The Oxford Paragraphs: Emily Brontë Wuthering Heights

Books Piecing my way through the narrative fog of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights with its many layers of narrators, I was reminded of the found footage genre of films, in which the viewer’s entire understanding of the story is whatever is visually made apparent to them through the first person gaze of the whoever’s holding the camera in the fictional world and then the film’s editor, a figure who sits between that world and our reality. Everything we know about the love story is filtered through the recollections of Lockwood and Nelly and others, characters who Bronte employs to imply that Heathcliffe and Cathy and their decedents exist in a subjectively cruel, sadistic place cut off from a more benign reality. All are apparently reliable narrators, but throughout I couldn’t help a nagging suspicion, and that like The Blair Witch Project et al, there are multiple layers of fiction at play.