In the nineteenth century, the Bronte sisters took the literary world by storm, with the release of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and her younger sister, Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.
In Wuthering Heights, the story of Catherine, Heathcliff, and the remainder of the Earnshaw and Linton families is told through a narrator finding out information from another narrator. To break that down, Lockwood is learning about the characters and their stories through Nelly, their former servant, and he is attempting to tell the story that he heard from a first-hand witness. So, basically, he is the secondary source, telling the story with some things lost in time – whether that’s Nelly’s fault for over-embellishing or his own for misinterpreting the complexity of the events.
Emily’s sister Charlotte, however, took a different approach of story-telling. In Jane Eyre, an older Jane is recounting her life. Although a fictional character, Jane’s story is being told in the form of a memoir within a story. Wuthering Heights adopts a similar style of a “story being told within a story” with the complexity of the narrators. In Wuthering Heights, I would definitely argue that Lockwood and Nelly are unreliable narrators, because they are both flawed in their story-telling, as mentioned above. Though many people wouldn’t consider Jane to be an unreliable narrator, I would argue the opposite, since her story is not being told in the present tense and as an older version of herself, her reflection and perspective of the events that happened may be more skewed than if they were told in the present tense.
Both stories are being recounted from past events, which makes for unreliable narrators, one is being told from a first-hand account, the other is being told from a second-hand account. For me, making the connections between these two novels stylistically enabled me to think about narration impacted the story-telling of each one, and whether or not having non-conventional styles affected the how I perceived the events of each story. Though different texts, the connection between the two styles of narration that the two Brontes used do have one main thing in common: they’re both stories-within-stories and frankly, can be quite complex.
I think your notion about the difference in tenses making a narrator more or less reliable and how this relates to the idea of truth is super interesting! While I definitely agree that we should be critical of the way we read any narrator and consider how their perspective may shape the narrative, I’m not entirely sure if present tense narrations, assuming they are still given by a first person narrator, are inherently more truthful than reflective narrators. For example, thinking about this in terms of The Moonstone, the narrators, while reflective, are only allowed to reveal the things they knew at the time. Jane, being reflective and not having this barrier, could perhaps have a more big picture kind of perspective that in a way could be just as if not more truthful than a present tense narrator. I think the questions you are asking are important ones, but I think they are inherently incredibly complex (as any search for truth always is).
Incredibly interesting, Emily. Thanks for sharing this.
I am thankful for Professor Kersh’s class because, clearly, she has chosen novels where narration plays a key role. From the third-person omniscient perspective in A Tale of Two Cities, to the “gossipy” perspective presented in Daisy Miller, to the turn-based narration in The Moonstone, the Victorian novel is one in which narration plays an important function.
Your interest in narration – whether that be recounting past events (Jane Eyre) to “secondary sources” (Wuthering Heights) – is fascinating. I think that we can actually apply both of these novels to our current novel, The Moonstone.
In The Moonstone, each narrator is recounting events that occurred in the past. For example, Betteredge is writing about his subjective experience surrounding the disappearance of the moonstone, while relying on the factual evidence supplied by Penelope’s diary (indicating the actual dates of the occurrences). Similarly, we are beset with “secondary sources,” or witnesses (if you will). While Miss Clack may not be involved in the actual disappearance of the moonstone, she is nonetheless related to the case, because she was living in London during the time that Lady Verinder and Rachel Verinder were also living there. She is recounting events as they occurred in the Verinders’ lives.
Because The Moonstone seems to be a “conglomeration” of the narrative styles present in both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, it makes me inquire: how can narration when recounting events from the past work in tandem with accounts from witnesses (secondary sources) to create unreliability?