The "Self" Under The Gender Coat

There have been tons of written documents concerning Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and the mysterious lives of their respective authors, yet few serious, systematic comparisons have been made either between these two books or the two older daughters in the famous Brontёfamily. Most critics tend to name Charlotte and Emily Brontё"female Gothic novelists", or describe them with a vague term"Victorian women writers". The author of the present thesis holds the view that as sisters, the two Brontёs lived in similar backgrounds, received similar education and were influenced by similar literature trends. On the other hand, the two sisters had different life experiences and pursued different goals in their literary creation. Thus, a comparative study of these two authors will be helpful in further understanding their greatness and the features of their masterpieces.This paper intends to discuss the two Brontёsisters and their masterpieces in the following aspects.First, the paper points out the limitation of feminist approach in literary criticism. Though regarded as a progressive and revolutionary movement, feminism has its own limits when applied to the analysis of literary works. As women writers in the Victorian England, the Brontёs were always put under the feminist microscope.However, to interpret their works only in the feminist perspective is far from enough. The feminist approach in literary criticism tends to put everything in a sociological context with the preposition that women are suffering in a male-dominated world. This generalization, unfortunately, is not always correct. The Brontёsisters lived in a world different from that of many other women writers. Feminism is not the best approach to the analysis of the greatness of the Brontёs and their novels.The thesis then explicates the romantic tendency in the Brontёworks in Part Three. Some critics put the Brontёs in the category of critical-realistic novelists together with Dickens and Thackeray, but the realistic elements were only of limited importance in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. These two books are essentially romantic novels. English Romantic writers near the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century had great influence on them. Unlike realistic writers such as Dickens and Thackeray, the Brontёs concerned more about the individual emotions, and psychological development. Their works are strongly tinged with Romantic elements.Part Four and Part Five of the thesis focus on the themes and styles of these two books. As works by writers with the influence of Romanticism, both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights were about one's self-identification. In such a process, Charlotte Brontёand Emily Brontёhad different discoveries. The former outlined the mental autobiography of an individual human being, and thus revealed the universal emotional, psychological and spiritual development of all human beings. The latter probed into the deeper part of human mind, trying to clarify the two conflicting tendencies in the heart of the author herself as well as in the hearts of individuals in general. Different themes of these two books, therefore, require different styles: the dramatic style of Charlotte Brontёand the poetic style of Emily Brontё.By such analyses, one of this paper's main purposes is to put right what has seemed to become an unwritten rule in the study of women writers'works ---- the feminist perspective. This paper tries to take a perspective other than feminism in the exploration of the themes and styles of these two novels. This new perspective should turn out to be no less productive than the feminist approach. Through examining the Brontёsisters and their masterpieces in terms of self-identification, the greatness of them might be rediscovered.