Abstract

The Victorians obsessed over the supernatural. Their fascination with the otherworldly emerges in the literature of the day. Our paper aims at highlighting the presence of the discourse of the imaginary in several Victorian novels (Emily Brontë – Wuthering Heights; Charlotte Brontë – Villette and Jane Eyre; Thomas Hardy – The Return of the Native) and identifying its functions. The paper will approach the discourse of the imaginary and the supernatural from two perspectives: one of the lines of discussion will correlate the use of the imaginary and the supernatural to the characters’ feelings and emotions; the second line of discussion will attempt to correlate the fictional discourse of the imaginary and the supernatural with the Victorian discourse of superstition and religion.