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Women on the Move: Coaches, Roads, and the Escape from Domestic Trauma in Jane Eyre and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Zhenhong Cai

Abstract


This essay examines the role of mobility in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë, emphasizing coaches as both material vehicles and symbolic pathways of liberation; and focusing on the roads as dynamic spaces where the heroines Jane and Helen resonate with nature and escape from patriarchy. In both novels, women’s movement by coach marks a decisive break from domestic spaces defined by trauma and patriarchal control. Jane’s departure shows her search for autonomy, self-definition, and love. Helen’s flight presents her resistance against matrital oppression. By situating these journeys into the context of Victorian mobility, this study argues that the two Brontës utilize travel not only as plot mechanism but as a reimagining of women’s relationship with freedom and domestic boundaries and trauma.

Keywords


Coach and Road; Freedom; Mobility; Domestic Trauma; Patriarchy

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References


[1] Brontë, Anny, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (London: Penguin Group, 2012).

[2] Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre (Beijing: Knowledge Publishing House, 2016).

[3] Cunningham, Alyson, Echoes of Highffyer, Hooves, and Horns: The Signiffcance of Coaching in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Lincoln: University of Lincoln, 2022).

[4] Klambauer, Anna, ‘Red Rooms, Attics and Female Antics: The Representation of Mad Women in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea’, Schizo: The Liberatory Potential of Madness, 2014, 63-73.

[5] Griesinger, Emily, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Religion: Faith, Feminism, and Jane Eyre’, Christianity and Literature, 58:1 (2008), 29-59.

[6] Livesey, Ruth, Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[7] Lupold, Rebecca L, Dwelling and the Woman Artist in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Montanta: University of Montanta, 2008).

[8] Locy, Sharon, ‘Travel and Space in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre’, Paciffc Coast Philology, 37 (2002), 105-21.

[9] Matus, Jill L, Shock, Memory and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

[10] Pain, Rachel, ‘Geotrauma: Violece, Place and Repossession’, Progress in Human Geography, 45:5 (2021), 972-89.

[11] Parkins, Wendy, Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture (London: Routledge, 2018).

[12] Sukdolova, Alice, Concepts of Space in Victorian Novels (Univerzita Karlova: Filozoffcka fakulta, 2011).




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18686/ahe.v8i12.14150

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