The new (double) issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 48 Issue 3, January-July 2023) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:
Editorial
pp. 163-164 Author: Claire O’Callaghan & Sarah Fanning
Chekhov and the Brontës
pp. 165-176 Author: Olha Honcharova
Abstract:
Chekhov’s biographer Donald Rayfield claims, in two different scholarly works, that Chekhov may have been inspired by the Brontë family’s biography when writing his drama Three Sisters (1901). Rayfield’s ideas in turn inspired Blake Morrison and Arlene Hutton in their creative adaptations of Three Sisters, in which the plot and structure of Chekhov’s drama were supplemented with Brontëan historical characters and themes. In this paper, the author questions whether Chekhov really did know about the family of the three writers from Yorkshire and, accordingly, whether he put this knowledge to work in his own literary endeavour. To this end, the author charts the availability of Russian nineteenth-century translations of the Brontës’ works and biographical sources, and examines biographical parallels between Chekhov’s family and the Brontës.
‘A Strong Wish for Wings’: The Epistolary Relationship and Intellectual Collaboration between Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë
pp. 177-188 Author: Chelsea Wallis
Abstract
This article disinters the impact of the correspondence between Mary Taylor and Charlotte Brontë on their respective intellectual lives and writing. Supplementing the epistolary archive, textual evidence from Shirley (1849) and Miss Miles (1890) demonstrates the powerful collaborative dynamic between the two writers, which not only affected their work but also helped them to cultivate a sense of literary legitimacy in a publishing context habitually hostile to women’s voices. Brontë and Taylor’s letters indicate the explicit influence of one another’s thinking upon their writing, and suggest that the writers shared a sense of belonging to an intellectual partnership through their sustained correspondence. Simon-Martin’s theory of ‘epistolary education’ illuminates how Taylor and Brontë’s friendship through letters was formative in developing both writers’ feminist consciousness and their agitation for social reform, as well as their authorial agency.
Canine Agency and Its Mitigation in the Characterization of Dogs in the Novels by Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë
pp. 189-206 Author: Jane Sunderland
Abstract:
As is well known to scholars of the life and work of the Brontë novelists, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë had three family dogs, Grasper, Keeper and Flossy. Less well-known is the fact that they included dogs in all seven of their novels. Emily is the best known on both counts, for her great bond with Keeper, and for the importance of the dogs in Wuthering Heights (1847), but also for the possibility that she may have held views about what can broadly be described as ‘human-animal equivalence’, a topic also of interest to current Animal Studies. In this article, I consider how the dogs in the novels are characterized, through naming and the attribution of sentience, but in particular in terms of the agency attributed to them in the language of the narrator and other human characters, including in relation to cognition. While there is evidence of attributed agency aplenty, from all three novelists, a sharp linguistic focus shows the cognition to be often mitigated. Emily does not stand out from her sisters in this respect. This characterization of the fictional dogs by all three authors offers something of a challenge to the notion of the dog-human binary.
The Man Who Rescues Cats and Dogs: Re-Inventing Masculinity in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey
pp. 207-218 Author: Robin L. Inboden
Abstract:
As modern readers question the patriarchal dominance of heroes such as Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847) and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847), a fresh look at Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey (1847) suggests that it may offer very different lessons about masculinity. A series of men and boys in the book interact with animals and lower-class people in ways that control, exploit, dismiss, and even destroy them. Read through the lens of animal studies, we see Agnes and others oppressed by privileged white men of the middle and upper classes who exploit and dominate animals, women, and working-class people. Edward Weston, though, appeals to Agnes—and the reader—precisely because he resists cruelty and destruction and instead values the affective attachments that Agnes and Nancy Brown have with their pets. Ultimately, through his humane relationship to animals and less-privileged people, Weston offers a more caring and compassionate model of masculinity.
‘…What Sort of Face It Was to Be, I Did Not Care or Know…’: Jane Eyre and the Self-Creating Portrait
pp. 219-230 Author: Rachel A. Ernst
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is a highly visual novel as Jane creates art, describes her artwork, and engages the reader in these acts of descriptive creation. While most critical scholarship has focused on Jane as an artist, the role of artwork beyond the artist, particularly the portrait of Mr. Rochester, has been largely unexamined. The unnamed portrait of Rochester is unique because it does not depend only on the artist; rather, as I argue here, the portrait is a self-creating object within the text. This act of self-creation de-centres the human figures of both Jane and the reader, upending the traditional nineteenth-century subject-object relationship, and focusing instead on the generative relationship necessary between narrator, reader, and portrait to create and perceive fictional matter.
