Brontë scholar survey

A survey of recent Brontë-related talks and articles:

The Northeast Modern Language Association (NEMLA)
38th Annual Convention, March 1-4, 2007 Baltimore, Maryland
Saturday, March 3 11.15 Adams Room
(Re)locating Home in the 19th Century
Chair: Rachel Spear, Louisiana State University

• "A Long Way from Home: De-constructing the Domestic and Re-constructing Empire in Brontë's Villette and Elliot's Mill on the Floss" ; Anna Marutollo, McGill University
  

• "Wherever you are is my home": Homespace and Self-Development in Jane Eyre"; Rachel Spear, Louisiana State University
  

2007 Student Research Conference:
20th Annual Undergraduate and 5th Annual Graduate Research Conference
Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri

• A Psychoanalytic Analysis of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, Heather N. Farrier (Dr. Hena Ahmad, Faculty Mentor)

Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea begins with Antoinette as a happy newlywed in a state of blissful harmony with her surroundings. Through her experiences with her husband, Rochester, she becomes a destroyed woman who is pushed to the verge of insanity. Rochester mistreats and degrades her horrifically. As a result of this torture, he eventually breaks her down spiritually and mentally so that every last piece of happiness in her life is extinguished, and she is forcefully removed from her home to be locked up in a faraway attic (to be the madwoman Bertha of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre). I wish to explore this fascinating relationship from a Psychoanalytic perspective. By drawing on aspects of Social Psychology, focusing upon psychological reactance, stereotypes and prejudices and the dynamics of intimate relationships, this paper will give psychological explanations for the motivations underlying Rochester’s behavior and Antoinette’s reactions.

• A New Historicist Examination of Masculinity in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, Tracey M. Hurt (Dr. Hena Ahmad, Faculty Mentor)

This paper will analyze the ways in which Nineteenth-Century British colonial society shaped the attitudes of white upper-class men, as reflected in the novels Jane Eyre (1847), by Charlotte Bronte and Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys. Edward Rochester, the primary male character of both novels, is deeply influenced by the standards placed upon him by the British nobility of which he is a part. Because of the law of primogeniture, Rochester is forced to marry Antoinette, an heiress, in order to maintain his noble status. He carries this standard of a noble gentleman into his household by asserting his dominance as the patriarch, both over Antoinette and Jane. By examining his relationships with Jane and Antoinette in the context of British imperial society, we can gain a more complex understanding of his actions, even when they sometimes seem cruel and illogical.

Romanticism on the Net, The Gothic: from Ann Radcliffe to Anne Rice, Issue 44, November 2006

• Domesticity and the Female Demon in Charlotte Dacre’s Zofloya and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Jennifer Beauvais, Université de Montréal

This essay explores the transformations of the female demon in Dacre’s Zofloya and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in relation to issues of femininity and domestic space. The mutability of the Gothic genre allows for the emergence of a new female demon introduced by Dacre and rewritten by Brontë. Tracing the domestication of Victoria and Catherine reveals the significance of the role of performance in the female demon’s acceptance into this feminized space. Masculinity and sensibility are also examined since the female demon is guided into the domestic sphere by effeminate male characters and then fall prey to their more masculine demon lovers. This essay argues that although the female demon’s newly acquired skill of performance and transformation allows her to explore the realm of the domestic, Dacre and Brontë suggest, by ultimately reverting to traditional Gothic perceptions of femininity, that her domestication is her demise.

Categories: Journals, Scholar, Talks