The Presentation of Nelly Dean as a Servant in Wuthering Heights

Nelly Dean has been much discussed down the years for her character, her role as confidante, and her function as the secondary narrator of Wuthering Heights (1847), but comparatively seldom for her presentation as a servant. Yet it is by presenting Nelly from this perspective that Emily Brontë displays her unwonted gift for characterisation. Thus, for example, notwithstanding Nelly’s intermittent references to the domestic chores she conscientiously carries out in the two households where she is employed, as well as her remarks on the importance she attaches to being house-proud, we note that, several years after becoming housekeeper of Thrushcross Grange, she reveals certain moral shortcomings that we have only glimpsed during her time of service at the Heights. Conspicuous among such shortcomings are her sundry disloyalties to Edgar Linton as manifest partly through her occasional failure to keep his daughter Cathy under requisite control, but mainly through yielding to the nefarious demands of Heathcliff. Whether Nelly deserves to have successfully reached the apex of her domestic career, as she appears to have done by the end of the narrative, may be deemed an open question.