Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Horace’s Ars Poetica, Lines 179-88: Nelly Dean as Tragic Nuntius

Abstract

A manuscript in the Hugh Walpole Collection of King’s School, Canterbury, attributed to Emily Brontë, consists of translations from Virgil’s Aeneid and Horace’s Ars Poetica. In his groundbreaking analysis of the manuscript, Edward Chitham detects in Brontë’s translation of Horace’s treatise her indebtedness to its precepts on drama and he suggests that the role of chorus applies to Nelly Dean as the principal narrator in Wuthering Heights (1847). Expanding on Chitham’s findings, the article proposes that Nelly Dean more plausibly fulfils the role of a tragic nuntius or messenger. The main principle of the Ars Poetica is decorum, or literary propriety, and Horace instructs that it is decorous for extreme tragic violence to be represented through the nuntius’s reported speech. Nelly delivers an account of and presides over each of Wuthering Heights’s eleven reported deaths and, in accordance with Horatian standards of making known tragic catastrophe, acts as tragic nuntius. Brontë’s formal choices for Wuthering Heights would seem to conform to Horace’s advice that it is decorous for tragic events to be reported rather than performed on stage.