Gender as Biology, Discourse, and Construct: The Form of Space in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall as a Subversion of the Fairy Tale “Blue-Beard”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18533/5zh0p025Keywords:
form, space, gender, Anne Brontë, Charles PerraultAbstract
The gendered prescriptions that permeate fairy tales can shape societal structures and perspectives. However, just as literature plays a role in reinforcing societal constructs, it can be used to challenge and subvert them. Victorian society was heavily structured by gender, which through the doctrine of separate spheres, relegated women within the domestic sphere and thus limited their contribution to the mainstream political discourse. It was through literary forms could they enter political discourse and shape the structures in society, especially with regards to gender. This paper looks at the form of space in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë (1848) as a subversion of “Blue-Beard” by Charles Perrault (1697) and its relation to shaping understandings of gender as biology, discourse, and construct. Brontë’s discourse of gender in Tenant through formative literary experimentation given the relegation of gender discourse in Victorian society—this formative discourse transcending the aesthetic into shaping the sociopolitical—enables gender to be understood as a cultural construct, dismantling and challenging traditional gender norms of prescribed roles and characteristics.
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