What is the unreliable narrator in Wuthering Heights?

An unreliable narrator is one whose account of events the reader has reason to question -- either because of limited knowledge, personal bias, or deliberate deception. Wuthering Heights has two of them, nested inside each other, which is part of why the novel remains so difficult to interpret and so endlessly argued over.

Emily Bronte published Wuthering Heights in 1847 under the pseudonym Ellis Bell. The novel is narrated primarily by Nelly Dean, a servant who has known the families of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange for decades, as reported to the tenant Lockwood, who frames the story. Both Nelly and Lockwood have significant reasons to be unreliable.

Why is Lockwood an unreliable narrator?#

Lockwood opens the novel and sets its frame. He is a London gentleman renting Thrushcross Grange, curious about his reclusive landlord Heathcliff, and prone to misreading every social situation he encounters. His initial characterisations of Heathcliff, Hareton, and the younger Catherine are all wrong. He mistakes hostility for reserve, cruelty for dignity, and wildness for indifference.

More importantly, Lockwood is an outsider with no direct experience of the events he is reporting. He is recording Nelly's account. His framing of the story -- as a kind of gothic curiosity, something to occupy a bored gentleman's winter -- is itself a form of distortion. The violence, grief, and passion of the central story do not fit the genre Lockwood has decided he is reading.

Why is Nelly Dean an unreliable narrator?#

Nelly is the more significant and more argued-over case. She is present for nearly every event in the novel and describes herself as sensible, practical, and morally grounded. But her reliability is undermined at several points.

She conceals information from characters when it suits her. She delays telling Hindley about Heathcliff's return. She withholds letters from Catherine. She enables Edgar's ignorance of what is happening between Catherine and Heathcliff. Each of these choices shapes events directly, and Nelly's retrospective account does not always acknowledge her own role clearly.

The critic James Hafley, writing in 1958, argued that Nelly is the novel's true villain -- a character who consistently acts in ways that serve her own interests while narrating herself as a passive bystander. Most readers find this overstatement, but Hafley's essay identified something real: Nelly is not the neutral observer she presents herself as.

Nelly also has aesthetic limitations. She does not understand Heathcliff and Catherine's relationship and tends to frame it in conventional moral terms that the novel itself refuses. When she describes Catherine's passionate declaration -- "He's more myself than I am" -- as madness or excess, Nelly is revealing her own interpretive limits, not Catherine's.

What does the unreliable narration do for the novel?#

Bronte's layered narration means that the reader never gets direct access to Heathcliff or Catherine. We always see them through Nelly's eyes, filtered through Lockwood's retelling. This is part of what makes them so mythic: they are never fully explained, never fully known.

The unreliability also creates the novel's characteristic ambiguity about Heathcliff. Is he a victim of class and racial prejudice who became a monster in response to his treatment? Is he always dangerous, always outside the moral order? Nelly has a view, but her view is partial. The reader has to triangulate -- and different readers triangulate differently, which is why arguments about Heathcliff's nature are essentially endless.

How does this affect how we read the love story?#

The love between Heathcliff and Catherine is the most famous element of the novel, but we receive it almost entirely through Nelly's retrospective account of things she witnessed, overheard, or was told. Nelly disapproves of the intensity of their relationship and says so. Her disapproval shapes what she notices, what she reports, and what she frames as excess.

This means the reader who falls in love with Heathcliff and Catherine as a romantic ideal is, in a sense, falling in love with something Nelly tried to warn them against. Which is either a tribute to the power of what Bronte achieved or a sign that readers are doing exactly what Lockwood did: misreading the genre they are in.

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Further reading#

For the life of Emily Bronte and why she wrote only one novel, who Emily Bronte was and why she wrote only one novel covers the biographical context.

Wuthering Heights is in the Foxing catalog, free.

For another novel that uses framing and narration to create deliberate ambiguity, what does the fog mean in Heart of Darkness covers Conrad's similar technique.

Sources#

• Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights, Thomas Newby, 1847
• James Hafley, "The Villain in Wuthering Heights," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 1958
• Patsy Stoneman, Bronte Transformations, Prentice Hall, 1996