7 results in The Brontës
Animal and Social Ecologies in Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey
- Christie Harner
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- 05 August 2020, pp. 577-599
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In Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey (1847), the eponymous narrator uses a range of ecological metaphors to make sense of her interactions with others. She likens governessing to domestic horticulture and envisions how her task of educating children will be “to train the tender plants, and watch their buds unfolding day by day.” Rather than voice her unfulfilled romantic feelings for Weston or consciously work through her self-doubts about physical appearance, she visualizes them both as insects: she is the “humble glow-worm” who, without a “power of giving light” (i.e., beauty), “the roving fly might pass her . . . a thousand times, and never light beside her” (123). Even the reader, in the opening sentence, assumes the role of active participant: a nucivorous beast hunting for whatever “dry, shriveled kernel” of narrative meaning might be found by “cracking the nut” (5). As character, the budding naturalist “botanize[s] and entomologize[s] along the green banks and budding hedges”; as narrator, she projects herself and those around her into complex ecosystems (95). Her choice of metaphors captures a matrix of exchanges in which species of all kinds interact with one another and their environments in unpredictable ways. Agnes assigns the life cycles of flora and fauna to characters, populating the novel with human and nonhuman animals in ways that draw heavily on early nineteenth-century science even as they also prefigure some of the concerns of contemporary animal studies and ecocriticism.
“MISS X,” TELEPATHY, AND AFFECT AT FIN DE SIÈCLE
- Susan Zieger
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- 16 May 2018, pp. 347-364
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In his book Apparitions and Thought-Transference: An Examination of the Evidence for Telepathy (1895), Frank Podmore relates what might at first seem a humdrum occurrence of settling into bedtime reading. The diary he has transcribed, of a woman he calls D, records on January 6th, “Tried several books . . . finally took to ‘Villette.’” But D’s choice was not completely autonomous. She was clearly influenced by her friend, “X.” As Podmore wrote, “From Miss X's diary it appears that she willed D to read The Professor,” which he notes, portentously, was “also by Charlotte Brontë.” X got luckier – or honed her skills – a few weeks later, when D recorded “Sonnets by E.B.B. 10:30 p.m.” and “In Miss X's diary, written at about 10 p.m., appears the entry, ‘Sonnets viii-ix., E.B.B.’” Assessing the records, Podmore found X's influence over D's literary taste to be “presumably telepathic” (122–23). Although the phenomenon was sensational, the circumstances surrounding it were decidedly mundane, ranging from bedtime reading to hearing X's piano-playing at a distance of miles, and meeting specific people at certain times. At a second glance, the phenomenon remains humdrum. Gauri Viswanathan has described how the institutionalization of Theosophy created reality effects that routinized its mysticism, rendering it ordinary (7). Similarly, though psychical research studied the numinous, its institutions ensconced it in bureaucracy, making it mundane. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Britain, the oddly interesting-yet-boring phenomenon of thought-reading became a cultural activity that ranged between scientific research, domestic pastime, and popular entertainment. Could people read each other's minds? If so, how was it done? Thought-reading arose to compete with Spiritualism, the practice of contacting the dead through séances. Its most mysterious public persona, and one of the more intriguing historical figures of the period, was Podmore's aficionado of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the presumed telepath known as Miss X.
CRITICAL NAMES MATTER: “CURRER BELL,” “GEORGE ELIOT,” AND “MRS. GASKELL”
- Daun Jung
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- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 08 November 2017, pp. 763-781
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It is a well-known fact that many Victorian women writers such as the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Gaskell adopted pseudonyms or anonymity in publishing their literary works, but few people are aware of how such naming practices had been received by contemporary readers, especially by Victorian periodical reviewers – the very first readers and mediators that presented any major literary works to the public. Since we, as modern day scholars, have become so intimate with their present forms of author names appearing on course syllabuses, school curriculums, and academic papers, we hardly ask how such naming has become possible.
