Female Ramblers and the Reconstruction of Private Space in Jane Eyre, Passing and Girls

Abstract

In this paper, focusing on the moments where female ramblers make significant movements in Charlotte Brontës Jane Eyre (1847), Nella Larsens Passing (1929), and Lena Dunhams Girls (2012), I explore the way the texts questions the constraint on female bodies through the window of female rambling and the texts deal with the dynamics embedded in the reconstruction of private space where a female achieves a fresh sense of agency through her experience of rambling or her imaginary rambling. This paper refers to Walter Benjamins notion of the flâneur while revising it, while accepting the view of Virginia Woolfs narrator in A Room of Ones Own where she urges a female writer to do an imaginary rambling to restore the unrecorded histories on the streets. This paper suggests that the movements of female ramblers in the above texts dramatically embody and explore the potentiality embedded in Woolfs notion of imaginary rambling.