Blame Chick-lit

Charlotte Stretch asks herself in The Guardians's Books Blog whatever happened to gothic romance? Blame chick-lit.

You know the story: Girl meets boy, boy locks girl in attic, boy promptly moves on to the next bit of stuff that comes along. Next year marks the 160th anniversary of the publication of Jane Eyre, and if the recent BBC adaptation is anything to go by, she's lost none of her ability to fascinate those who encounter her.
Furthermore, Charlotte Brontë's seminal novel refreshed the formula for gothic romances, with a spate of copycat triple-deckers soon following "Currer Bell" on to the book market. No popular romance was complete without a fragile heroine in dire need of a good rescuing, a brooding, potentially bad boy but ultimately damaged-soul hero and a vixenish, scheming rival for his affections. A taste of exotic stuff from overseas? All the better. A house, possibly haunted but certainly in possession of a few spine-chilling adornments? Perfect.
Since then, the romance novel has undergone a few significant changes. The mysteries of the strange, foreign land have now been unlocked by Ryanair; as for being haunted by ghosts of your husband's past, all you need to do is hack into his email account. Jane herself, meanwhile, has been magically transformed into a sussed, streetwise single mum/high-powered career woman/girl-about-town with a midlife crisis and a sexy neighbour. Chick lit has taken over.
It would be a mistake to dismiss gothic fiction's offspring as trashy, insubstantial fluff, however. In recent years, romantic fiction has turned into the bully of the literary playground, snapping up more than 25% of the UK fiction market. Around the world Mills and Boon, that powerhouse of heaving bosoms and throbbing manhood, sells a staggering two books every second.
These figures are astonishing, but are as nothing to the true crimes that they conceal: behind a veneer of harmless pap, romantic fiction is gradually offing its progenitor. These days, chick-lit heroines aren't allowed to be damsels in distress; while critics claim that Jane Eyre reproduces patriarchal paradigms, the ladies of escapist literature are busy balancing their successful careers with finding a man. (...)
Following the template of the best gothic romances, the grande dame of melodrama has been made redundant by a younger and more alluring rival. It's a sad passing, but it seems that the fact is we can relate to chick lit in a way that we no longer can to gothic fiction. Who knows, maybe the chick-lit novel will one day have its own head cut off by the next big movement in women's writing. But for now the gothic romance is an inaccessible madwoman locked up in fiction's unvisited attic.

Check the comments on the blog. It's an interesting discussion. However, we must step in and say that 2007 marks the 160th anniversary of Jane Eyre, not next year!

The Daily Trojan talks about Rosanna Gamson's Ravish dance piece, now at the new LATC, as we presented yesterday.

The premise behind "Ravish" is, in itself, the stuff great theater is made of - except that in this case, the story translates itself into an interactive dance piece. It is a modern spin on a classic tale. The production revolves around the lives of the five Bronte sisters, all of whom died of tuberculosis prior to the age of 40, and the dichotomy that existed between their own isolation and the rich, romantic lives of the characters they created.
Rosanna Gamson, the creator and choreographer of "Ravish," said that though she drew inspiration from various sources, the root of her piece is embedded in her life - the integration of disparate artistic elements a reflection of her own unique experiences. (...)
"Ravish," despite its literary influence, is the next step, a progression into something far more conceptual in both its writing and its execution. The dynamic motion of the five dancers is set off by a 24 square-foot stage, but the physical exterior of the space by no means limits the range of influence the performers have on their environment.
"I'm trying to make movement that has a certain awkwardness, that's very hard to do in terms of stamina," Gamson said. "There's a struggle in it. Imagine trying as hard as you can to find movement that you've never seen before. It's a short show - only one hour. I need the production to feel dense, like a jewelry box. Everything in the box should be unique and flashy and essential to the production."
What Gamson said she wanted, more than anything, was to have a show that fully engaged the audience, allowing viewers to be a part of the show, as opposed to being passive observers. This is where the technological component of "Ravish" came into play.
For the production, Gamson teamed up with former Massachusetts Institute of Technology fellow and researcher Flavia Sparacino to create a completely new form of dance theater, integrating modern know-how into traditional movement to create an ethereal realm of dancing words and a dramatic interplay between the performers and the stage itself.
"One of the great things about working with Rosanna was that she is a choreographer with a vision," said Sparacino, who is the founder and director of Sensing Places, an interactive architecture firm. "A designer is a designer and will always have his or her unique artistic tastes. But with Rosanna, we agreed on a vision, and as a choreographer, she was open to ideas. I see technology as being at the service of art, not dominating it."
The point behind interactive media, Sparacino explained, is examining the relationship between people and the space they are in - and perhaps more importantly, how the people can influence their environments. In "Ravish," the dancers are at once controlling their surroundings and trapped by them: Their movement dictates the direction of the lighting and the way the stage reacts to their actions. It is motion sensors without the markers, special effects in real time.
"There are three components to interactive media: The input, the output and the glue that holds the two together," Sparacino said. "In this case, the dancers' movement provides an input and the reaction of the computer software to this movement is the output. It's everything that happens in between that is the hard part."
At one point in "Ravish," letters projected onstage follow the dancers, seemingly chasing the performers tirelessly as they spell out poignant words. Though Gamson choreographed the dances well in advance, the letters' reactions happen in real time, so there is an interactive component that immediately draws the viewer in.
"My vision is to have art generated as the body moves," Sparacino said. "Just like how skin reacts to how we feel on the inside, I want the environment and the stage itself to react to how the dancers move throughout the stage.
"This is releasing power to the people. This is about allowing dancers to create dynamic art with just their movements, and that's something that I think will appeal to people, this augmented reality." (Joyce Chen)

