Throughout Charlotte Brontë's fiction, her heroines relentlessly pursue their quest for self-definition and identity. Although they invoke a rhetoric of freedom, their language and categories of thought are nonetheless inevitably caught up within the contradictions of Victorian discourses on femininity. Brontë's heroines tread, either warily or defiantly, onto the field of self-assertion, only to be assailed immediately by profound remorse. They speak openly of their sexual feelings and are then consumed with shame for their unfeminine behaviour. Caroline Helstone believes that such open speech would be ‘self-treachery’, a defiance of ‘Nature's’ instincts, and Jane Eyre habitually uses the language of abortion and monstrous motherhood to define the ‘deformed thing’ produced by her rebellious thoughts and desires. The internal dynamic of these oscillations forms one aspect of a wider field of ideological contradictions condensed within Victorian projections of gender identity.

The social and economic rhetoric of self-help and improvement upon which Brontë's protagonists draw was countered for women by an equally prominent strand of discourse which emphasized female powerlessness and subjection to the forces of the body. Even that seemingly most private act, self-definition, is yet inextricably interwoven within the wider material and linguistic field of economic and cultural practice.