This article examines Anna Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) through cognitive poetics. It argues that Bronte’s critique of Victorian marriage, alcoholism, and patriarchal authority is built not only through plot but through a cognitive architecture that reorganizes reader attention and judgment. Using figure-ground organization (Gestalt), foregrounding (Stockwell), prototype theory (Rosch), deictic shift theory (Segal), Text World Theory (Werth; Gavins), and conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson), the analysis shows how the epistolary form re-centers female experience, disrupts dominant cultural prototypes (the Byronic hero and the fallen woman), and forces repeated readerly reorientation across time, place, and person. Findings suggest that ordinary narrative details (doors, naming, gossip, modality) operate as thresholds that separate conventional assumptions from ethically revised understanding.

Cognitive poetics, figure-ground, prototype, deictic shift

Bronte, A. (1848). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Gavins, J. (2007). Text World Theory: An Introduction. Edinburgh University Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.

Rosch, E. (1975). Cognitive representations of semantic categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Segal, E. (1995). Narrative comprehension and the role of deictic shift theory.

Stockwell, P. (2002). Cognitive Poetics: An Introduction. Routledge.

Werth, P. (1999). Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse. Longman.