The Blindman in the classic

A paper and two talks given in recent conferences:

The blindman in the classic: feminisms, ocularcentrism and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
Author: David Bolt
Affiliation: University of Staffordshire
Textual Practice, Volume 22, Issue 2 June 2008 , pages 269 - 289

National Conference on Undergraduate Research at Salisbury University 2008 (April 10-12)

MOTHER-FIGURES IN VICTORIAN FICTION: WORKING-CLASS MATERNAL REPLACEMENTS

Jessica N. Mattson (Christa Zorn) Department of English, Indiana University Southeast, New Albany, IN 47150

To understand the role of the mother, specifically the biological mother, during the Victorian period, or rather that of her absence, in many Victorian novels, it seems vital to determine the construction of her role by society. Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering gives us an important lead in the investigation of the roles of mothers whether we look at the described roles in etiquette guides from the Victorian period or in the mother figures in early or late Victorian novels, such as Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Olive Scheiner’s The Story of an African Farm. The curious absence of biological mothers in Victorian novels—already noticed by Florence Nightengale in Cassandra—is not immediately evident to the reader, since surrogate mothers present themselves in many forms both as hired servants, such as farmhands, governesses, wet-nurses, or nannies, and as siblings all taking on parts or all of the roles of the biological mother. I will be comparing the description of the mother’s role in etiquette books and other contemporary sources with the representation of mothers and motherly figures in the two novels. In identifying mother-figures in both texts, it does not seem uncommon to find both men and women as having some characteristics prescribed to the mother by society. From the development of these mother-figures in the Victorian Age between Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm one could argue that the working-class appears as the primary parent figure in the Victorian period, a phenomenon which created cultural anxiety among the middle-classes and, at the same time, reinforced their ideological construction of motherhood.

SouthWest TexasPopular Culture and American Culture Associations (13-16 February)

Panel: Children and Characters: Adapting Dylan, Eyre, and Terabithia

Sensitive vs. Stormy: How Recent Film Adaptations of Jane Eyre Adjust Rochester’s Byronic Character in an Era After Feminism and Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea
Paisley Mann, University of Victoria

Categories: Journals, Scholar, Talks