The romantic impulse in the fiction of the Brontë Sisters: Wuthering heights and Jane Eyre

The aim of this study is to argue about the Romantic influence on Victorian novel, in particular as revealed in the novels Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre by the Brontë sisters. In this context, firstly, the general characteristics of the Romantic Movement and its main concerns, then, Victorian Literature and its general characteristics are exposed. In Victorian literature, despite Realism and realistic fiction emerging as a reaction against Romantic Movement, poetry continues the Romantic tradition which emphasizes subjectivity. However, the novels of the period aim at the reconciliation of the man with society and tell the human life with its full nakedness. From this point of view, the novels of this age, concerned with individual and his emotions reflect the literary endeavour to question and reshape the Romantic values. Charlotte and Emily Brontë include in their novels the Romantic themes and present them in the light of Victorian thought. This study on the novels of the Brontë sisters discloses a number of Romantic themes such as love, imagination, nature, memory, escapism, oppression, alienation, childhood experience, liberty, Byronism and Gothicism, which are present in Victorian fiction and which prove the continuity of Romanticism as a literary tradition.