Scholar overview

A Brontë scholar review of the lasts talks and articles:

ARTICLE

• Gezari, Janet "Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic"Essays in Criticism - Volume 56, Number 3, July 2006, pp. 264-279

Abstract

It took about a century for the angel in the house to join forces with the madwoman in the attic. According to Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, even when this angel occupied the foreground in nineteenth century novels, she was shadowed by her dark twin. Beneath the placid brook, the turbulent whirlpool churned. This split image had a long history in romance, and a famous nineteenth century version in Thackeray's bitter picture of Becky Sharp as a 'fiendish marine cannibal' towards the end of Vanity Fair. But Gilbert and Gubar were the first to unite the angel and the madwoman in a single being, applaud her expressive transgressions, and identify her with the woman writer. When the monster-woman rose from the depths to the attic, mostly because Charlotte Brontë had located her there in the novel that gave Gilbert and Gubar their title and provided 'a paradigm of many distinctively female anxieties and abilities', she staked a new claim to her legitimate share of the house of fiction.

TALKS:

• In the recent Midwestern Conference on Literature Language & Media (April 2006):

Christine Haskill, Northern Illinois University

The Victorian Ideal of Womanhood in Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

• In the 15th Conference of BSA Auto/Biography Group, Leicester, England, 13-15 July 2006:

Erben, Michael (2006) Documenting disordered lives: family relations and problematic forms of social capital in Wuthering Heights.

Abstract

The use of non-traditional data sources within sociology has seen considerable development within recent years. It will be argued in this paper that descriptions and analyses of social institutions found in fiction can be highly reflective, in Raymond Williams’ terms, of “authentic personal or family experience” . The paper posits that the disordered family life depicted in Wuthering Heights throws light upon some largely unexplained features of the concept of social capital and goes someway to refining the definitions of positive and negative forms of social capital. These issues will be explored and examined through Emily Brontë’s dissection of unresolved familial conflict in Wuthering Heights - between the natural and the cultivated, the passionate and the restrained, the violent and the peaceful, and between family members who either deny time or accept narrative. This theme is explicated by a discussion of open and closed social capital resources within the family and the structural embedding of interactional relations as a consequence of (a) rigid patterns of legal inheritance, (b) misplaced intense affect and (c) atomistic commercial practices.

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