In what ways do Nelly Dean and Lockwood help us to understand the story and characters of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights?

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Juno Maloney        English        2007-02-06

In what ways do Nelly Dean and Lockwood help us to understand the story and characters of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights?

        

Emily Bronte wrote Wuthering Heights in 1847, and it was then published later the same year, during the gothic period of romantic tales. In the novel, there are two narrators, Mr. Lockwood, the new ‘misanthropic’ tenant at Thrushcross Grange, who has only recently met his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff, and Nelly Dean, who is a servant at Wuthering Heights and has lived there almost all her life, she grew up with Cathy Earnshaw, Hindley Earnshaw and their adoptive brother Heathcliff, therefore she knows and understands the past of the moody character the best.

The two narrators are very different in many different aspects. For one, Mr. Lockwood is a male narrator from the South of England and a different social class to Nelly; this affects his use of language and tone of how he tells the story of Wuthering Heights. Nelly, on the other hand, is a Northern woman, who is very straight forward and practical which makes her story more realistic as she does not put as much detail in her words as Mr. Lockwood. Both the narrators however are unreliable. This means that the story that they tell is from their point of view and most likely in their own opinion. For example, Nelly says that when she first met Heathcliff, he was a “dirty, ragged, black-haired child” but that was only judgement of his appearance and she would not have been able to tell of his personality. This technique that Bronte has used, gives the reader the information of the story and what has happened, leaving it to them to figure out the facts for themselves.

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Mr. Lockwood is a middle class, descriptive person who is sensitive towards emotions. He is polite and conciliatory, unlike Heathcliff who is blunt, rude and unwelcoming. However this is only Mr. Lockwood’s opinion of him, and therefore may not be true of his character. By moving to Thrushcross Grange, Mr. Lockwood searched for a “perfect misanthropist heaven” inclining that he shares the hatred for society with Heathcliff. From the way Mr. Lockwood talks, we can tell that he has sarcasm and the slightest hint of humour in tone, Heathcliff does no appreciate this and tries to attack Mr. Lockwood’s ...

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