In Wuthering Heights and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the theme of manipulation is explored through several means, including that of narrative technique, the role of illness and dreams, and the role of relationships. Manipulation is demonstrated to be a core theme in both novels, perhaps reflecting the role that the authors, and the characters by extension, seem to have been manoeuvred into during their Victorian lives; manipulation is also explored through the extent to which each character experiences autonomy, and the way in which ‘Fate’ intervenes. As such, manipulation is explored through both the passive form of subjective experience, often seen in Tess’s narration and also that of Isabella’s letter, and in the active form of direct interference, such as that of Nelly in WH or the omniscient narrator in Tess.
Manipulation is exemplified through the two authors’ use of narrative techniques, exhibiting both the narrator’s subjective, passive manipulation of events through re-telling them, almost like a series of Chinese Whispers, yet also their active manipulation in the stories. Manipulation is explored both through the act of manipulating words, colouring the narratives – most notably Nelly’s – with shades of subjectivity, calling Cathy’s decline a ‘favourable crisis’, or hindsight, ‘I really thought him not vindictive’, and through active interference – such as controlling or directing the actions of other characters, such as Nelly’s choice to not mention Cathy’s state of mind to Edgar; as such, it seems that there is not an ‘impartial’ narrator in either text that has not manipulated the narrative through either their own feelings, or their own actions – perhaps symbolic of the incompatibility between human nature and Blanket-objectivity. The ironic contradiction of ‘a favourable crisis’ echoes the disdain that Nelly had felt for Cathy at the time, but also the disdain she felt as Cathy had been ‘lingering a burden and a misery maker to all about her’; Nelly’s active manipulation in the story, but also her passive manipulation in the structuring and re-telling of events – later made even more corrupted through Lockwood’s seizure of the narrative and manipulation of her words – makes her the epitomised ‘corrupted narrator’ and chief manipulator figure in the novel, equated to that of the ‘President of the Immortals’ in Tess, who had enacted his ‘Justice’ and ‘had ended his sport with Tess’.
The key narrative frames, such as that of Nelly or, more overtly, the ‘omniscient’ narrator of Tess – perhaps omniscient in that it is a moral caricature of Hardy, who necessarily knows the events before they happen – seem to embody the authorial perspective itself, with the authors being the epitomised ‘manipulator’, colouring the novels with their own moral ideas, feelings and drive, and actively bringing the novel to fruition. Thus, creating a clear social critique of both society’s roles for women and class, in the instance of Tess, and of the denial of true natures for Cathy and Heathcliff. In Tess, Hardy seems to be echoing his opinions on where the ‘blame’ lies throughout the novel, definitive in that it is not Tess through her inactive role whilst she is in a state of dreaming, during the death of Prince, and structurally depicted in the ‘hazy fog’ of the wooded area during Alec’s abuse of her– a highly contemporary idea to lay the blame outside the ‘temptress woman’ figure of the Victorian era, and this is clearly depicted through the God-like moral-source of the omniscient narrator.
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