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Abstract
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This study focuses on women’s empowerment in the genre of the Female Gothic by analyzing Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and Villette. The Brontë sisters, known for contradicting patriarchal society through the agency of the oppressed women, represented their female characters, Jane Eyre, Lucy Snowe, and Catherine Earnshaw, as the victims who suffered in a patriarchal society. Through relying on themselves, the three female protagonists learned to pursue independence, to strengthen, and to empower themselves to survive the patriarchal domination. As Ellen Moers defines it, the Female Gothic generally refers to eighteenth-century Gothic works. This thesis aims to show how the suggested female characters in the three above Female Gothic novels embraced self-reliance and their own identity, thought independently, and strove toward their own goals to achieve, in reality, a power that could subvert the entire image of women and defeat the patriarchal order created by men and how the Gothic female characters paved the way for women’s empowerment.
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