Nelly responds to situations with a certain busy-body-ness, dogged self-interest, and inflated sense of moral authority. Nelly rejects her own culpability in events, and expresses a desire to avoid in the present moment any drama, embarrassment, or overt challenge to the patriarchal status quo, which the more “passionate” and “rebellious” characters typically cause—much to her dismay. Only occasionally is Nelly fully self-aware, displaying fleeting compassion for Heathcliff or kindness toward Catherine, but she never recognizes/accepts her own “reduced” condition in terms of class and gender, as servant and woman.
She bows to the pressures of a hierarchical system of power, and she is actively complicit by conforming to its double standards, especially with respect to moral codes: “I’ve had many a laugh at her perplexities and untold troubles, which she vainly strove to hide from my mockery. That sounds ill-natured—but she was so proud, it became really impossible to pity her distresses, till she had been chastened into more humility. I’ve said I did not love her [Catherine], and rather relished mortifying her vanity now and then; besides she hurt me extremely…She never had power to conceal her passion.” (pg. 53, 55)
After returning from a five-week convalescence at the Thrushcross Grange, Cathy succumbs to the societal and gendered pressures she has, up to this point, successfully avoided by living as a “rude savage.” She is also forced to recognize insurmountable cultural differences between herself and Heathcliff and what their futures hold. Heathcliff, at an existential loss in the aftermath of Catherine’s physical and moral “transformation,” tries to conform and “elevate”—however futilely—his status, in order to rival Edgar for Catherine’s love: “Nelly, make me decent, I’m going to be good…I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be. I must wish for Edgar Linton’s great blue eyes and even forehead. I do—and that won’t help me to them.” (pgs. 44-45) Heathcliff’s best opportunity for revenge—Hindley’s dropping Hareton—is bungled when Heathcliff “by natural impulse” (pg. 58) catches Hareton as he falls, due to Hindley’s negligence, from the banister.
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Here Hindley is saved from another tragic loss, another sorrow “of the kind that will not lament” (pg. 51) that would only serve to heighten his despair, desperate self-destruction, and “tyrannical evil” (pg. 51), and Hareton survives as his heir and only living link with his beloved Frances. Note the irony that Heathcliff’s instinctive action was “the instrument of thwarting his own revenge.” (pg. 58) Heathcliff’s departure is triggered by more than hearing Catherine’s acceptance of Edgar’s marriage proposal. This scene is over-the-top and full of tension, climaxing with Heathcliff leaving Wuthering Heights just as Catherine declares that it would “degrade” her to marry him (and added layer of pathos—she doesn’t know he is listening, but Nelly and the reader do!) before she has the chance to assert that “he will never know how much [she] loves him.”
In Catherine’s misguided view, marrying Edgar will not result in a separation from Heathcliff—in fact, it is her clear intention that this union with Edgar (i.e. as “the greatest woman of the neighborhood,” her social position and its influence, and substantial wealth) will allow her to help Heathcliff rise and escape Hindley’s oppression. Bronte does not want the reader to underestimate how Hindley’s actions—specifically, his cruel, systematic abuses as “master” and “patriarch”—have informed her motivations.
Women dominate the narration in Wuthering Heights—controlling the selection of events and proposing how these events should be interpreted. Under the pseudonym Ellis Bell, Bronte was disguised in her dealings with a male-dominated literary world, and uses her narrators to echo her own unique agency as a woman writer. Bronte, as the author, exerts complete control over how the narrative unfolds, and it provides her with an escape from the marginalization and constant supervision she experienced in patriarchal society.
However, as with the public reception to a published work, the female narrators are not immune from criticism. Social identity is defined by the structures of family, gender, and land/money inheritance. Catherine emerges as Heathcliff’s double because she is marginalized by her sex just as Heathcliff is marginalized by class—in different but parallel ways, they are both excluded, alienated, and feel the sting of antagonistic relationships. Marriage provides a long-term means of survival for women—and even some indirect power. Yet, since women are as wives also expected to be mothers, there is some inherent risk as evidenced by Frances’ death shortly childbirth (the perils of maternity!).
In marriage, a man might be able to overlook his potential wife’s lack of family name and money, as with Hindley and Frances, but a woman faces much dire circumstances in choosing a husband: “If Heathcliff and I married we should be beggars.” (pg. 64) Lockwood, as men are permitted to do, can easily survive outside of the institution of marriage—he does not need a wife for an income, entrance to the public sphere, or to fulfill some notion of “masculine duty.” Marriage for men can be an afterthought as opposed to an all-consuming priority for women.
In her “exceeding fondness” for Heathcliff, Catherine jeopardizes her prospects as a “suitable” marriage partner, and the Lintons through their ritualized “cleansing” (making her as “white”—read: pure—as Edgar and Isabella, pgs. 42, 45) allow her reclaim her former station as a “potential wife” for Edgar. But, as Frances adds, “she must mind and not grow wild again.” (pg. 41) Here Catherine’s sense of division, marked by her entrance into puberty, gains momentum.
With Heathcliff and an uninhibited childhood on one side & Edgar and promised comforts of affluence as well as stifling demands of adulthood on the other—she begins a spiral of contradiction and instability by attempting to satisfy both men. Moreover, the belief that she can exist in a space between these contradictions—constantly walk a tightrope where she is Catherine Linton living in the “civilized decadence” of the Grange, but still committed to the primal passion shared with her soulmate Heathcliff—will prove impossible.
