Main Points

Catherine Earnshaw
 Introduction
 Wild Nature
 Tendency to Own Everything
 Status-conscious Social Climber
 Conflicted Loyalties
 Prejudiced
 More of a Ghost

Ellen "Nelly" Dean

 Introduction
 Personality
 Auto Biographer
 The Unreliable Housekeeper
 Double Agent
 Brief Explanation
Catherine Earnshaw
· Introduction
Catherine Earnshaw is the main female protagonist of the novel “Wuthering
Heights”. To give a brief introduction to her and the role she played in the novel,
she is the daughter of Mr. Earnshaw, sister of Hindley, foster sister and true love of
Heathcliff, wife of Edgar, mother of Cathy. There are basically two sides to
Catherine: Catherine Earnshaw and Catherine Linton. (She also fantasizes about a
third, Catherine Heathcliff—which her daughter later becomes.) Gorgeous and fiery
with dark curls and penetrating eyes, Catherine is a woman in conflict— she craves
the luxury, security, and serenity of ultra-civilized Edgar, even as she runs wild
across the moors with brooding and unkempt Heathcliff. She loves Heathcliff with
a huge and overwhelming passion. She is impetuous, proud, and sometimes haughty.

· Wild Nature
Catherine possesses a wild, passionate nature which initially is presented when she
spat at Heathcliff on discovering that he was the reason for her father losing the whip
she was to get. Further evidence of Catherine's wildness can be seen from the pledge
she and Heathcliff made: "promised fair to grow up as rude as savages" in response
to the tyranny of Hindley. It was as Nelly said-: "one of their chief amusements, to
run away to the moors in the morning and to remain there all day, and the after
punishment grew a mere thing to laugh at." Catherine is defiant of authority and
seemed to enjoy the wrath of others-: "she was never so happy as when we were all
scolding her at once" Catherine's passionate nature, evident throughout her
childhood, seemed not to exist in her early months of her marriage to Edgar. Her
passion was described as-: "gunpowder which lay as harmless as sand because no
fire came near to explode it"
· Tendency to Own Everything
Wild, impetuous, and arrogant as a child, Catherine grows up getting everything she
wants. She regards it as her right to be loved by all though she was the love of
Heathcliff's life. When two men fall in love with her, she torments both of them. She
never refused Heathcliff; rather she said if she could get married to Edgar, she would
be able to support Heathcliff with money. Ultimately, Catherine's selfishness ends
up hurting everyone she loves, including herself.

· A Woman with a Double Characteristics

While Catherine is wild, willful and passionate, she also possesses a double
character. Her five-week sojourn at the Grange awakens in her an appreciation of
the civilized world. When she returns to the Heights, both manner and appearance
have changed and is shocked in the appearance of Heathcliff and Edgar. From then
on, Catherine adopts a split personality - an amusing lady-like disposition in the
company of the Lintons and returning to her wild passionate self when accompanied
by Heathcliff. The duality of Catherine's character revealed a crisis point with her
marriage to Edgar - the one event in the novel above all others which determine the
futures of the central characters. Catherine's marriage to him is a betrayal of her
nature. Not only has she broken with her kindred spirit, Heathcliff, but she has
physically removed herself from the wildness and freedom from the Heights and the
crags. This choice made by Catherine favored wealth, civilization and social position
over her natural affinity with the untamed, uncivilized world represented by
Heathcliff.

· Status-conscious Social Climber

Catherine is also a status-conscious social climber as She declared her wish to be
'the greatest lady in the neighborhood" as the materialistic side to her personality
begins to assert itself. She worries how others see her and she confesses to Nelly it
would degrade her to marry Heathcliff. she remarks that marrying to Edgar will bring
her solvency and happiness. On the other hand, if she marries Heathcliff, she is going
to be a beggar. Later on, her marriage to Edgar destroys Heathcliff.
· Conflicted Loyalties
At the end of Catharine’s role in the novel, it remarks a significant characteristic of
Catherine. The location of Catherine’s coffin symbolizes the conflict that tears apart
her short life. She is not buried in the chapel with the Lintons. Nor is her coffin
placed among the tombs of the Earnshaws. Instead, as Nelly describes in Chapter
XVI, Catherine is buried “in a corner of the kirkyard, where the wall is so low that
heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor.” Moreover, she is
buried with Edgar on one side and Heathcliff on the other, suggesting her conflicted
loyalties.

· Prejudiced
In the beginning of the novel, we find Catherine Earnshaw as a prejudiced character.
Her prejudice towards Heathcliff plotted the climax of the whole novel.
Subsequently, her prejudice was proved false as Heathcliff became a rich man and
Catherine’s life with Edgar was not happy.

