Why does everyone fancy Heathcliff?

Chapters 10-13

In first year at university we had a lecture on unreliable narrators. The set text was The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. A story narrated by someone who is listening  to a ghost story at a Christmas party told by another guest else who read an account of the tale. The basis of the lecture was to show us that the further way the reader moves from the action the less reliable the information becomes; the less the reader really knows about the characters. This is why I’m suffering from a slight migraine at the end of Chapter 13 in which the narration moves from Nelly to Isabella through a letter she sent to the former describing her first night at Wuthering Heights as Heathcliff’s wife. I’m now four people removed from the action. I get it, it’s a technique, and it hides the truth because all through the novel we’ll never really know what took place between certain people or what was said – but seriously FOUR PEOPLE REMOVED. I’m closer to being heir to the throne than that!

In these chapters  my primary narrator, the ever useless Lockwood, has become ill and taken to his bed, demanding that Nelly continue her tale of Wuthering Heights to amuse him. She tells him of Catherine and Edgar’s domestic life after their marriage and the subsequent return of Heathcliff. Who chooses to come back under dead of night and lurk around the house for a little while until he sees Nelly and sends her in to Catherine.

Heathcliff’s return sparks an interesting development – Isabella fancies him. The explanation being that she’s never had anyone to interest her before. Cue obscene and inexplicable jealousy on the part of Catherine, who maturely decides to out Isabella in front of Heathcliff and then rant on his negative aspects for quite a while. Seems like odd behaviour for a married woman….

Catherine gets herself into such tizz that she too takes to her bed and refuses to come out for three days. Nelly, being the wonderful and kind-hearted soul that she is, thinks nothing of this, deciding that she’ll emerge when she wants to. Of course, Catherine then goes absolutely mad and does lots of standing at the window breathing in the moor air and pontificating about her imminent demise. Her confusion for her current predicament is explained to Nelly, “I thought, though everybody hated and despised each other, they could not avoid loving me.” She’s bizarrely correct. Even though she’s behaved ridiculously, when her illness becomes serious Edgar “dotes” on her until she recovers. She has the love and adoration of every character in the book at her beck and call – it’s nauseating. Even Nelly cares about her, though she hides it well.

Whilst Catherine has taken to her bed with a severe case of melodrama Isabella, following her sister-in-laws example, has run away and married Heathcliff. I do not understand this at all. How? HOW? Heathcliff basically laughed her out of the room when he found out she liked him, am I really supposed to believe that Isabella is such a pathetic person that she would still run away with him at a minute’s notice?!

At the end of chapter 13, Nelly reads Isabella’s description of Wuthering Heights which, under the combined management of Hindley and Heathcliff, now resembles a circle of Dante’s Inferno. Things are definitely getting worse for everyone.

Now, although Nelly makes a fine narrator, she is guilty of having told us that at the Grange there was, “one sensible soul and that lodged in my body.” I spent a very long time villainizing Nick Carraway (the most overdone unreliable narrator in English Literature – as my long essay marker informed me) for doing a very similar thing, “I am one of the most honest people I have ever met.” I’m starting to question just how honest Nelly is being…