Brontë Scholar Overview: Anne Thackeray and INCS Conference

Some papers and talks given recently in the Brontë scholar world:

Yearbook of English Studies publishes an interesting article about Anne Thackeray's (W.M. Thackeray's daughter) quite unknown novelette The Story of Elizabeth.

'In her father's steps she trod': Anne Thackeray Ritchie Imagining Paris
Author: Jay, Elisabeth
The Yearbook of English Studies, Volume 36, Number 2, 1 July 2006, pp. 197-211(15)

Anny Thackeray's The Story of Elizabeth (1863) was written in the interstices of transcribing her father's last novel, and won instant acclaim for its `freshness' when it followed William Makepeace Thackeray's The Adventures of Philip, in the Cornhill. A plot that challenges the Gothicized account of the Franco-English, Catholic-Protestant encounter given in Charlotte Brontë's Villette also carries as a subtext Anne's anxiety that by daring to enter the public domain she risks encountering the spectre of her father, the English flâneur whose urbane cynicism stemmed from having supped too deeply on worldly experiences.

If you are curious, you can read The Story of Elizabeth scanned by google online.

Last week, 6-9 July, the INCS International Conference 2006: Creativity (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies) was held at the Centre for Nineteenth-Century Music & St Chad's College, Durham University, UK. Several talks dealt with Brontë topics:

Gail Turley Houston (University of New Mexico)

Double-crossdressing, Charlotte Brontë, and a Mother God

In 1906 feminist Frances Swiney notes in 'The Maternity of God,' an article in the Westminster Review, that religion was the last bastion of male authority to preclude women's rights. In response, Swiney describes an omnipotent, self-created ('Diremption') female god who creates and precedes male divinities. In doing so, Swiney positions herself as uncovering a lost goddess-centered Judeo-Christian tradition. In this paper, I examine three Victorian women writers who authorize the female creative act of writing by explicitly acknowledging the authority of an omnipotent female god. As I show, along with an examination of Swiney's prose blend of religion and science, Charlotte Brontë's allusion to the 'Mighty Mother' in a poem written at the age of fourteen self-authorizes her entry into the writing profession vis-à-vis the male canon. Bronte's later references to the mythic Lilith and a pantheistic mother-god in Shirley and Jane Eyre respectively continue in this 'Great Mother' vein. I also examine Mrs Anna Jameson's Legends of the Madonna, particularly the point in the text at which she figures the Virgin Mary as a divine entity who, in giving birth to Christ, essentially precedes, creates, authorizes, and participates in his godhood. More understated than Swiney and Brontë in accessing a female-centered religious tradition, Jameson, nevertheless, thusly creates her own authority as a woman writer and art critic. Arguing that this impulse is extant and significant in nineteenth-century women's writing, I also historicize Victorian strands of archaeology, antiquarianism, and theological inquiry that contextualize these writers' apotheosis of a female god.

Elizabeth McClure (University of Maryland)

Insatiable Cravings, a Cold Name, and the Creation of Narrative in Charlotte Brontë's Villette

Charlotte Bronte's Villette has provoked intense and varied critical response from the time of its publication. Many of those responses have focused on the supposed unreliability of Lucy Snowe's narrative. In particular, readers and critics alike have noted, often with discomfort, her willful refusal to provide fulfilling details and conclusions to important parts of the narrative as well as the conflict between her self-presentation as cold and unfeeling and her passionate interior life. Writing about The Professor, Sally Shuttleworth argues, 'Social control resides with the figure who possesses the power to read the inner state of the other, whilst maintaining the illegibility of the self.'[1] This statement is equally applicable to Villette. My paper begins with Shuttleworth's assessment of the importance of personal illegibility in Bronte's fiction, but extends it by connecting Lucy's inscrutability to her insistent and intense experience of physiological sensation. I examine Lucy's explicit self-presentation as emotionally distant and constitutionally insensitive in connection to her descriptions of her own intense, even excessive, bodily sensation, and I suggest that this paradoxical self-presentation not only helps to ensure her psychological survival but also forms the foundation of her ability to create and narrate her own story. By connecting the two widely divergent modes of self-characterization through Lucy's act of narrative creation, I argue that the physical act of writing - presented as it is in extraordinarily acute and evocative sensory detail - bridges the space between body and mind, public and private, materiality and interiority.

Deborah Denenholz Morse (The College of William and Mary)

Burning Art: Incendiary Female Creativity in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Early on in Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the heroine, Helen Graham, burns the miniature she has drawn of her lover Arthur Huntingdon rather than submit to its being forcibly taken by him when he intrudes into her studio. Years later, when Helen is planning her escape from her intolerable marriage to the drunken philanderer Arthur, he violates her artistic space and identity again when he reads her secret diary and learns of her intention to leave him. Arthur's angry response is to burn all of his wife's painting materials, after which he tells the servant that 'your mistress won't want them any more.' However, the urgent desire of female creativity cannot be so easily destroyed: like a phoenix from the ashes, Helen's art emerges from the destroying flames. After she flees her confinement in her husband's home, Helen paints, writes, and acts her defiant role as revolutionary female artist.

While the most discussed instances of incendiary female creativity in the Bronte sisters' works are the 'madwoman's' torching of Thornfield in Jane Eyre and the inflammatory performance of the actress Vashti in Villette, it is in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Charlotte's sister Anne, that the female artist is a central figure. Helen Graham is a painter whose art reflects her evolving consciousness from sentimental dilettante to authentic artist who must earn her own bread not only for herself but for her young son. Helen tells the brutal story of her marriage to the dissolute Arthur in a diary that she chooses to allow her future second husband, Gilbert Markham, to read. This diary is also a work of art, a fierce document in which a woman's passionate experience of male cruelty and female anger and pain is recorded.

Helen's writing inscribes more and more intimately the horrific details of her married life at the ironically named Grassdale Manor. At the same time, her paintings progress from the decorative allegorical art and miniatures of her maidenhood through the loving portraits of her early married days to the realistic landscape paintings she paints after her escape from Arthur and Grassdale, when she poses as a widow. Helen's diary and paintings—and even her acting the part of widow when she is still a wife—are representations of her increasing commitment to confronting the harsh realities of her patriarchal culture. These realities of women's oppression have been masked by romantic platitudes about love and marriage, and gender ideals that tell women that they are angels meant as the helpmeets and indeed saviors of men, while they assure men that their 'manliness' consists of selfish brutishness. In her writing and in her paintings, and finally, in her self-constructed role as widowed mother of a son, Helen claims the authority of the female artist to tell her own truths from her own experience, and to create her own identity. Helen's creator Anne Bronte states in the Preface to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: 'I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man.' Helen too, like 'Acton Bell', creates art in defiance of Victorian gender dictates.

Categories: Scholar, Journals, Talks,Anne_Brontë, Charlotte_Brontë, Villette, The_Tenant_of_Wildfell_Hall