Cinema scholar Barbara Creed in her definition of the monstrous-feminine describes its many archetypical faces: archaic mother, monstrous womb, vampire, witch, monstrous mother, castrator, and possessed body. To that list I add the two-faced teenage girl, a variation of the possessed body: both victim and monster, an unconsenting creature in the clutch of coming-of-age and burgeoning sexuality.

The diary is a space for psychological resistance; it is a bulwark against dejection and the discomfort and the constraints of quarantine, a practice that is as useful today as it was in the nineteenth century.

Based largely off of Brontë’s own experiences and desires, Jane Eyre, Villette, and Shirley navigate the geographies of gender and the potential and perils of wandering alone.

But perhaps walks are all we have now — without destinations or any clear end to this pandemic, life indeed hinges on the circular journeys from our homes and back and the ways we stay sane while self-quarantined.

Joy is ultimately in the day-to-day lives of the girls and in their dreams that inform these moments [...] Their artistic and intellectual endeavors are always present and underscore the bliss in their ordinary lives, even when tragedy hits.

In the merging of filmic aesthetics and documentary-style adaptation, "So Pretty" creates a tautness between utopia and reality; between creating ways of being in the world and creating other worlds; between theatrical and quotidian queer acts. And it is through these gestures in motion and on screen that the world transitions to queerness, enacting it in the present—the here and now both is and is becoming queer.

Because I resist and make my voice heard, and because you are reading this article, someone will tell my story, and their story, and someone else theirs, and so on. And in numbers, the silence is drowned out.

Brontë and Dickens both tackle, at the level of language, the feat of looking back onto a life starting in childhood; they represent the period in one’s life as a time of vulnerability, naïve observance, malleability, innocence, and the rising desire of experience. In their novels, they grapple with the complexity of being a human being and experiencing the passage of time in an era where technological metaphors for such a phenomenon were just recently being established.