THE HERMENEUTICAL CIRCLE OF LITERARY WORK: THE BRONTËS CONTEXT

A survey of innumerable Brontës studies reveals a plenty of comparative analyses of their novels as a common creative writing of three sisters. Based on the methodology of literary hermeneutics which includes both a divination and a comparison as two main principles of the perusal of literary work the purpose of the paper is to understand and thus to interpret single novels “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë, “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Brontë, and “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall” by Anna Brontë as accomplished fragments of unified literary text. Results of the research paper confirmed an existence of repeated female dramatic love stories filled with inner pain and torments as well as female search of happiness maintained on the very feminine self or female identity. The artistic universe created by the women writers is built around three crucial thematic nodes: love-evil-landscape, “stitched” through by the spirit of frantic passion. They arise and are formed at the crossroads of biographical, literary and cultural contextual layers, on the one hand, and individual author’s interpretation, on the other one. Revealing complete or partial identity, numerous variations or branching of thematic diversity, they acquire signs of coincidences or ruptures of the creative imagination of the Brontës sisters. Thus, the central universal theme of passionate love is realized through the prism of authentic superimposition, a modified echoing or splitting as well as transformation of the plot episodes of the integral text of Charlotte, Emily and Anna Brontës in the categories of: a) a girl-orphan (Jane Eyre, Catherine Earnshaw, Helen Graham); b) Byronic hero (Edward Rochester, Heathcliff, Arthur Huntingdon [Helen Graham]); c) marital relationships (Jane Eyre – Edward Rochester; Catherine Earnshaw – Edgar Linton [Cathy Linton – Heathcliff Linton]; Helen Graham – Arthur Huntingdon); d) disease: alcoholism (John Reed, Hindley Earnshaw, Arthur Huntingdon) / madness (Bertha Mason, Catherine Earnshaw); d) death (Bertha Mason, Catherine Earnshaw, Hindley Earnshaw, Heathcliff, Arthur Huntingdon); e) elements of nature (storm, snowstorm); f) time (night); e) space (Thornfield Hall, Wuthering Heights, Wildfell Hall). Value/originality. According to hermeneutic approach every literary work has its own timelessness that reveals its absolute modernity in a new period of the perusal of the work. In that context we believe the present paper reopens an opportunity for a variety of new interesting interpretations of the Brontës novels.