Top 100 Literature Essay Topics - Ievgen Sykalo 2026
The use of flashback in “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte
The Mediate Ghost
Frame Narratives, Found Manuscripts, and the Discordant Voices of the Heights
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a masterclass in Narrative Mediation. It utilizes a Frame Narrative where the reader is three steps removed from the actual events. By the time we hear about Heathcliff and Catherine’s childhood, the story has been lived by the characters, spoken by Nelly Dean, and transcribed into a journal by Lockwood. This layering suggests that the "truth" of the past is a Gothic Fragment—something that can be glimpsed through old diaries but never fully possessed by the civilized outsider.
The Found Manuscript: Marginalia as History
In Chapter 3, Lockwood discovers Catherine Earnshaw’s childhood writings scrawled in the margins of her books. This Epistolary Device serves as our first window into the past. Rather than a simple flashback, it is a Found Manuscript moment that disrupts the present timeline. Catherine describes the cruelty of her brother Hindley—whom she calls a "detestable substitute" for their father—and her defiant plans to escape to the moors with Heathcliff. This establishes the Narrative Conflict: the struggle between domestic confinement and elemental freedom.
Fact: Lockwood’s Prolonged Fever is a critical structural device. Because he is bedridden for weeks at Thrushcross Grange, he becomes the captive audience for Nelly Dean. This creates the "convalescent frame"—a period where the present stands still so the past can be fully reconstructed through Nelly's oral history.
Discordant Narration: The Nelly Dean Problem
As the primary Embedded Narrator, Nelly Dean is far from objective. Her relationship with Catherine and Heathcliff is defined by Domestic Friction. While Nelly provides the facts, her Discordant Narration often suppresses the raw emotion of the scenes she describes. When Catherine recounts her dream of being "kicked out of Heaven" because she longed for the Heights, Nelly reacts with moralistic dismissal. As critics Gilbert and Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the Attic, this forces the reader to look past Nelly’s pragmatism to see the Byronic Passion of the characters she is judging.
"Nelly, I am Heathcliff—he’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself—but as my own being."
Why it sticks: This verified quote is the novel's Ontological Pivot. Catherine isn't describing an erotic attraction; she is stating a shared identity. This is a rejection of the separate "self" in favor of a singular, elemental existence that the social world of the Grange cannot accommodate.
Transferable Skill: Decoding Filtered Narratives
The Skill: Analyze Narrative Distance. When a story has layers (A writes what B said about C), the author is often highlighting the Unreliability of History. In your own writing, look for where the "Transcriber" (Lockwood) and the "Speaker" (Nelly) disagree. The gap between their two perspectives is usually where the author hides the most complex themes—like the clash between city civilization and rural nature.
Temporal Trauma and the Second Generation
The novel’s Non-linear Structure ensures that the tragedies of the first generation haunt the second. Heathcliff’s revenge plot, involving the forced marriage of Cathy Linton and the sickly Linton Heathcliff, is a perversion of the passion he shared with the elder Catherine. However, the cycle is finally broken through literacy and mutual respect between Cathy and Hareton Earnshaw. As Lockwood closes his journal, he sees a world finally moving past its Gothic Trauma, allowing the ghosts of the past to rest in the "quiet earth" of the moors.
- Intro: The Frame Narrative—Lockwood as the urban scribe of the Heights.
- Body 1: The Found Manuscript—Analyzing Chapter 3 and the marginalia as Gothic history.
- Body 2: Discordant Narration—The bias of Nelly Dean and the "convalescent frame" of Lockwood’s illness.
- Body 3: Ontological Identity—The "I am Heathcliff" declaration as a rejection of social morality.
- Conclusion: Breaking the Cycle—The resolution found in the younger generation’s union.
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