My dissertation begins with the central crisis of Jane Eyre, in which Jane flees Thornfield Hall after her failed marriage, is unable to find work, and almost dies of exposure and starvation on the moors. She finds herself asking "What was I to do? Where to go? Oh, intolerable questions, when I could do nothing and go nowhere!" I suggest that this passage, and others that echo it in Villette and works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot can be read in terms of early Victorian anxieties over middle-class women's inability to support themselves should they need to. Most literary criticism on women and work focuses on the end of the century, which saw an explosion of the topic in public debate and literature of the time; in my work, I explore how these discussions and anxieties about women's work were developing much earlier than is usually discussed. While the fin-de-siècle figure of the New Woman characteristically moves through urban landscapes in ways that emphasize her independence (alone, on bicycles, on buses, to and from places of work and her own domicile), earlier middle-class Victorian women walk out of domestic spaces that are not their own, and any brief sense of freedom is swiftly followed by a sense of desperation or need. These women wander through economic landscapes in ways that point to their profound state of dependence and their inability to support themselves. Given that women are still, today, the first economic victims of a recession, I am interested in tracing how women writers started responding to this vulnerability almost as soon as it became visible with the establishment of an industrial economy and the rise of the middle class in early- and mid-Victorian England. While some extant criticism examines Victorian gender and economics in literature on a text-by-text basis, I propose a comprehensive model with four modes for understanding how woman move through economic and physical landscapes in Victorian fiction: 1) in a mode of desperation that points to a fundamental problem with middle-class women's vulnerable economic position (Bronte's Jane Eyre and Villette); 2) in a mode of learning to better understand their limited but relative privilege compared to working-class women (Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh); 3) in a problematized mode of successful self-reinvention, prompted by economic aspirations, that poses a danger to conventional social hierarchy and therefore marks the woman as errant or evil (sensation fiction, Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Aurora Floyd); and 4) in a mode of self-revelation in which a woman comes to realize how her own perpetual state of dependence has affected her choices (Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Middlemarch). Desperation, comprehension, problematic self-invention, revelation: Victorian women's wanderings consistently point to, through the movement of the woman's body, the ways that the woman is an economic subject, perhaps before she is anything else.

Among Charlotte Bronte's four full-length novels, three are composed in the form of autobiography: Jane Eyre (1847), Villette (1853), and The Professor (published posthumously in 1857). The abundance of first-person narratives in Bronte's juvenile writings also highlights her marked preference for the first-person perspective in telling stories. In fact, due to the vital sense of truth inherent in first-person narration, Bronte is often identified by her readers as the heroines in her novels. This thesis aims to deal with the complex relationships of the authoress, her works, and the first-person narration. As a famous woman writer in the nineteenth century, Bronte satisfies her desire for self-expression by means of writing autobiographical fictions instead of composing her real autobiography. The first chapter examines the social and cultural contexts as well as Bronte's personal reasons behind such a choice. There is also the discussion of Bronte's presentation of the different characteristics of Victorian autobiographies by men and women in her novels. The second chapter investigates into Bronte's narrative strategy, and provides answers to her insistence on first-person narration while the omniscient narration is the mainstream of novel writing. The development of Bronte's narrative technique and her transition from the early masculine narrative to the later female discourse are also traced. The third chapter reviews the everlasting subject of Bronte's novels¡Xlove and marriage. With a careful textual study of Bronte's novels and a comprehensive examination of her biographical documents, I find that Bronte's fictional hero and heroines have faithfully reflected the authoress's real thoughts and true beliefs. As can be detected, to deliver the truth that she knows of and to influence her readers on issues that concern her most have always been Bronte's main preoccupations in respect of novel writing.

It is the purpose of this thesis to discuss the Bronte juvenilia only in reference to the mature works and to make clear what influences and likenesses there are between the two, and what currents of continuity exist from the childhood writing through the adult accomplisbment. In such an inquiry Charlotte Bronte, of course, provides the richest reward. For only hers and Branwell's juvenile writings remain to us, and of these two only she wrote significantly with a mature purpose. But the search is barren in none of the four: in all--Charlotte and Branwell, Emily and Anne--the investigation becomes the means of a deeper understanding of the whole picture of their literary lives.

The aim of this essay is to examine Janes personal progress through the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. It addresses the issue of personal development in relation to social position in England during the nineteenth – century. The essay follows Janes personal journey and quest for independence, equality, self worth and love from a Marxist perspective. In the essay close reading is also applied as a complementary theory.