Re-Mapping Jane Eyre: Childhood Trauma, Colonial Fear, and the Narrative of Self-Development
pp. 231-249 Author: Meng Li
Abstract:
Jane Eyre (1847) is a story of human migration and its psychic consequences. The constant displacements of the novel’s heroine, I argue, are a form of internal migration, undertaken by Jane as by many others within the British Empire in the early nineteenth century. Yet, as we shall see, Jane’s similarity to such migrants is complicated by a fear of them—and by her own desire to escape their fate. Jane, too, as a socially marginalized governess, moves from one locale to another. What interests me in particular is the way this spatial movement also constitutes temporal movement that will not let Jane rest and requires her to revisit her own past while she internalizes her childhood trauma. Ultimately, I argue, she accepts her own implication in the English colonial past and its present, before she finds a place of permanent, but not fully secure, abode. Critical accounts, including early feminist critics, such as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, often treat Jane’s migration as a journey towards maturation, self-definition, and self-sovereignty. I argue that, though migration helps Jane to achieve independence through dependence, it might not be a path leading towards the formation of a unified, conscious, and mature identity. Instead, migration helps Jane to achieve knowledge of the self and to configure that self’s relation to the larger society and world in experiencing alienation within the self and digging deeper into the personal and national trauma of her unconsciousness.
A Logos Masquerade: The Unity of Language and Woman’s Body in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
pp. 250-260 Author: George Sadaka
Abstract:
Although contemporary criticism tends to steer away from popular Lacanian frameworks, I find in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) a range of ideas that, if elucidated by the less popular theory of the masquerade, are useful to understand for our appreciation of women writers’ struggle to bridge the gap between language and the body. I argue that Helen masquerades in language to show man that the power of the phallus is a mere mask of language. In her masquerade, she employs language to subvert, in Lacanian nomenclature, the ‘name of the father’ and to resist the overarching constitution of ‘the big other’ before unmasking the ‘phallus’ through her body and the emancipatory language of her diary. Helen somatizes her words by enacting them, thus incarnating ‘the logos’ in her body through various acts of defiance and emancipation.
The Presentation of the First Catherine in Wuthering Heights
pp. 261-270 Author: Graeme TytlerAbstract:
A perusal of scholarship on Wuthering Heights (1847) published in the past hundred years or so reveals the extraordinary extent to which the first Catherine has been loved and admired by Brontë scholars. This may, however, seem rather surprising inasmuch as a detailed examination of her presentation makes abundantly clear that Catherine evinces severe moral and mental limitations for much of her short life. That the author nevertheless intends Catherine to be ultimately considered something of a heroine is evident from the favourable comments made about her after her death, especially those concerning the posthumous power she exerts both psychologically and physiognomically over other characters in the novel.Reading ListA Brontë Reading List: 2020pp 126-147 Author: Sara L. Pearson, Peter Cook &James OgdenAbstract:This reading list is an annotated bibliography of selected scholarly and critical work on the Brontës published in 2020.1 Bibliographical details are followed where possible by summaries and assessments. The list covers most book chapters and peer-reviewed articles on the Brontës, but it is not comprehensive. Articles published in Brontë Studies are as a rule excluded, as are books reviewed in Brontë Studies; readers are directed to the publisher’s website, www.tandfonline.com, for online access to these reviews. The author of each entry is indicated by the author’s initials in brackets following the entry.Editorial - Reviews SectionEditorial. Reviews Sectionp 271 Author: Carolyne Van Der Meer
Book ReviewsThe World of The Brontës, 1000-Piece Puzzlepp 272 Author: Carolyne Van Der MeerDetermining Wuthering Heights: Ideology, Intertexts, Traditionpp. 273-275 Author: Lydia Craig
Goth Girl and the Wuthering Fright
pp. 275-276 Author: Carolyne Van Der Meer