MADEIRA AND JANE EYRE’S COLONIAL INHERITANCE
- Alexandra Valint
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- 05 May 2017, pp. 321-339
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The denouement of Charlotte Brontë’sJane Eyre contains multiple happy rewards for its heroine: a fortune, strangers turned friends turned cousins, the self-elimination of Bertha, and a Rochester still alive, still in England, and now free to marry. The hefty twenty-thousand-pound legacy (of which Jane only keeps one-fourth) bequeathed to her by her late uncle John Eyre allows Jane to return to the maimed Rochester and gleefully proclaim, “I am an independent woman now” (Brontë 501; ch. 37). Citing such financial independence, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar briefly mention Jane's inheritance as the event that allows Jane to “follow her own will” and marry Rochester on terms of equality (367). Similarly, Nancy Armstrong writes that “[m]ore so perhaps than her virtue or passion, it is an endowment from Jane's wealthy uncle that makes her happiness possible” (47). Other critics, such as Elaine Freedgood and Susan Meyer, focus on the origin of the fortune – Madeira – and suggest that such a colonially associated locale implicates Jane in the finances of colonialism and even of slavery. Unlike those critics, however, I will claim that Jane's complicated relationship to the inheritance distances her from the problematic taint of the money's colonial associations and marks her non-conformity with and resistance to the economic practices of the British Empire.
THE ELEMENT OF LIVING STORM: SWINBURNE AND THE BRONTËS
- Lakshmi Krishnan
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- 12 September 2013, pp. 463-485
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That Algernon Charles Swinburne loved the Brontës is well known, and his interest in them well documented. His admiration for Charlotte and Emily, in particular, prompted two studies, a short book and an article, which were instrumental in establishing their critical reputation as it exists today. “Those great twin sisters in genius,” as he wrote in 1877, held a powerful sway over Swinburne's imagination (A Note 188–200). He considered them his Yorkshire kinswomen, bred in the wild borderlands of the North (although Swinburne was born in London and spent most of his life in southern England, his family was based in Northumberland, and he never lost his allegiance to the county, calling himself a “Borderer” to the very end). He sensed in their work – Emily's especially – the haunting, poetic influence of the moors, a passionate, romantic spirit that saturated his own verse and prose. More, they were his novelistic predecessors, and his essays on them shed considerable light on his own fictional practice. In framing himself as the Brontës’ apologist, Swinburne was “far ahead of his time,” shaping Victorian criticism (Hyder 15–16). His praise of Wuthering Heights is considered “by some literary historians to be epochmaking” and altered the way in which novels were discussed, analysed, and ultimately evaluated (Watson 247). There are also striking features that suggest Swinburne's own novel Lesbia Brandon – in its trans-genre form and unique milieu – was conceived as an exercise in the manner of Wuthering Heights.
“AN INFERNAL FIRE IN MY VEINS”: GENTLEMANLY DRINKING IN THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL
- Gwen Hyman
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- 01 September 2008, pp. 451-469
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Drinking was a serious preoccupation for mid-century English Victorians, and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a novel sodden with drink. This startlingly explicit novel is a troubled and troubling anatomy of upper-crust drunkenness, obsessed with issues of control and productivity, of appetites and class, as they play out across the body of its prime sot, the wealthy playboy Arthur Huntingdon. In telling her drinking tale, Brontë is doing more than simply crafting a prurient morality story, meant to scare drinkers straight. Arthur's fall into the bottle is emblematic of the increasingly untenable role of the landed gentleman in Victorian culture, and the dire consequences of his appetites suggest the possibility of a radical social revisioning across that gentleman's prone, overstuffed body.
“SOME GOD OF WILD ENTHUSIAST'S DREAMS”: EMILY BRONTË'S RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM
- Emma Mason
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- 19 March 2003, pp. 263-277
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IN EMILY BRONTË'S Gondal poem, “How do I love on summer nights” (1842–43), the spirit of Lord Alfred S. gloomily haunts Aspin Castle, shut out from heaven after committing suicide for the love of Queen A.G.A.
References to Brontë's works are from Chitham and Roper's edition of her poetry and Nestor's edition of Wuthering Heights. Brontë's central Gondolian figure, A.G.A. dominates every poem in which she appears or is evoked, a ruthless and yet ardent ruler, a powerful rhetorician, the murderer of her newly-born daughter and direct cause of the deaths and exile of her several lovers. Yet for Alfred, A.G.A. is almost divine, inspiring in him a fervent passion from which he cannot escape, even as a ghost. His “angel brow,” the reader is informed, is marked by a “brooding” “shade of deep dispair / As nought devine could ever know,“ intimating the dark depression from which Alfred suffers alone: not even a god could contemplate such misery (ll.37–39). Alfred's despair shifts to delirium once he is within the castle itself, a transition marked by the appearance of a statue of A.G.A. situated in the interior gallery. Now corroded, its form “mouldered all away,” the statue still outshines the other figurines and portraits in the room, and Alfred addresses it as “Sidonia's deity,” a supreme being capable of rousing wild and unruly states of mind.