A Marxist/Feminist Reading of Nelly Dean

Paper Summary:

Writing against the Marxist and feminist readings of Terry Eagleton and Lyn Pykett, respectively, the author investigates the novel's narrator, Nelly Dean, to show how she is a more complicated character than meets the eye.

From the Paper:

"In his Marxist analysis of Wuthering Heights, Terry Eagleton considers the role of Heathcliff as an analogy for industrial capitalism's pernicious rise in England. His analysis ignores, however, one of the key working class characters in the novel, Nelly Dean. He focuses primarily on Heathcliff, a character who is ruined by the social effects of capital, while ignoring Nelly, who is a key ideological subject of capitalism. Eagleton, for instance only mentions her "self confessedly biased testimony" (402) but ignores another important trait, that she is a servant and this helps make her a more transparent observer of the action which she retells Lockwood in the course of the novel. There is a negative consequence of this transparency, in that we sometimes lose track of Nelly the person in her recollection of events. The dehumanizing effect of capitalism renders Nelly as invisible to the reader as the families whom she observes. In Lyn Pykett's feminist reading as well, Nelly is only mentioned as an observer and not a character. She discusses how the two Catherines are formed as women, but does not stop to consider how Nelly is also formed as a woman. Nelly is written into the text as a woman every bit as much as the Catherines are. There is especially something to be said about how Lockwood, the other major narrator in the text, constructs Nelly as a woman figure in the novel. While the analyses that Pykett and Eagleton may do well with exploring the characters of the Catherines and Heathcliff, their assumptions and approaches can be useful in understanding the most prominent and least apparent character in the narrative of "Wuthering Heights", Nelly Dean."

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