Victorian Domestic Architecture and the Implications of the Sequestered Private Spaces

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Bertha Mason is the ghost that haunts Thornfield at night. When the sun goes down and the house falls asleep, she rises to explore the house that she is locked within, and yet outside of, by daylight. She roams the corridors, peeping into rooms to take a whiff of the domestic life that she is shunned from. She exists on the threshold of sanity, domesticity, even personhood. This is a character that is simultaneously locked inside of the walls of the mansion and discounted from the everyday domestic life of the household. In the domestic narrative of Thornfield Hall, she also represents the liminal, closeted, purely private corners of the household. Bertha Mason’s spatial displacement in the domestic layout of the house is also reflective of the liminality of her character in Jane and Mr. Rochester’s romance narrative. The spaces that she inhabits in Thornfield Hall, as seen in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, illustrate the private sequestrated spaces in the household and the implications they have on the functioning of the Victorian family.
Thornfield Hall is described by the newly-arrived Jane as having “proportions not too vast, though considerable,” and as forming a “cozy and agreeable picture.” It is situated a little ways from a populous town yet distanced by woods enough to render it inaccessible in the winter. Mrs. Fairfax is introduced to Jane in a “snug, small room [...] a large cat sitting demurely at her feet,” suggesting “the beau ideal of domestic comfort.” (81) However, when Jane explores the house with Mrs. Fairfax later that night, she notes that the galleries and stairs in the house contain a “very chill and vault-like aspect, suggesting cheerless ideas of space and solitude.” She n...

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...Each house strikes a unique balance between the private and the public, and this is the balance that perhaps dictates the relationships within the house. Thornfield Hall, despite its immaculately designed segregations, was ruined because of this bipolar split within the household. Therefore, the architecture of a house and the designation of space in homes can have unavoidable effects on the lives of the members of these households.

Works Cited

Rhys, Jean, Judith Raiskin L., and Charlotte Brontë. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Print.
Brontë, Charlotte, and Richard Dunn J. Jane Eyre: An Authoritative Text. New York: Norton, 2000. Print.
Tange, Andrea Kaston. Architectural Identities: Domesticity, Literature and the Victorian Middle Classes. Toronto: University of Toronto, 2010. Print.
Stevenson, J.J. House Architecture. London: Macmillan, 1880.

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