Nelly Dean, the servant who moves from Wuthering Heights to Thrushcross Grange and back again and tells the story of the Earnshaws, Lintons, and Heathcliffs to Mr. Lockwood, grew up at the Heights. She was a child there, the same age as Hindley; she was there when Heathcliff arrived and she grew up with him and the two Earnshaw children.
What happens when you grow up with someone? What happens when you’ve always known someone, and they’ve always known you?
Heathcliff and Cathy grow up together, and the two of them are very close in age; they end up bleeding into each other, becoming each other, inseparable despite everything that comes between them. They have an affinity almost from the very beginning, and it’s strengthened through years of intimacy. They see and recognize each other, then form each other for years, and cannot even be separated by death.
Nelly and Hindley grow up together, also close in age, and while their lives take very different directions in adulthood Nelly never loses the close feelings she had for her longtime playmate. When the local doctor informs Nelly that Hindley has finally died:
I confess this blow was greater to me than the shock of Mrs. Linton’s death: ancient associations lingered round my heart; I sat down in the porch and wept as for a blood relation, desiring Kenneth to get another servant to introduce him to the master. I could not hinder myself from pondering on the question—’Had he had fair play?’ Whatever I did, that idea would bother me: it was so tiresomely pertinacious that I resolved on requesting leave to go to Wuthering Heights, and assist in the last duties to the dead. Mr. Linton was extremely reluctant to consent, but I pleaded eloquently for the friendless condition in which he lay; and I said my old master and foster-brother had a claim on my services as strong as his own. …
I insisted on the funeral being respectable.
And what happens when you haven’t grown up with someone, when you’ve met them only in adolescence? You might be deceived; you might make a terrible mistake. Edgar Linton meets Cathy only when they are teenagers and can’t understand her double character. One day, in a fit of temper, she lies and strikes him. He is horrified and threatens to leave; Cathy threatens to cry herself sick if he does. Nelly has witnessed all. She knows Cathy (if not Edgar). She involves herself.
I resolved to encourage him.
‘Miss is dreadfully wayward, sir,’ I called out. ‘As bad as any marred child: you’d better be riding home, or else she will be sick, only to grieve us.’
The soft thing looked askance through the window: he possessed the power to depart, as much as a cat possesses the power to leave a mouse half killed, or a bird half eaten. Ah, I thought, there will be no saving him—He’s doomed, and flies to his fate!
In fact, Nelly’s intended encouragement has the opposite effect she hoped for: after Edgar returns to Cathy and they make up, Nelly “saw the quarrel had merely effected a closer intimacy—had broken the outworks of youthful timidity, and enabled them to forsake the disguise of friendship, and confess themselves lovers.”
A remarkably parallel thing happens later, when Heathcliff returns and begins calling on Cathy in her new married home. He meets Isabella Linton, her sister-in-law, and Isabella becomes infatuated with him. Cathy knows the real Heathcliff and knows this is a terrible mistake. She tries to warn Isabella, who claims to love Heathcliff more than Cathy ever loved Edgar.
‘I wouldn’t be you for a kingdom, then!’ Catherine declared, emphatically: and she seemed to speak sincerely. ‘Nelly, help me to convince her of her madness. Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation: an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone. I’d as soon put that little canary into the park on a winter’s day, as recommend you to bestow your heart on him! It is deplorable ignorance of his character, child, and nothing else, which makes that dream enter your head. Pray, don’t imagine that he conceals depths of benevolence and affection beneath a stern exterior! He’s not a rough diamond—a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he’s a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, “Let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous or cruel to harm them”; I say, “Let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged”: and he’d crush you like a sparrow’s egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge. I know he couldn’t love a Linton; and yet he’d be quite capable of marrying your fortune and expectations: avarice is growing with him a besetting sin. There’s my picture: and I’m his friend—so much so, that had he thought seriously to catch you, I should, perhaps, have held my tongue, and let you fall into his trap.’
Not only does Cathy indeed speak sincerely here, but she speaks true: she forecasts perfectly the next phase of the story of these entangled families. Her only mistake is in saying that she should have held her tongue in order to let Isabella fall into Heathcliff’s trap. In fact, he wasn’t laying one yet, and Cathy involving herself is what sets it up. Isabella thinks Cathy is lying because of jealousy, and when Cathy tells Heathcliff about Isabella’s foolish feelings, he realizes how easily he can pull off this coup. Then he crushes her like a sparrow’s egg to set himself up to own Thrushcross Grange decades later. Cathy knew Heathcliff, but she did not really understand Isabella.
As Cathy suggests, Nelly too knows Heathcliff. And Heathcliff knows her in turn. They had much in common: both grew up in the Earnshaw household, among the Earnshaw children, without being one of them. Nelly was the daughter of a servant and remained always in service herself, despite being raised among the family. Heathcliff was so petted by old Mr. Earnshaw that was not initially raised to be a servant, but a member of the family—but once Hindley was in charge after the old man’s death, that changed. Rather than submit, as Nelly always did, to what was arguably his own rightful social place in the household, Heathcliff rebelled, first by shirking his work and later by running away and actually turning himself into a species of gentleman. He ends up owning both estates concerned in the novel, while Nelly continues her whole life in service. But they still know and see each other, and Heathcliff has a remarkable soft spot for Nelly in a world where he seems to care for nothing but Cathy. “Worthy Mrs. Dean, I like you, but I don’t like your double dealing,” he says to her near the Grange, while inducing young Catherine Linton to visit the Heights against Nelly’s and her father’s wishes. Later in the process of capturing young Catherine for his son*:
[W]hen hearing a rustle among the ling, I looked up, and saw Mr. Heathcliff almost close upon us, descending the Heights. He didn’t cast a glance toward my companions, though they were sufficiently near for Linton’s sobs to be audible; but hailing me in the almost hearty tone he assumed to none besides, and the sincerity of which, I couldn’t avoid doubting, he said—
‘It is something to see you so near to my house, Nelly!’
Nelly knows well enough to know that Heathcliff’s designs are far from innocent here. But she does correctly note that he treats her differently from anyone else we see. This doesn’t protect her from him (let alone protecting her charge), but it does put her in a unique position that seems to come from what they uniquely have in common.
*And just imagine what we could say about young Catherine Linton and how little she knows or understands of Linton Heathcliff!
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