· More of a Ghost
In terms of Gothic elements, Catherine is more of a ghost. Even after being haunted,
she never forgets Heathcliff, and she wants to fulfill her desires which she couldn’t
fulfill in her life time. Catherine’s actions after becoming haunted make us to think
that she is trying to repent for her deeds.
 Ellen "Nelly" Dean

· Introduction
The main narrator of the novel is referred to as Ellen, her given name, to show
respect, and as Nelly among those close to her. The novel is from her point of view;
we see every character (aside from Lockwood) through her eyes. Nelly is a servant
to three generations of the Earnshaws and two of the Linton family. Humbly born,
she regards herself nevertheless as Hindley's foster-sister (they are the same age and
her mother is his nurse). She grows up with Hindley, Catherine, and Heathcliff and
works at both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. Nelly is confidante to
many, including both Catherines, Isabella, and even Heathcliff. She cares for
Hareton when he is an infant and is a mother-figure to the younger Cathy. Though a
servant, she is educated and articulate. Frequently, she does more than observe; she
becomes very involved in her employers' lives.

· Personality
Nelly has advanced not only house management and cleaning skills, but also an
innate ability for telling a good story. She is also a capable caregiver. Above all else,
Nelly is a gossip, not afraid of telling stories and injecting herself into everyone else's
business. It is unknown, though, how much of a liar Nelly is. Inconsistencies in her
story lead many to believe that she has a higher opinion of herself than others do.
Nelly is a decent housekeeper and does have a knack for taking care of children,
especially those very young. Despite her meddling, she is not a very good
manipulator, as things very rarely go her way.
· Auto Biographer
To analyze the narration made by Nelly, it is apparent that her own life was
accumulated with the life of Earnshwas, Lintons and Heathcliff. Thus, her narration
is not only a story of the people mentioned there but also her own autobiography.
This narration is a pretty much evident of her own life. She has nothing of her own
separated in the novel other than the related stories with the characters discussed.

· The Biased Housekeeper

The characteristic which has made “Wuthering Heights” is more interesting is its
unreliable narrator. It's the character of Nelly Dean, in fact, that transforms this book
from a simple tortured romance and revenge drama into a masterpiece. Sometimes
she takes side as in, "Hindley hated him, and to say the truth I did the same" (4.52).

Since the story is not told plainly, as Nelly officially interjects her thoughts into the
narrative at times and she also unofficially registers her opinions on all matters of
her employers' behavior. While she describes herself as being there for most of the
major events, whether or she actually was is open for debate, for the majority of the
characters she describes, like Catherine herself, are already dead and her stories can't
be confirmed. In fiction, the idea that a character is telling the truth is almost always
taken for granted. In life, however, people lie all the time, for reasons that are so
complicated that they can never truly be pulled apart. In a way, Bronte is trying to
circumvent the narrative form by detailing an aspect of human nature (gossip, lying,
inflating one sense of self) that is all too common but truly difficult to capture in
story form, since the reader has been trained to trust what the characters and narrators
tell them. In general, when we encounter a liar in fiction, they're either heart of gold
scoundrels or the villains. But Nelly Dean is either. Instead, she's just a maid trying
to sell a story to a passerby. There's no evil, though, just a story around a fire meant
to entertain. So who knows what's true and what's not? For Nelly (and in general,
the reader), it's more about how the story's told.
· Double Agent
As Lockwood figures out pretty quickly, Nelly Dean has the inside scoop on the
Earnshaw-Linton melodrama. She is trusted by the members of both houses, so she
is a pretty good source for the story. Nelly has been excommunicated from
Wuthering Heights at least two times that we know of. When Heathcliff first arrives
as a child, she leaves him on the landing of the stairs and, as she tells Lockwood,
"Inquiries were made as to how it got there; I was obliged to confess, and in
recompense for my cowardice and inhumanity was sent out of the house" (4.50). She
further confesses, "Hindley hated him, and to say the truth I did the same" (4.52).

All of this suggests that the very person we rely upon for the facts was a participant
in Heathcliff's childhood humiliations. When Heathcliff reaches the climax of his
manic behavior, Nelly wonders, "Is he a ghoul, or a vampire?" (24.46)—only to
remind herself of the infant he once was and that such musings are absurd.

Another issue to consider is Nelly's reliance upon several other narrators to piece
together the story—Isabella, Dr. Kenneth, gossipy villagers, and credulous shepherd
boys. While she is a much more useful and informed narrator than Lockwood, she
is also flawed, biased, and overly identified with the Lintons. When Nelly begins
narrating to Lockwood, we don't suddenly get the "real story," but rather another
representation of the "truth."
It's easy to forget that the novel is Lockwood's journal, which is itself a recording of
Nelly's oral narration. Lockwood hopes to find in Nelly a "regular gossip," though
she believes herself to be a "steady" and "reasonable" character whose familiarity
with books qualifies her as a storyteller. She will indeed provide some clarity to the
complicated family tree, but she is no omniscient narrator—not by a long shot. By
her own confession, she and the other villagers (several of whom fill in the gaps of
her story) don't like outsiders, and they have a tendency toward superstition. Finally,
Nelly seems to find the whole conflict between the families pretty entertaining.
Works Cited
1. https://www.shmoop.com/
2. http://www.litcharts.com/
3. http://www.sparknotes.com/
4. https://www.cliffsnotes.com/
5. https://schoolworkhelper.net/
6. https://www.enotes.com/
7. http://www.pfspublishing.com/
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/
9. http://homepage.tinet.ie/~splash/Cath_E.html
 All Accessed on 15 August 2017