Women Looking For Hearth And Home

Looking for an ideal hearth and home has been the eternal will of human beings since the moment when Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, knowing good and evil. Literature originates from life, and in turn reflects it. In the 19th century, English novel stepped into its "Golden Age". At this period, women writers represented by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontě, Emily Brontě, Elizabeth Gaskell vied with each other in publishing their novels, in which they put the women figures at the leading place, describing mainly the colorful pictures about women's struggles for their ideal hearth and home: a warm house and an ideal love. This thesis aims to propose a new point of view—the hearth and home complex to interpret four of the classic English women novels of the 19th century (Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Mary Barton) by analyzing the love journeys through which heroines in those novels above mentioned struggle for their ideal hearth and home, meanwhile offer a chance for the reader to appreciate the awakening and development of the women's consciousness. The main body of this thesis is composed of five chapters, with the first chapter dealing with the hearth and home complex and the other four respectively analyzing the love journey of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, of Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre, of Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights and of Mary Barton in Mary Barton based on the hearth and home complex.