Female Consciousness In Jane Eyre And Wuthering Heights

Charlotte Bronte and Emily Bronte, known as the famous women writers of 19th century in Britain, wrote Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. They are the representative works of the time, where they made a deeper description of the women status.The thesis gives an introduction to the subculture of women writing in Bronte sisters' time. In literary or the real world in Victorian England, the images of women were defined by male-dominated society as either an angel or a whore. Women were always expected to serve men as their better halves. The prevailing Romantic belief and Victorian thoughts limited women to a marginal and subordinate social position. This kind of restriction defined the subculture of women writing in Victorian England. However, individualism and imagination that were advocated by the Romanticists also helped emancipate women in terms of the way of thinking. The rising of novel writing in Victorian age offered feminine writers an opportunity to excercise their literary ability and express their special feminine voice. Bronte sisters' writing contributes to the subculture of women writing, but their novel Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are by far the more experimental and original and are regarded as the representative of early feminine work.The present thesis aims to illustrate female consciousness demonstrated in the two novels. The first part introduces the social background of Victorian Age and the experience of the Bronte sisters, and also gives a brief generalization of feminist theory. The next two chapters describe separately the female consciousness in the two novels: the pursuit of equality in love, pursuit of autonomy and economic independence in Jane; Catherine's contempt for social conventions, double characters and her pursuit of wholeness in love.In the subculture of women writing, Bronte sisters give their special feminine voice in their novels mainly through depiction the female protagonists. Besides the special feminine sexual reality and awareness of female sexuality they reveals through the descriptions of the female protagonists in the novel, Their subversive impetus against the patriarchal world is expressed in many other ways. Living in a subculture of women writing, Bronte sisters' subversive voice in the novel can be traced more closely by applying some concepts and ideas given in some latest famous feminist's theories. The sisters' participation in writing is in itself a kind of challenge of the male-dominated literary circle. And through their reconciliation of body and soul they prove that women are not the weak sex that they are usually supposed to be.