Drawing fictional lines: dialect and narrative in the Victorian novel

Style, Spring, 1998 by Susan L. Ferguson

While for dialect scholars and other socio-linguists, Joseph's complex dialect provides a problematic but rich source of information about the actual Haworth dialect in the 1840s, from a ficto-linguistic perspective what matters most is not the specific features of the actual speech, but that Joseph's dialect is strikingly consistent throughout the novel, and strikingly different from that of the other characters. Whether quoted directly by a narrator or quoted at several removes, and whether written down by Lockwood in his narrative or Catherine in her marginalia or Isabella in her letter, Joseph's dialect is consistently rendered. This fixing of Joseph's speech into a persistent, and, it is important to note, persistently difficult, style takes place alongside Bronte's widespread minimization of language difference (on such minimization see Sternberg and Hough) in the speech of the other characters, including Ellen Dean, whose language is almost entirely standard, though her position is similar in many respects to Joseph's (she is also a servant, born and raised in the area).

The characters who ought to speak some kind of dialect but do not also include Heathcliff. Though this idea may surprise readers, there are many reasons to expect that Heathcliff's language be different from that of the other characters. Ellen Dean explains that when Heathcliff first arrived at Wuthering Heights his speech was unintelligible: "We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy's head, I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk - indeed, its face looked older than Catherine's - yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and repeated over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand" (77). Later, Edgar Linton clearly perceives Heathcliff as lower class, for he refers to him as "the gipsy - the plough boy" (134), and treats him as a servant. Still later, when Heathcliff returns from his long journey away from Wuthering Heights after Catherine's marriage, Ellen describes Heathcliff's voice as "foreign in tone" (132). Despite these comments, however, there is nothing in the actual spelling or grammar of the dialogue to suggest to the reader that there is any important difference between Heathcliff's speech and that of the other major characters of the novel.

Since Heathcliff's violence and cruelty outdo even Joseph's, this standardizing of Heathcliff's language is not an example of the Victorian convention of representing virtue through standard English. Though one could argue that the standard English is used to suggest Heathcliff's intelligence or education, it seems to me that there is another explanation for Heathcliff's speech style. If we consider how dialect and standard English function within the novel itself, the "inconsistencies" of the dialect begin to make sense. By making Heathcliff's language exactly like that of Catherine and Hindley, Bronte noticeably resists making Heathcliff's story primarily social; instead, she emphasizes the psychological drama and divisions that are so central to the novel. If Heathcliff spoke the dialect, the novel would appear more about the social climbing and illicit love of an adopted son. Further, the intense intimacy of Catherine and Heathcliff would take on a far stronger social meaning (more like that, for instance, of Connie and Mellors in Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover; see Leith), and so would Heathcliff's usurpation of Wuthering Heights. Instead, by making Heathcliff's style of speech similar to that of Catherine, Hindley, and even Edgar and Isabella, the novel locates him at the absolute center of its strange world, a world geographically restricted to the two estates, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.