Portals of Desire in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre (1847) and Fanny Fern in Ruth Hall (1855) inscribe the possibility for personal agency through textual passages that describe border spaces and movement between margin and periphery, inside and outside, and departure and arrival. The authors employ architectural portals — windows, doorways, gates, stairs and hallways — to illuminate an array of physical, psychic and socio-cultural spaces and to convey a more fluid sense of truth as knowledge gained by experience. Truth is represented within a subjective lens, in the different positions their protagonists assume. By way of the insertion of autobiographic resonances in their fiction, Charlotte Brontë and Fanny Fern invert public and private spheres, thereby creating a strategy for personal agency. This emphasis on mobile independence for a woman did not sit well with many nineteenth-century critics, who responded adversely to the implied expansion of gender roles. Ultimately, Charlotte Brontë and Fern, through their method of encoding threshold images with subjective significance, create a conceptual space that affords possibilities of resistance to social oppression.