Desire and romantic art in Anne Brontë

The Second Global Conference "Critical Issues in Sex and Sexual Relationships" organized by inter-disciplinary.Net opens tomorrow November,30 at Vienna, Austria. It will close next Saturday, December 3.

The project seeks to examine issues of sexuality across a range of critical and cultural perspectives. In an effort to promote innovative inter- and multidisciplinary exchange, the project will bring together people working in any relevant disciplines along with queer activists and professionals in non-profit and non-governmental organizations.

One of the talks, next Thursday December 1, is the reason of this post:

Session 4: Is There Such a Thing?
Chairman: Diane Negra
Desire and Romantic Art in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Nóra Séllei
Department of British Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary

Constructed by Charlotte Brontë for posteriority as “the baby” of the family, called by Elizabeth Gaskell “that gentle little one”, Anne Brontë has always been problematically positioned to her sisters. The reasons for this are multiple: first, biographical criticism has made her “meek and mild”; second, her work has always been evaluated as of lower quality compared to Charlotte’s and Emily’s literary output; thirdly, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which created a bit of a stir on publication, was suppressed by Charlotte as she kept it out of print for ten years.Yet, this novel is considered “the first sustained feminist novel”. In this presentation I will focus on one particular aspect of all its gendered/feminist features: the correlation between female desire and romantic art since the plot revolves around a woman who evolves from female amateur to professional painter on her escape from her abusive husband, and maintains herself and her child on the money she makes from painting.This act is transgressive enough in contemporary social/cultural norms, yet the text at one point has a further transgressive element: the protagonists is presented at work, furthermore, as the iconic romantic artist desiring to reach for, experience, and represent, the sublime, a key aesthetic category in Romanticism, which is also highly gendered as several critics have already pointed out. While trying to paint as a desiring subject, however, she is also being looked at and desired by a man. The close reading of this scene will reveal how intricately gender, sexual desire and romantic art are intertwined. It will also touch upon a painting by Anna Brontë: the copy (or intertextual revision) of a David Caspar Friedrich painting may shed further light on Anne Brontë’s figure as a desiring woman, writer, romantic artist, and on her painter protagonist.

Categories: Talks, Scholar, The_Tenant_of_Wildfell_Hall, Anne_Brontë