ELH's fall issue

Two new Brontë-related papers appear in the most recent issue of ELH (English Literary History), Volume 74, Number 3, Fall 2007

Dellamora, Richard.
Earnshaw's Neighbor/Catherine's Friend: Ethical Contingencies in Wuthering Heights
ELH - Volume 74, Number 3, Fall 2007, pp. 535-555

In the early years of the Victorian period, writers of fiction looked for ways to challenge the authority of the definition of human nature within the new science of political economy: namely, the view of human beings as individuals chiefly related to one another by means of economic exchange. In doing so, writers needed access to an alternative rhetoric that would be at once intuitive and universal. One of these rhetorics exists in the ethic of the neighbor as expressed in the Levitical injunction to love thy neighbor along with its expansion in the parable of the Good Samaritan. Novelists of the 1840s such as Benjamin Disraeli and Elizabeth Gaskell found this ethic ready to hand as did also young Karl Marx when, in his notes on economy, he challenged James Mill's Elements of Political Economy. A second such rhetoric exists in the ethic of friendship as formulated in the Classical tradition of male friendship writing, which was drawn upon by novelists throughout the period. In an important recent book, Alan Bray has demonstrated that this ethic also exists within Catholic ritual and material culture up to the death of Cardinal Newman in 1890. Both ethics...

Gettelman, Debra
"Making Out" Jane Eyre
ELH - Volume 74, Number 3, Fall 2007, pp. 557-581

Late in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847) occurs a scene in which the clergyman St. John Rivers, visiting Jane Eyre in her humble teacher's cottage, imagines himself for a few moments in another, more paradisiacal setting. Though intent on becoming a missionary and foregoing domestic bliss, St. John listens eagerly to Jane talk of pretty Rosamond Oliver's apparent love for him; tells Jane that it is pleasant to picture what might have been were he to marry Rosamond; and asks if he may go on imagining such a marriage "for another quarter of an hour." With his watch actually set on the table to measure the time, he describes aloud the vivid images that come to him "Now I see myself stretched on an ottoman at Vale Hall, at my bride Rosamond Oliver's feet" and then falls silent, permitting himself to remain "entranced" by such thoughts for precisely fifteen minutes (J, 476). "That little space," St. John notes at its close, "was given to delirium and delusion" (J, 476). So apparently problematic is this mild act of imagining domestic contentment that it calls out all of St. John's manifold defenses and has to occur under the double watch, literally, of the clock and Jane's gaze. Despite such redoubled restriction, watching a character have a vision that the observer cannot...

Categories: Journals, Scholar