The tortured and victimized Brontë sisters

Given the interest of fashion designers nowadays in Victorian/Romantic fashion and the mentions of fashion journalists to Brontë novels, it is interesting to read a short article (with illustrations) on clothing from 1825 to 1850.

The trend towards sexual dimorphism in dress reaches an absurd apex in this period. Men's fashion becomes a series of undecorated black tubes, like the smoke stacks of the The Industrial Revolution (an analogy they were even conscious of at the time), while women's dress continues to balloon out with ruffles, decorations and petticoats until women look like ambulatory wedding cakes. [...]
This is the time [1830s and 1840s] of the tortured and victimized Bronte heroines, not to mention the tortured and victimized Bronte Sisters themselves. (Sans_Titre)

The Brontës tended to date back their novels (see Wuthering Heights or The Tenant of Wildfell Hal for instancel. The debate on when Jane Eyre was set is still alive and well) so those two decades would have been (part of) the time of the 'tortured and victimized Bronte Sisters themselves', though we hardly know they were tortured and/or victimized. Quite the opposite, perhaps.

The Village Voice writes about François Truffaut's film Jules et Jim and a Brontë mention turns up.

Truffaut doesn't typecast Catherine as a feminist or a repudiation of one. She is wild, passionate, maybe even a little mad, but always straight—which is to say, she is more real than anyone in the film's carnival of souls. But she is above all a romantic, and like another famous Catherine familiar to fans of Emily Brontë and Kate Bush, her love is potentially metaphysical. Daring us to understand her, Catherine shatters traditional views of women, just as Jules and Jim's visual panache destroyed conventional opinions of film art. (Ed Gonzalez)

And the Camden Hills Regional High School in Maine is sorting out which books to mark as compulsory reading.

• “The Wide Sargasso Sea” by Jean Rhys, requested by teacher Jen Munson for the proposed Women and Literature class;
• “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Bronte, requested by teacher Jen Munson for the proposed Women and Literature class; (Steve Rzasa)

Jen Munson sounds like a Brontëite :D Here's hoping she gets her way!

Categories: Books, In the News