A Study on the Narratives of the Brontёs

A Study on the Narratives of the Brontёs

This study aims to explain how the Brontes' Narratives is interwoven by various narrative techniques. In this paper I have examined the three novels of the Brontes. Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre has a fundamental conflict between mother-figures and heroine Jane. It is Jane's failure to establish rapport with her primary mother-figure, Mrs. Reed that finally leads to the plot's failure to reach a resolution until the very end of the novel Unlike other works where the mother is absent and it is the lack of maternal presence that breeds mistrust and conflict between characters, Jane Eyre has a powerful presence of a surrogate mother. Emily's Wuthering Heights seems to be very neatly designed, though it has multiple narrators and interwoven plots. Beneath the surface, however, there are ruptures in the layers of narratives that we can detect at a second reading. These ruptures are caused by the narrators who choose to tell the story in their own special way, and they ultimately reveal a fragmentation in author's vision which splits the novel itself. Anne Bronte makes use of established genres like the fairy tale, the gathic and the Bildungstroman, and subvert and deconstruct these older, "patriarchal" forms of narrative. Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is similar to Wuthering Heights, especially because both novels have twin tales yoked together Markham and Helen tell two separate stories in Anne's novel like Emily's Lockwood and Dean Helen bestrides both stories, and there is an underlying pattern of repetitiveness that links the plots in both novels, in spite of breaks and fragmentations. Indeed, the Bronte sisters use earlier, more rigidly defined forms of narratives in their fragmentary narratilon. Their novels that originate from their personal history of suffering, struggles and catastrophes surely create a form that illustrates for readers the shape of things to come in English literature.