"Of That Transfigured World" identifies a generally unremarked upon mode of nineteenth-century literature that intermingles realism and fantasy in order to address epistemological problems. I contend that works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde maintain a realist core overlaid by fantastic elements that come from the language used to characterize the core narrative or from metatexts or paratexts (such as stories that characters tell). The fantastic in this way becomes a mode of interpretation in texts concerned with the problems of representation and the ability of literature to produce knowledge. Paradoxically, each of these authors relies on the fantastic in order to reach the kinds of meaning nineteenth-century realism strives for. My critical framework is derived from the two interrelated discourses of sacred space theology and cultural geography, focusing primarily on the terms topos and chora which I figure as parallel to realism and fantasy. These terms, gleaned from Aristotle and Plato, function to express two interweaving concepts of space that together construct our sense of place. Topos, as defined by Belden C. Lane, refers to "a mere location, a measurable, quantifiable point, neutral and indifferent" whereas chora refers to place as "an energizing force, suggestive to the imagination, drawing intimate connections to everything else in our lives." In the narratives I examine, meaning is constructed via the fantastic interpretations (chora) of realistically portrayed events (topos). The writers I engage with use this dynamic to strategically address pressing epistemological concerns relating to the purpose of art and its relationship to truth. My dissertation examines the works of Dickens, the Brontës, Pater, and Wilde through the lens of this conceptual framework, focusing on how the language that each of these writers uses overlays chora on top of topos. In essence each of these writers uses imaginative language to transfigure the worlds they describe for specific purposes. For Dickens these fantastic hermeneutics allow him to transfigure world into one where the "familiar" becomes "romantic," where moral connections are clear, and which encourages the moral imagination necessary for empathy to take root. Charlotte and Emily Brontës's transfigurations highlight the subjectivity inherent in representation. For Pater, that transfigured world is aesthetic experience and the way our understanding of the "actual world" of topos is shaped by it. Oscar Wilde's transfigured world is by far the most radical, for in the end that transfigured world ceases to be artificial, as Wilde disrupts the separation between reality and artifice. "Of That Transfigured World" argues for a closer understanding of the hermeneutic and epistemological workings of several major British authors. My dissertation offers a paradigm through which to view these writers that connects them to the on-going Victorian discourses of realism while also pointing to the critical sophistication of their positions in seeking to relate truth to art. My identification of the tensions between what I term topos and chora in these works illuminates the relationship between the creation of meaning and the hermeneutics used to direct the reader to that particular meaning. It further points to the important, yet sometimes troubling, role that imagination plays in the epistemologies at the center of that crowning Victorian achievement, the Realist novel.

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Lucy Snowe, the heroine of <i>Villette</i>, Charlotte Brontës final novel, is in constant conflict with the dichotomies of patriarchal culture. As she is perpetually torn between the opposing forces of patriarchy, Lucy Snowe inhabits what she calls her own <i>still shadow-world</i> (Brontë164). This thesis explains the nature of the intermediate space Lucy Snowe occupies and examines its repercussions on her mental state. Chapter One theorizes the effect of patriarchal dichotomies on Lucy Snowe to demonstrate that her mental conflict has its roots in the female experience of the opposition between nature and culture. Chapter Twos analysis of the nineteenth-century medical understanding of madness shows that Lucy Snowes melancholy is a symptom of the intermediacy created by conflicting patriarchal expectations. Chapter Three compares Lucy Snowe to the female figure in patriarchal master narratives, which draws attention to the serious consequences of patriarchal culture on women and demonstrates that Lucy is representative of women in conflict with patriarchal expectations. Ultimately, as part of Charlotte Brontës endeavor to represent truth rather than reality, Villette challenges patriarchal expectations of women and presents a different vision of womanhood.

By Her Own Hand: Female Agency Through Self-Castration in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction explores the intentional methods of self-castration that lead to authorial empowerment. The project relies on the following self-castration formula: the author’s recognition of herself as a being defined by lack. This lack refers to the inability to signify within the phallocentric system of language. In addition to this initial recognition, the female author realizes writing for public consumption emulates the process of castration but, nevertheless, initiates the writing process as a way to resituate the origin of castration—placing it in her own hand. The female writer also recognizes her production as feminine and, therefore works to castrate her own femininity in her pursuit to create texts that are liberated from the critical assignation of “feminine productions.” Female self-castration is a violent act of displacement. As the author gains empowerment through the writing process, she creates characters that bear the mark of castration. The text opens a field of play in which the author utilizes the page as a way to cut, disfigure, or erase the feminine sexual body. On the authorial level, the feminine writer works through her self-castration process through the process of writing, editing, and publication. Within the text, her characters demonstrate a will toward liberation from authorial productive hegemony by carrying the mark of their creator’s castration and by taking on the power the process allocates to the writer.

Lucy Snowe, the heroine of <i>Villette</i>, Charlotte Brontës final novel, is in constant conflict with the dichotomies of patriarchal culture. As she is perpetually torn between the opposing forces of patriarchy, Lucy Snowe inhabits what she calls her own <i>still shadow-world</i> (Brontë164). This thesis explains the nature of the intermediate space Lucy Snowe occupies and examines its repercussions on her mental state. Chapter One theorizes the effect of patriarchal dichotomies on Lucy Snowe to demonstrate that her mental conflict has its roots in the female experience of the opposition between nature and culture. Chapter Twos analysis of the nineteenth-century medical understanding of madness shows that Lucy Snowes melancholy is a symptom of the intermediacy created by conflicting patriarchal expectations. Chapter Three compares Lucy Snowe to the female figure in patriarchal master narratives, which draws attention to the serious consequences of patriarchal culture on women and demonstrates that Lucy is representative of women in conflict with patriarchal expectations. Ultimately, as part of Charlotte Brontës endeavor to represent truth rather than reality, Villette challenges patriarchal expectations of women and presents a different vision of womanhood.