wuthering

Social standing, and moral values were vital elements in Victorian society, and the fundamental doctrine of establishing this ideology, began at home. The home provided a refuge from the rigour, uncertainty, anxiety, and potential violence of the outside world. (P,341) A woman’s role was to provide a safe, stable, and well-organised environment for their husbands and families. Writers, Poets and Novelists were predominantly male, and women writers were not encouraged or taken seriously. Emily Bronte challenged this stereotype and in 1847, Wuthering Heights, was first published under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell. Despite this being an period of social change, both home and abroad, with industrialization, and the suffragette movement, the novel with its cynical plot, and tumultuous passion, caused controversy, with some critics, labelling it ‘coarse, immoral, and brutal.’ Wuthering Heights, is the story of domesticity, obsession, and divided passion between the two intertwined homes of the Earnshaw’s at the rugged farmhouse Wuthering Heights, and the Linton family of the more genteel Thrushcross Grange. This essay will discuss how the language and narrative voices established a structural pattern of the novel, and how these differing voices had a dramatic effect on the interpretation of the overall story.

The novel’s narrative structure is intricate, and recounted through two fallible eyewitnesses ‘Lockwood,’ an outsider who narrates the first three chapters of the first volume, and the three chapters at the end of volume two. Followed by the housekeeper, Nelly Dean who tells the bulk of the story. Lockwood is an educated southerner who has stumbled upon a bewildering, and primitive, uncivilised world, and whilst he does not fully u...

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...rame to the domestic action that occurred between the two houses through Nelly’s memory and her account of events of the actual characters, having been present first hand. However, Nelly is also an unreliable narrator, and is manipulative, as she either withholds information, or only tells what people need to hear. It is evident throughout, that Nelly found Catherine annoying, and Nelly’s recollections of events are often exaggerated, and the situations influenced to make Catherine appear selfish. We see when Nelly speaks for herself; her language is lively and colloquial and her images are very vivid; we see this when she speaks of Heathcliff’s history.

‘It’s a cuckoo sir, – I know all about it, except where he was born, and who were his parents, and how he got his money at first. And that Hareton ― has been cast out like a unfledged dunnock.’ (24).XXXXXXXX