Nelly Dean: Memoirs of a Survivor

Abstract

The narrative of Wuthering Heights is framed or enclosed by Lockwood’s voice, the voice of the novel’s dramatic present, but Nelly’s is its most persistent voice, the voice of the enclosed, inner, and retrospective narrative. Many recent critics¹ have noted that this narratorial division of labour replicates that of the culture in which the novel was produced. Like nineteenth-century society, the narrative voices of Wuthering Heights are divided into ‘separate spheres’. The outer, enclosing narrative voice is that of an educated and worldly man of means who occupies a public, social sphere and who assumes a community of shared values with his readers. The voice of the inner, enclosed narrative, on the other hand, is that of a self-educated and socially subordinate woman whose positions as nurse, trusted housekeeper, surrogate sister or mother, give her a privileged access to the intimate lives of virtually all the family units of the novel. In short, Nelly is the narrator of the private domestic life.

[T]he housekeeper, a matronly lady taken on as a fixture along with the house. (Lockwood of Nelly, WH, 51)

‘I certainly esteem myself a steady, reasonable kind of body… I have undergone sharp discipline which has taught me wisdom; and then, I have read more than you would fancy… you could not open a book in this library that I have not looked into, and got something out of, unless it be that range of Greek and Latin, and that of French — and those I know from one another: it is as much as you can expect from a poor man’s daughter.’ (Nelly of herself, WH, 103)