The works of Anne Emily and Charlotte Brontë are saturated with spatial metaphors their
composition inevitably reflecting Victorian concepts of gender and the ideology of 'separate
spheres'. Questioning the binary interpretation of incarceration and flight this study focuses
on how through a transgression of narrated textual and metaphorical spaces the Brontës'
feminine protagonists show the ideological divide between male and female spaces to be more
permeable than previously acknowledged. Applying the spatial concepts of Michel Foucault
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari this study examines how the normative dichotomy of the
'separate spheres' in the selected novels is destabilized through a transgression of literary
spaces.
