The Roles Of Nelly Dean In Wuthering Heights

Emily's novel Wuthering Heights is a riddle to many readers and has a reputation of being a sphinx-like novel. The focus of existing criticism seems to lie in the themes of cruelty and horror and sorrow. The social-historical school tries to explain the novel from the point of class suppression during the author's time; the psychological school tries to find answers from the author's disposition and psychology; formalists regard it as an integral presentation of words and phrases, etc. Each criticism has its own feature and explanation. Therefore, it is difficult for critics to agree. In China, some critics study its narrative structure; some study its content and idea based on the modem or realistic point of view; some study it from comparative point of view. All achieves a lot in the study. Now, as it did before, the novel still attracts numerous readers and critics.The purpose of this paper is not to solve the problem of disagreement, since such an attempt would be unnecessary and impossible, but to find another point of view from which to understand the novel Wuthering Heights, to enlarge and enrich the connotation of the novel. My dissertation will develop my own ideas based on some materials of narrative theory to analyze the roles of Nelly Dean in Wuthering Heights. Most critics' evaluation on Nelly is limited to her narration, that is, she is an objective narrator, a reliable witness of events and a faithful housekeeper. However, Nelly is not so reliable and faithful, her narration and her roles in the two families are very doubtful. The story is told mainly by Nelly, Catherine's old nurse, to Mr. Lockwood, a temporary tenant at Grange, and through him to the reader. She renders usHeathcliff from her memory. As a principal character and narrator of the story, Nelly has an active, even directive role in unfolding the events. She controls Lockwood's thoughts and through Lockwood also controls the readers'. Nelly's point of view weaves through the whole story. Often her point of view also determines how well readers will understand the story's theme. She has an obvious interest in the audience's accepting her particular version of the story as truth. Nelly has her bias when narrating the story. She is especially unfair to Heathcliff and dislikes Catherine; she cannot understand the love between Heathcliff and Catherine.Nelly serves a double purpose not only to give a seemingly credibly realistic framework to the extraordinary story, but also to force the reader to evaluate every event for himself because he cannot trust her judgment. As an example, Heathcliff is cruel, that is to say , Nelly tells us he is cruel. Nelly does use guesswork, and interprets on the basis of what she observes, she guesses about the internal states and opinions of characters; she guesses about Heathcliff, Catherine, and God. Nelly's character interferes with the story, too. She is an active participant in the story and acts on the basis of what she believes, introducing her concepts of good, evil, and Heathclifif's character, into her words, she admonishes him pompously and rubs salt into his wounds.