Different Narrative Voices: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is deemed a complex novel, with its wide ranging themes of love, betrayal, suffering and imprisonment. It contains all the elements of a Gothic novel in nature but with the added ingredient of realism, but it is not just this blending of Gothic with realism that makes the novel so multifaceted, it is also Brontë’s use of multiple narrators that adds to the complexities of this novel. And it is the resulting effect of the different narrative voices in Wuthering Heights that this essay seeks to discuss.

There are two distinct narrative voices in Wuthering Heights, that of Mr Lockwood and Nelly Dean, but within the novel we also encounter tertiary narratives from Catherine Earnshaw, Isabella and Zillah. The opening narrative of the novel begins with Lockwood who is the primary narrator and author of the story and it is Lockwood’s narrative that provides the outer frame for the story as he introduces the reader to Heathcliff and the inhabitants at the Heights.

During Lockwood’s visit to the Heights he uncovers the diary of Catherine Earnshaw scribbled within several volumes of mildewed books. His reading of the diary temporarily transports the reader back in time and into the first tertiary narrative of Catherine Earnshaw before Lockwood reinstates himself as the narrator and propels us back to the present. His visit is also the catalyst that drives him to question his servant Nelly Dean regarding his poorly received reception from his hosts at the Heights. It is at this point we are introduced to the second and most prominent narrator Nelly Dean, who begins by taking us back some twenty years to the beginning of her story. As with Lockwood, it is within Nelly’s narrative that we are introduced to t...

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...domestic life, as Da Souse Correa explains, ‘The brutal truths which Wuthering Heights presents include the realities of domestic life, social exclusion and economic dispossession’ (Correa, 2012, pg.373).

Our final narrator in the novel is supplied through a recalled conversation between Nelly and the servant Zillah.

Works Cited

Da Sousa Correa, D. (2012) ‘Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: at home’ in Watson, N. and Towheed, S. (eds) Romantics and Victorians, London, Bloomsbury Academic/Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 350-375.

Da Sousa Correa, D. (2012) ‘Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: abroad’ in Watson, N. and Towheed, S. (eds) Romantics and Victorians, London, Bloomsbury Academic/Milton Keynes, The Open University, pp. 378-407.

Brontë, E. (2009 [1847]) Wuthering Heights (ed. I. Jack, with an introduction by H Small), Oxford, Oxford University Press.