Thursday, January 10, 2013

What quotes in Wuthering Heights show that Nelly is reading Isabella's letter to Lockwood?This is to help with essay on intertextuality in particular.

Two examples in the text of Wuthering Heights that show that Nelly is reading Isabella's letter to Mr. Lockwood are in Chapters 13 and 14. In Chapter 13 Nelly tells Lockwood about a note Isabella sent to her brother announcing her marriage to Heathcliff and asking forgiveness and reconciliation. Then Nelly says that she herself received a long letter about two weeks later (a fortnight, or fourteen days).


Nelly goes on the say that she still values it and says, "I'll read it: for I keep it yet." Nelly goes on to say, "'Dear Ellen, it begins, - I came last night to Wuthering Heights...." In Bronte's construction, Nelly's voice blends in with Isabella's own voice because it is Nelly's voice that says "it begins," but there is no textual punctuation orother signification that this is so.


In Chapter 14, Nelly steps out of the reading and tells Mr. Lockwood, "As soon as I had perused this epistle I went to the master." These steppings in and out of the epistle (1) in her own discourse and (2) in her conversation with Lockwood, are demonstration of the mechanics of intertextuality in which separate texts influence each other.

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