Voice Beyond Discourse: Nelly’s Narrative Intervention and Narrative Ethics in Wuthering Heights

Abstract

Wuthering Heights, the masterpiece of British author Emily Brontë, depicts a story about "a storm of love and vengeance". It has secured an unshakable position in world literary history through its vivid imagination, delicate structure, and Gothic style. Current scholarly analyses of its multiple narrative perspectives predominantly focuses on the multiplicity of narrators’ identities and the reliability of narrative discourse, yet insufficient attention has been paid to the core of narrative artistry—the function of narrators and their discursive interventions. Nelly Dean, as the primary narrator of the novel, not only propels the narrative progression but also takes on a mediating role in character dialogues through moral evaluations and emotional inclinations. This paper explores how the author employs Nelly’s discursive interventions to interweave narrative progression, exercising the explanatory, judgmental, and summative functions. It tries to explain Brontë’s skillful use of extratextual forms to grant Nelly a channel for voices, revealing her crucial role in foreshadowing and guiding the novel’s emotional tone as well as controlling the rhythm and structure of the narrative. Furthermore, the study clarifies the relationship between the narrator’s interventions and the narrative ethics of the implied author.