ABSTRACT
As Charlotte Bronte's own contemporaries recognised, the striking originality of her novels lies not so much in the nature of her subject-matter as in her treatment of it. 1 Her work builds on the traditional staples of fiction - love and courtship, the progress of romantic involvement to its culmination in matrimony. Her heroines' deepest desire is for the satisfaction of sexual relationships; though they temporarily experience they do not whole-heartedly champion a single, self-contained existence. The power of Bronte's fiction, however, lies in its approach to the romantic orthodoxies, which at least one of her more hostile critics saw as socially subversive.2 Bronte exploits these orthodoxies in order to express her reservations about her age's ideologies regarding women. More boldly than most of her fellow-novelists, she seeks to re-define feminine selfhood, freed from restricting images and assumptions. Her challenge is especially effective because she formulates it from within a conventional framework, arguing for new approaches to women's traditional needs. Inspired by her own awareness of the dichotomies of female experience, she is openly ambivalent about such needs, refusing either to deny their existence or to allow false idealism to suppress her sense of their problematic complexity. Her novels not only demand that sexual ideologies be re-examined, they themselves enact that re-examination, thematically and structurally.
