Nelly Dean In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

The epilogue I put above says exactly nothing related to what I wish to say about “Wuthering Heights” in this paper, but it still shows effectively it needs to take Nelly Dean to its center. David Daiches, the editor of my copy of “Wuthering Heights”, is reluctant to admit Nelly to the group of important characters of the novel without needing parenthesizes, and his very need to separately mention her name to recall her to the reader’s mind as one of the important characters shows that his reluctance is shared by the readers, as well. With her marked status as a “servant” and an “unreliable narrator”, Nelly Dean does not excite much interest: plotwise or otherwise. I suspect her underestimation as a character and an agent in the novel stemming from her status as a servant and narrator with “unreliability” is built on two major false beliefs: that Nelly Dean is merely a machinery to get the story started and continued, a mere observant as a servant and narrator, and that …show more content…
The faith in textual or linguistic truth has been shaken by Derrida and others long ago, and in the case of a novel there can be no claims to reality or reliability unless we have at least two narrators. The Victorian novel not yet making use of the postmodern literary device of multiple narrations, the criticism of unreliability must disperse through the air in the case of “Wuthering Heights”, in which the concern for reliability, to make things worse, is not on material reality, but on moral reality -even the existence of which is doubtful. The term “unreliable narrator”, in fact, is a hollow one when it is admitted that each narrator or author that makes moral judgments is the product of a certain age, psyche or political-economic mode and thus each narration is “unreliable”, wrought with the narrator’s politics. As there is nothing outside the text, there is nothing outside politics,