Representation of the Socio-Economic Position of Victorian Women in the Novels of Brontë Sisters: Villette (1853), Wuthering Heights (1847), and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Victorian understandings of domesticity and idealised womanhood created a limited sphere for women during the period. Particularly, upper and middle-class women were confined to either marrying and becoming the property of their husbands or pursuing a career in teaching. In such conditions, the novels of the Brontë sisters enabled the readers to understand the socio-economic positions of women in the Victorian period and the struggles they faced in a male-dominated, class-based society. The sisters themselves experienced hardships because of their gender throughout their lives as such, financially supporting their household and never achieving their lifelong dream of opening a private school. This study begins with brief accounts of the sisters’ lives with the addition of how their own experiences influenced their fictions, and an examination of the position of women in Victorian society. It then moves on to the novels Villette, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which depict the struggles of Victorian women through four fictional women in different settings and occasions. Finally, considering the socio-economic position of women in Victorian Period, this thesis analyses Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), and Charlotte Brontë’s portrayal of Lucy Snowe in Villette anticipates the New Woman archetype by nearly forty years, depicting her as an independent woman who defies the societal expectations of the era, Emily and Anne’s heroines – the unruly, erratic Catherine and victim femes covert of marital violences, Isabella Linton and Helen Huntingdon – subvert conventional norms surrounding marriage and divorce, highlighting the struggles faced by Victorian women in terms of gender norms and socio-economic structure of the period.