WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Narrative
Technique / Point of View in Wuthering
Heights.
A Towey.
“Worthy Mrs Dean, I like you, but I don’t like your double dealing”
There is no single or consistent point of view in Wuthering Heights. Bronte remains outside her story and leaves the commentary and moral judgements to a series of NARRATORS. Nelly Dean and Lockwood are the main narrators. Everything is filtered through them. They are the main interpreters but, because they are limited characters with sometimes flawed perceptions, the reader is left to make up her own mind.
Nelly Dean is a sane, sound, simple character, who is not however, above misrepresenting the truth to Edgar Linton to show her behaviour in a better light, or betraying confidences behind another’s back. Nelly dislikes excess, and seen through her eyes, Catherine and Heathcliff’s behaviour seems extreme. She has little imagination, and she is often wrong. She interferes and betrays the trust placed in her (leaving Catherine delirious and fasting in her room; allowing young Cathy to be abducted and married; telling Edgar of Heathcliff’s visits, and so on.)
Nelly is rooted in practical, everyday reality. Her common sense makes what she is telling appear credible. To those she favours she can be very kindhearted. She dislikes the wilful and disobedient Catherine who makes her work as a servant much more difficult, preferring the sweeter-natured Cathy and the gentle, bland, undemanding Edgar. She cannot understand anything outside her own homely, familiar world. The wild passion of Catherine and Heathcliff is beyond her. She loves the normal.---the gentle love between Cathy and Hareton, for example.
But because she has lived long and seen so much of life at the Heights and the Grange, her views are worth listening to. Catherine shouts at her in a fit of rage “You want setting down in your place!”
Lockwood is a conceited, educated town-dweller who seems to understand little about emotion or imagination. He has poor social sense and little self-knowledge, seeming to be unaware that his visits to the Heights are unwelcome, or that young Cathy might not consider him a suitable love interest.. He is a very useful opening narrator, however, in that we get to see the Heights and their inhabitants at the start of the novel through his amazed and disapproving eyes---the rough language, the lack of civilized values, the cold hearth, the wild dogs, the lack of hospitality, the ghost of Catherine, her diary…….
Nelly’s account as the major narrator is interspersed with other narratives—Isabella, Joseph, Zillah, Heathcliff, Catherine’s diary…
A Towey.
“Worthy Mrs Dean, I like you, but I don’t like your double dealing”
There is no single or consistent point of view in Wuthering Heights. Bronte remains outside her story and leaves the commentary and moral judgements to a series of NARRATORS. Nelly Dean and Lockwood are the main narrators. Everything is filtered through them. They are the main interpreters but, because they are limited characters with sometimes flawed perceptions, the reader is left to make up her own mind.
Nelly Dean is a sane, sound, simple character, who is not however, above misrepresenting the truth to Edgar Linton to show her behaviour in a better light, or betraying confidences behind another’s back. Nelly dislikes excess, and seen through her eyes, Catherine and Heathcliff’s behaviour seems extreme. She has little imagination, and she is often wrong. She interferes and betrays the trust placed in her (leaving Catherine delirious and fasting in her room; allowing young Cathy to be abducted and married; telling Edgar of Heathcliff’s visits, and so on.)
Nelly is rooted in practical, everyday reality. Her common sense makes what she is telling appear credible. To those she favours she can be very kindhearted. She dislikes the wilful and disobedient Catherine who makes her work as a servant much more difficult, preferring the sweeter-natured Cathy and the gentle, bland, undemanding Edgar. She cannot understand anything outside her own homely, familiar world. The wild passion of Catherine and Heathcliff is beyond her. She loves the normal.---the gentle love between Cathy and Hareton, for example.
But because she has lived long and seen so much of life at the Heights and the Grange, her views are worth listening to. Catherine shouts at her in a fit of rage “You want setting down in your place!”
Lockwood is a conceited, educated town-dweller who seems to understand little about emotion or imagination. He has poor social sense and little self-knowledge, seeming to be unaware that his visits to the Heights are unwelcome, or that young Cathy might not consider him a suitable love interest.. He is a very useful opening narrator, however, in that we get to see the Heights and their inhabitants at the start of the novel through his amazed and disapproving eyes---the rough language, the lack of civilized values, the cold hearth, the wild dogs, the lack of hospitality, the ghost of Catherine, her diary…….
Nelly’s account as the major narrator is interspersed with other narratives—Isabella, Joseph, Zillah, Heathcliff, Catherine’s diary…