Landscape, Independente, Imagination, Moors, Mansions, and the Female Mind

 A couple of recent Bachelor Thesis:

Landscape, Independence and Imagination: a comparative study of Jane Eyre, Jo March and Anne Shirley and Their Impact on contemporary culture

Giorgia DiTommaso, Università degli Studi di Padova

2024/2025

Heroines of 19th-century literature have always been role models to follow for many women. Thanks to their bold personality and their desire for independence, they helped shape women’s mentality towards the recognition of their rights. The aim of the thesis is to compare the main characters of some of the greatest novels of the 19th century: Jane Eyre from the eponymous novel by Charlotte Brontë, Jo March from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, and Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, focusing on metaphorical landscapes and settings, feminism and independence and the role of imagination. In particular, the thesis also analyses the life and times of the authors, offering a careful portrayal of the male oppressive society of the period in which they lived and how this reality is reflected in their novels. Moreover, by examining their respective national literatures – British, American and Canadian-- the thesis investigates the reasons that led the authors to write their novels and considers whether they might have influenced one another. Finally, through the analysis of the most recent film and TV series adaptations, the study explores how these heroines have evolved over the centuries and how they have been reinterpreted and modernized by our contemporary society.

Moors, Mansions, and the Female Mind: Nature, Narrative Structure, and Female Subjectivity in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre

Brigita Morkute, University of Iceland

2025

This thesis examines the role of the natural world in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, focusing on how Emily and Charlotte Brontë employ nature to explore forms of female subjectivity. It situates both novels within the Gothic tradition, a genre that historically offered women writers a mode for articulating female fears, desires, and constraints, often in encoded or symbolic ways. Modern feminist criticism has frequently turned to Gothic fiction for this reason, making the Brontës’ works especially productive sites for analysis. The study argues that Wuthering Heights presents the repression of Catherine Earnshaw-Linton through both its imagery and narrative form. Catherine’s confinement indoors, her limited access to the natural world, and the narrative’s reliance on the mediating voices of Nelly Dean and Mr. Lockwood collectively underscore her lack of agency within the patriarchal structures of the nineteenth century. The novel’s layered, external narration mirrors Catherine’s fragmented subjectivity, emphasizing how her inner life is misrepresented, silenced, or obscured. In contrast, Jane Eyre grants its heroine a first-person narrative voice, allowing Jane to articulate her psychological and moral development directly. Her recurrent movements away from oppressive environments mark the stages of her growing autonomy, and nature becomes a crucial ally in expressing, validating, and guiding her interior life. Whereas Catherine’s disconnection from the natural world signals her repression, Jane’s deep attunement to nature supports her journey toward self-determination. Both novels employ Gothic monster-figures to explore female subjectivity in different ways. In Jane Eyre, Bertha Mason’s death functions as a catalyst for Jane’s symbolic rebirth, while in Wuthering Heights, Catherine’s spectral return reveals that suppressed female agency resists containment even in death. Read together, the novels illuminate how the Brontës use nature and Gothic conventions to interrogate the possibilities and limitations of women’s autonomy in the Victorian era.