The Journal Live publishes David Almond's top ten books:

6. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte: It’s the atmosphere and passion she creates but also the northern moorland setting that appeals to me. Also, the poetic language is extremely powerful. It’s certainly one of my favourite English novels and, like all of these books, has had an influence on my writing. (Paul Loraine)

Twilight is not good for maidens has a couple of posts of interest: a review of the current exhibition of Cornerlia Parker at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham that we have previously reported. Her attention was driven to the Brontëan Abstracts pieces:

My attention was particularly caught (unsurprisingly) by Brontean Abstracts, her work which came out of the artist’s time at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth. The exhibition guide talks of Parker’s "forensic interest in the stuff of the Brontes’ lives", and this section of the exhibition features photographs taken through an electron microscope, displaying in the most minute and scientific detail a pin hole made by Charlotte Bronte, the hair of the three sisters, their nibs and needlework. I was fascinated by the level of detail, presumably representative of a "never ending" search for the essential, real Brontes, the people behind the novels, because that seems to be what we, whether as literary critics or the reading public, want. One might assume it’s a modern obsession, this consuming interest in celebrity, wanting to be close to those in the public eye, but as I have previously mentioned in the case of Tennyson, this has been going on for a long time now. And, of course, wanting to know every minutiae of the life of the Brontes is arguably a very different proposition to wanting to know who Kate Moss is going out with and which moisturiser Victoria Beckham wears; this, one can argue, is a "literary" interest, one for the erudite, the well-read. It isn’t, really, though. I wonder if Parker was really suggesting that we are trying to get too close, that the scrutiny of biography and reworkings of history is all a bit much, extraneous, almost. What impact would that image of the pinhole have had if it had been made by Mrs Jones of Cardiff who lived and died in obscurity? But then, what material value would be placed, at auction, say, on Mrs Jones’ nightdress, for example, when compared to Charlotte Bronte’s? It’s all about association, and Parker is making us question, uncomfortably, if we have over-emphasised these associations – it’s cynical, but celebrity sells; is it right that these anonymous pictures become more interesting because of their associations? (...)
What particularly caught my eye here, however, was a framed series of photographs, twelve in all (I think) of deleted words from the manuscript of Jane Eyre. Only academics tend to look at manuscripts in such detail, so it’s thought-provoking to see these deleted words turned to their own use, as art. The materiality of the text is thrown into relief here, as words become meaningless as signifiers, taken out of their context (and some barely legible) but exist purely as pictures, the lines of handwriting becoming strokes of paint on a canvas which exist for the purposes of decoration only. The frames seem to break up the continuity of the text, until one recalls that since these are random, deleted words, they had no continuity and little textual status anyway. It forces the viewer into a different relationship with the text, and provokes discussion about the place of text-as-object, and, in the context of the exhibition as a whole, the object-as-text, in which an inanimate object provides a "text" for the viewer to "read". (Serena)

The other post covers the recent Victorian Memories conference that we reported some time ago:

The panel on ‘Charlotte Brontë and Memory’ lent a psychological focus to the darker, more disturbing facets of memory such as trauma theory and repressed memory. Speakers offered compelling accounts of Villette and Jane Eyre with astute examinations of Brontë’s use of the autobiographical form in rendering experience. (Nazia Parveen)

Categories: Art-Exhibitions, Brontëites, Dance, Jane Eyre, Scholar