THE SOCIAL ROLE AND INDEPENDENCE OF WOMEN: THE FEMINIST POSITION OF THE BRONTË SISTERS

Abstract

This article explores how Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë articulated and advanced feminist ideas concerning the social role and independence of women in mid-Victorian England. Although the term “feminism” was not yet in common use, the sisters’ prose fiction challenged prevailing gender hierarchies, critiqued legal and economic restrictions, and imagined alternative models of female autonomy. Through a close textual reading of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall in dialogue with nineteenth-century social history and modern feminist theory, the study demonstrates that the Brontës reframed marriage as a partnership, foregrounded female agency, and exposed the psychological costs of patriarchal confinement. Methodologically the research combines narratological analysis, intertextual comparison, and contextualization within period discourse on women’s “separate sphere.” The findings suggest that the sisters’ literary strategies—interior focalization, ironic commentary, and subversive plot structure—produced a nuanced critique that resonates with later feminist arguments advanced by writers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Sandra Gilbert. The article concludes that the Brontës occupy a pivotal position in the genealogy of feminist thought: they neither merely echoed contemporary reformist voices nor awaited twentieth-century liberationist movements but rather forged a distinctive rhetorical space in which female subjectivity could be imagined as self-determining.