However, we soon see, that she is much more than just an observer. She tries to portray herself as just a witness, not a perpetrator. Nelly is much more intertwined with the families than she makes Lockwood believe. And if she is willing to tell the fluffed up version she is no doubt willing to lie about the story to make it most beneficial to her. Stories like the time Heathcliff supposedly threw a knife at his wife lose authenticity as they may just be gossip. With her saying these readers begin to doubt her stories. At one point Nelly even admits to this saying she’s telling the stories in a true gossip fashion. If it was bad to marry him to me it would be just as bad for her to say she loves him.Īnother thing off about Nelly is her interest in telling an entertaining story rather than a true story. Her very personal relationships with Heathcliff and Catherine lead readers to believe that she may be swaying things in her favor, for example, the speech Catherine gave regarding why she must marry Edgar seemed to strangely favor Heathcliff even though she didn’t want to marry him. Her relations with certain characters like Heathcliff, who she grew up with, may lead her to sway stories more into a more positive reflection of her. Nelly knows most of these characters personally, which leads her to have biased opinions of them. For a character as easily persuaded as Lockwood is to begin to notice problems with her story, shows that nelly can’t be trusted at all.
As soon as he meets her he notices discrepancies in her personality compared to what Nelly told him. Nelly is undoubtedly an unreliable narrator, but Lockwood’s poor judgment plays right into her lies, but when meeting Catherine Heathcliff, even Lockwood begins to recognize Nelly’s lies. Her lack of willingness to accept responsibility for her actions lead her to make obvious lies in her story. Through Nelly’s telling of the story in a gossip fashion, her relationships with curtain characters, her large role in the family, and the opinions the other characters have of her all make her reliability come into question. However, throughout the story, it becomes clear she may not be a very reliable narrator. After he asks her about Heathcliff, his rather weird landlord living in a closely located manor, Nelly retells the story of her time working for the Earnshaws, former tenants of Wuthering Heights. The reader gets most of the story from Lockwood, the tenant of a nearby house, through the maid, Nelly Dean.
Living in a completely isolated mansion, the families are forced to interact almost completely with each other, often intermarrying and moving between Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a book of two families from 18th century England.