influenced Catherine’s actions was when she had dual behavior. At home, in front of the family, she was naughty, and impertinent, and used insulting words in her discourses, unlike when she tried to impress Edgar. Catherine used this dual behavior only to make them despite Nelly. We can say she’s doing the same thing with her marriage to Edgar:
The reason why Emily Brontë tells us the story through Nelly and Lockwood is to project us inside the novel. We can feel the passion, the love of the characters, the feelings that fill the pages. She also lets us see what Brontë wanted to convey. If the writer chose another narrator, like Heathcliff, we could not see the bold love between him and Catherine, as Nelly narrates it. The reader would have different feelings when reading the book, seeing each character in another light: ‘If the whole book was told at Heathcliff’s point, the reader would have different feelings. I saw Edgar as a vicious monster who stole Catherine from the best thing that ever happened to her.’ (sites.google.com/site/heightsgrange) If we put Edgar in the role of the narrator, the perception of the novel would be to hate Heathcliff’s vindictive personality. When we read that because of Catherine he went mad, the pain that his sister Isabela had gone through, the fact that he wanted to take revenge on himself and his sister through his son Linton, and especially when his young daughter, Cathy, took her daughter, forcing her to marry her son just for wealth, knowing that Edgar was a bachelor and he will die, the same fate as his son.
The way Lockwood reveals the story is different from Nelly’s part because Lockwood’s language is an elected language of an uncertain, alien character that takes over Nelly’s story and translates it objectively without direct and emotional involvement with the characters: ” It is `Lockwood’s fickleness and ignorance of his character [that] makes him a thoroughly unreliable narrator, for he judges others according to his ideas of himself`” (The Incompetent Narrator of Wuthering Heights 51). Unlike Lockwood, Nelly uses colloquial language and is emotionally anchored in the action that has taken place, giving the impression that everything in the story is fresh. Nelly is a homodiegetic narrator who empathizes with the reader, a thing that is noticed from the reading of the short phrases, the way of storytelling is quite dramatic, which produces a far greater impact than the narrator’s storyteller. As I have said before, Nelly is a character, which shows that she narrates and perceives the action of the novel subjectively, as it can distort how the events have happened, the reader being somewhat distraught, not knowing how to absorb Nelly’s information in the foreground. Nelly tells us the action from its perspective, but also the rumors heard from the servicemen working at Wuthering Heights or Thrushcross Grange. I can also give an example in this regard: the moment when Isabela chose to run away with Heathcliff, the way she had been with him, how she returns to Wuthering Heights, and things heard from Zillah, the maid working at the time. A similar example is the description of Isabela`s life that brings to London, after running away from Heathcliff, having a child, and, ultimately, her death. As I said before, we do not know for sure if things have happened exactly as Nelly has told us. The reason why, I think, Brontë uses this narrative technique of the two narrators is to have two different points of view in the narrative act. A subjective female narrator, who lived in the story she tells, had lived with the characters, had grown up with them, and a male narrator, an objectively alien to what happened in the act.
Therefore, any serious discussion of Wuthering Heights must consider the complex point of view that Brontë has chosen for her literary work. The male narrator, represented by Lockwood tells the entire story. Consequently, the male narrator of this novel and the female one are merely recipients of the story themselves as in the case of the reader. There’s no evidence to conclude the reliability and the sincerity of the narratives. In the case of Nellie Dean, we can wonder whether she deliberately lied to Lockwood, the second narrator, or remembered events incorrectly. There also occurs the problem that both of them are exactly like the readers; they may misunderstand and misinterpret some of the things that they have witnessed.
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