Drawing fictional lines: dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel

Style, Spring, 1998 by Susan L. Ferguson

Making Strange: Dialect in Wuthering Heights

In Wuthering Heights, dialect is closely associated with a single figure, Joseph, for all of the narrators and most of the other characters speak standard English. Because Joseph's dialect speech is elaborately non-standard, it has attracted much attention from dialect scholars. Because the use of dialect in the novel is so limited, however, it has been little discussed from a fictolinguistic perspective. When critics do discuss the function of dialect in Wuthering Heights, they tend to see it as a class marker identifying Joseph as a powerful, but minor servant character, and note the conventional class-restoration narrative involving Hareton in the second half of the novel (cf. Ingham, Waddington-Feather). But if we consider the context for Joseph's speech, and particularly if we compare the representation of Joseph's speech with that of Heathcliff, it becomes clear that dialect in Wuthering Heights plays more than a minor part in the novel. Indeed, Joseph's dialect has a central role in the shaping of the fictional world and in the development of the novel's social critique.

Charlotte Bronte was among the first readers to criticize her sister's use of dialect. After Emily's death, Charlotte decided to rewrite the dialect, explaining to the publisher: "It seems to me advisable to modify the orthography of the old servant Joseph's speeches; for though as it stands it exactly renders the Yorkshire dialect to a Yorkshire ear, yet I am sure Southerns must find it unintelligible; and thus one of the most graphic characters of the book is lost on them" (Gaskell 318). Charlotte was apparently right that Emily's rendering of dialect works exactly "to a Yorkshire ear," for Mrs. Gaskell tells us that the real identity of the "Bells" was uncovered in part because a Haworth man recognized Joseph's speech as a Haworth form of Yorkshire. Charlotte was also right that some readers might find Joseph "unintelligible," but, despite her determination, she had difficulty reworking Joseph's speech for "Southerns." That current editions of the novel generally use Emily's orthography stems not only from a contemporary preference for unique authorship, but also from the fact that Charlotte's revised dialect proved no more consistent or intelligible than Emily's.

There is no denying that there are insoluble technical problems in using any kind of non-standard orthography in a novel; literary dialect can, at best, provide only a rough approximation of the sounds of actual speech to the reader, and efforts to capture a precise idea of the sound through extensive use of non-standard spellings may frustrate, rather than inform, readers. Consider the following typical instance of Joseph's speech: "This is t'way on't - up at sun-dahn; dice, brandy, cloised shutters, und can'le lught till next day, at nooin - then, t'fooil gangs banning un raving tuh his cham'er, makking dacent fowks dig thur fingers i' thur lugs fur varry shaume; un' th' knave, wah, he carn cahnt his brass, un' ate, un' sleep, un' off tub his neighbour's tuh gossip wi' t' wife" (143). The language in this sentence includes an abundance of non-standard spellings, many of which can be recognized as alternate spellings for common words, "t'way" for "the way," "can'le lught" for "candle light," "dacent" for "decent." But unless the reader already knows how Yorkshire speech sounds, the sounds of this speech remain mystifying. What, for example, is the meaning of the double k in "makking"? Does it suggest emphasis? a stutter? a sound different from the ordinary k sound or a shortened a? Is "nooin" pronounced with one or two syllables? What is meant by the respelling of folks as "fowks"? Is this an instance of what is called "eye dialect" - since to my knowledge the word is never pronounced with a noticeable l, and so the respelling may suggest the standard pronunciation - or is the w particularly emphasized in this instance? While these and many other ambiguous uses of the letters of standard English to indicate Yorkshire speech may be perfectly clear to the Yorkshire reader, they thwart the outside reader who wishes to discover the key to the phonetics of this transcription. Indeed, all dialect writing will tend to leave readers with only the most approximate sense of what the speech is supposed to sound like - in large part because it is impossible to know exactly what sounds the author means the standard written orthography to represent.