On Nelly Dean In Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is a masterpiece in English literature. With its strange style and its fantastic story, it has long baffled the common readers, who always find it hard to get at the essence of the novel. In other words, Wuthering Heights is the most treacherous for the analytical understanding to approach. It is treacherous partly because of the complicated form, which would be impossible without the presence of Nelly Dean, a major narrator of the story and at the same time a character in the story. Ever since the publication of the novel, Nelly's role in the story has not been fully recognized. It is generally held that Nelly is only an objective narrator of the story and a faithful servant in the story. However, is Nelly Dean's point of view transparent, so that we see the characters objectively, or a distortion that twists them into the only shapes she can recognize? To understand how this text develops it is necessary to situate Nelly, and her narrative power, inside it, and to establish our own critical distance from her voice. This thesis attempts to probe into this narrator and character, Nelly Dean: her importance in narrating the story, her incredibility as narrator, her doubtful status and her functions in the story.The thesis consists of an introduction, three chapters and a conclusion.In the Introduction, the author first gives a brief introduction of the studies about the character Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights. And then the author advances the question of the incredibility of Nelly both as a narrator and a character mainly from four points: her name, the arrangement of the story-order, the duel identity of Nelly as Narrator and narratee and the shifts of her status in the story.The first chapter discusses the narrative structure of Wuthering Heights from two aspects: the time-scheme and narrative method, the importance of Nelly in the narrative structure and her unreliability as a narrator.Chapter Two devotes to the detailed analyses of the changes of Nelly's status in the two houses, the relationships between Nelly and other four major characters: Hindley, Heathcliff, Catherine and Edgar Linton, and her contradictory discourses in the narrative. Therefore we can have a glimpse of Nelly's incredibility as a simple servant and her conscious involvement in the crucial moments of the plots.Chapter Three sets out to explore Nelly's functions in the story by drawing an analogy between the family and the human psyche. Just as a family consists of different members, the psyche is made up of different institutions: the id, the ego and the superego. Nelly's functions in the story are then compared to those of the ego: mediating the relationships between different members of the family, censuring the indulged, protecting the innocent and eventually keep the peace and security of the whole family.The conclusion shows that Nelly is not only the key for us to understanding the text, but also explains the plurality of the interpretations of the text and reflects the superb skill of Emily Bronte in writing and expressing her strange vision of life.