A SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO THE HOUSE IN THE BRONTË SISTERS’ NOVELS
A SEMIOTIC APPROACH TO THE HOUSE IN THE BRONTË SISTERS’ NOVELS

Summary/Abstract: The paper deals with concepts such as: the house as semiotic object, position and role, cultural space, cultural paradigms, in an attempt to trace the process of the house signification and the way it is communicated to the reader by three 19th century women writers. Novels such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of the Wildfell Hall contain a ‘discourse of the house’ which foregrounds the semiotic object as binary oppositions (manor house vs hearth; surface calmness vs inner tumult; captive (imprisoned) vs free beings/minds/ souls etc.), as positions and roles in terms of strict hierarchical dependency (possessor/master vs shelterless beings/objects etc.), as cultural space in terms of identity, alterity and otherness, closely associated with the ‘where’ and a particular place. As for specific Victorian paradigms, such a discourse sends to presence and/or absence of money (as a sign of stability, respectability and wealth), of the house as a space of imprisonment and of the body as commodity, all of them revealing the mentality of the age.

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