Wuthering Heights :: essays research papers

Explore the role and function of the narrators in Wuthering HeightsEllis Bell was criticised not only for the novels blasphemous nature and trigger-happy plot but a lack of conclusive moral. It seems freedom of expression was tolerated as long as the reader was left in no dubiousness of the righteous path. Bronte liberates the reader from this sense of duty and distinguishes her novel from its Victorian contemporaries. Helping to accomplish this task is her style of narration, being unusually structured in the concentrical circles of Lockwood and Nelly Dean. Lockwood descends on the Yorkshire moors, like the reader unaware of the turbulence that the beautiful country conceals. I have read that Brontes original purpose of the book was to memorialise Lockwood the meaning of love and her choice of name, Lockwood, implies a depth that is not on display nor easy to withdraw. (From this respect it is an ambitious novel for Emily Bronte to attempt as her life-time is from all accounts barren of much romantic attachment. Perhaps her impression of love mimics Isabella Lintons adoration for a Byronic Heathcliff, an ideal never quite within reach.) Lockwood strikes me as a character who is much astonished by his own intelligence, he dilutes his account of the Heights with Latinate words and pompous expressions, relaxed a little in the laconic style of chipping off his pronouns and auxiliary verbs. Either this is an early indication of his arrogance, later confirmed by his unlikely fear that Catherine would regret a union with Hareton on observing how tolerably attractive he was or possibly the primitive nature of the Heights provokes him to use terminology that he associates with fine-tune society in order to feel comfortable in an evidently uneasy situation. If this be the case Bronte mocks the established politeness of introduction showing his language to be simply a faade disguising his unsettled emotions. This language helps him to preserve his detached demean our as only once is the reader given an incursion to his insecure character. He relates an amusing incident in which a goddess he professed to be in love with hinted at a reciprocation of feeling that unfortunately caused him to flee rabbit-like, rapidly lessening the warmth of his glances. This minor incident demonstrates his inability to handle complex emotions and in comparison to the forthcoming passion of Cathy and Heathcliff, Lockwood appears all the more than sheltered. It is as though a distant relative of the Lintons has come to call.