Joseph & Zillah
Hale, Sinewy...Lusty and Stout
Joseph
Joseph has been in service at Wuthering Heights for 60 years! We meet him on the very first page of the novel—when Heathcliff instructs him to take Mr. Lockwood’s horse and ‘bring up some wine.’ Joseph is my inspiration for encouraging readers to purchase an annotated edition of the novel.1
Janet Gezari writes in The Annotated Wuthering Heights, “Joseph speaks entirely in the West Riding dialect that signals his locality, class, and lack of formal schooling.” She goes on to explain why Emily had such an ear for the dialect:
“The Brontës spoke standard English with an Irish accent in the Parsonage, but most of their neighbors as well as their servants were dialect speakers.”
Joseph is a fundamentalist who uses the Bible as his authority, but who interprets it literally and according to his own purposes.2 Expect fire and brimstone mixed with good old-fashioned blame-laying and judgement.
Zillah
We meet Zillah, ‘the stout housewife,’ in the first chapter of Wuthering Heights. A ‘lusty dame, with tucked-up gown, bare arms, and fire-flushed cheeks,’ Zillah (frying pan in hand) rescues Grange tenant Mr. Lockwood from Mr. Heathcliff’s, ‘half-a-dozen, four-footed fiends.’ She is also responsible for putting him in Catherine Earnshaws’s room.
“And who showed you up to this room? [Heathcliff] continued, crushing his nails into his palms, and grinding his teeth to subdue the maxillary convulsions. “Who was it? I’ve a good mind to turn them out of the house this moment!”
“It was your servant, Zillah!” I replied, flinging myself on the floor, and rapidly resuming my garments. “I should not care if you did, Mr. Heathcliff; she richly deserves it. I suppose that she wanted to get another proof that the place was haunted, at my expense. Well, it is—swarming with ghosts and goblins! You have reason in shutting it up, I assure you. No one will thank you for a doze in such a den!”
Zillah is an important character, as she acts as yet another narrator of The Story of Heathcliff. Sometimes she shares gossip from Wuthering Heights or Thrushcross Grange and readers will become well acquainted with her.
His dialect reminds me of some modern descendants of our Pennsylvania Germans—who retain words and phrases which are largely unintelligible outside of the local area.
Fike, Francis. “Bitter Herbs and Wholesome Medicines: Love as Theological Affirmation in Wuthering Heights.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 23, no. 2, 1968, pp. 127–49.