wuthering

In 1847, the literary world remained predominantly male, and women writers not encouraged, or taken seriously. The novel was in its infancy, and not yet considered an acceptable literary genre. The hierarchy feared that it could corrupt women and upset the orderly running of a congenial Victorian society, and have an adverse effect on morality, and encourage sexuality and desire. Women writers were beginning to confront this philosophy, and whilst they were gaining autonomy in this male dominated market, Emily Bronte decided, her best chance of success with her first novel Wuthering Heights was to publish it under the male pseudonym of Ellis Bell. This essay will look at the role of the novel in Victorian society and examine the effect of the novels different narrative voices, together with how social class has a predominant outcome on the overall perception of the story, and how language can be misconceived, and manipulated, to represent the truth.

Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, narrative structure is intricate, subjective, with multiple layers, recounted mainly 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. Nelly Dean, the housekeeper, is the second narrator who shapes the bulk of the story and dramatises the narrative with energy and immediacy. There are also other eyewitness narratives interspersed throughout the novel such as Zillah, Cathy Isabella, and Heathcliff. The novel dramatises the struggles and conflicts between two intertwined houses, namely the dark, bleak, windy farmhouse Wuthering heights, belonging to the Earnshaw’s and the orphaned Heathcliff. This house represents storms, and signifies cruelty. I...

... middle of paper ...

..., when Cathy has a basketful of cats, which turn out to be a heap of dead rabbits,

By the end of Chapter 3, Lockwood’s style has become more complex in that his sentence structure, which is intricate and often multifaceted with large numbers of adjectival and adverbial clauses, recurrently separated with the liberal use of the semi-colon and commas;

‘My human fixture and her satellites, rushed to welcome me; explaining tumultuously, they had completely given me up; everybody conjectured that I perished last night; and they were wondering how they must set about the search for my remains.’ (3.37)

Throughout the novel Lockwood does not change, whilst everybody around him has changed considerably, Through Lockwood, Bronte is pointing out that Lockwood remained stagnant in an ever-changing world and that we must move with the times and not follow Lockwood’s example.