The Bronte Sisters

Sisters Anne, Charlotte and Emily Bronte were all authors whose works often revolved around women's issues with respect to living in a patriarchal society. Women in the era in which the sisters wrote were often limited to roles of wife, mother or family caretaker, and were seldom able to express their own feelings or emotions. This was particularly true in relations with men and in expressions of sexuality. In Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte's Jane Eyre, and Emily's Wuthering Heights, we are treated to heroines who often go against the values, norms, and roles set for women in their societies. In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Helen Huntingdon is a single, divorced mother who must live off her own earnings and wits, a prototype feminist who is years ahead of such women's movements. In Jane Eyre, Jane Eyre opposes the Victorian notion and tradition that a good woman does not feel passion or needs to require it from her lover. In Wuthering Heights Catherine (Cathy) Earnshaw also represents a feminist whose rejection of grand passion in favor of materialism makes her one of literature's most multifaceted women. This analysis will explore the issues of feminism, equality, and sexuality as experienced by these three heroines of the Bronte sister's works.

In The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Gilbert Markham is a farmer who acts as narrator of the story. Early on he is consumed by his love for Helen, a young widow who arrives as a

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son and find some measure of happiness for them both. In Jane Eyre three women are used to serve distinct functions by Bronte with respect to feminism, equality, and sexuality. Bessie, Helen, and Bertha serve different roles in the novel to demonstrate different aspects of womanhood in the Victorian era. Helen Burns teaches Jane restraint, Bessie enables her to see a happy state of marriage, and Bertha Mason shows Jane the dangers of not controlling sexuality. Jane is more than willing to recognize within herself the emotional and physical response which Rochester has awakened. As she says of herself: He is not to them as he is to me; he is not of their kind. I believe he is of mine - I feel sure he is, - I feel akin to him - I understand the language of his countenance and movements; though rank and wealth sever us widely, I have something in my brain and heart, in my blood and nerves, that assimilates me mentally to him (Bronte 1967, 177). These are words that speak not only of an intellectual attraction to a man; they also reflect Jane's awareness of class and income in addition to her recognition that she responds to Rochester physically, in her "blood and nerves." Helen Burns is in direct contrast to Jane. Jane wil

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