While critics have scrutinized Emily Brontëë's use of the framed narrative in Wuthering Heights (1847), raising questions about the reliability of the central narrators, Lockwood and Nelly Dean, scant attention has been paid to Isabella Heathcliff as the third narrator. Though readers have overlooked the importance of Isabella's narrative, Brontëë highlights her narrative by including it as the only intact letter in the entire novel and devotes almost an entire chapter to her narrative. Isabella's narrative surfaces in a letter to Nelly Dean, offering a highly unorthodox portrait for the mid-Victorian period of the domestic abuse of a young bride from the gentry class. Isabella's letter, which comprises most of chapter 13, also becomes a critical tool to ferret out the reliability of Heathcliff's account in chapter 14 of their marriage. By analyzing the conflicting accounts of their marriage, this essay demonstrates that Heathcliff 's argument acts as a carefully crafted legal rationale, based upon the laws of coverture, to defend and sanction the domestic confinement of his wife. While the laws of coverture deprived women of a legal and economic voice, Brontëë endows Isabella with a complex and at times ironic voice. Brontëë paints a powerful portrait of the radical transformation of Isabella from the pampered and infantile Miss Linton to the hardened Mrs. Heathcliff, ending with her as the intrepid, fugitive wife, Isabella Heathcliff. Brontëë demonstrates through Isabella's story that as long as the laws of coverture are intact, companionate marriage is at risk of being exploited and compromised.
In the past twenty years, given the burgeoning field of postcolonial studies and its inquiry into the identity politics of race, ethnicity, and imperialism, significantly more critical attention has been paid to Charlotte Brontë's portrayal of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847) than in the prior one hundred and forty years of Brontë scholarship. While in The Madwoman and the Attic (1979), Gilbert and Gubar present an earlier reading of Bertha as “Jane's truest and darkest double” (360), any reading of Bertha's darkest in terms of a cultural or racialized identity came about in later criticism. Gayatri Spivak was instrumental in positioning Bertha within a discourse of imperialism rather than reading her merely in psychological terms, which then precipitated more recent studies on Bertha's colonial heritage, her financial and cultural imperialist inheritance and her ambiguous ethnic status as a Creole women. Contemporary critics have also addressed how Rochester in a sense becomes Bertha's “truest and darkest double.” However, his darkness has proven to be far more quizzical, for unlike Bertha he is neither Creole nor raised in the West Indies; quite to the contrary, Rochester was desired by the Masons precisely because of his heritage, being “of a good race.” Still, as readers, we have had to grapple with Brontë's numerous descriptions of Rochester's dark visage.
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