Slaves, Drinking and The Reader

Scholar and non-scholar journals:

THE (SLAVE) NARRATIVE OF JANE EYRE
Julia Sun-Joo Lee
Harvard University
Victorian Literature and Culture
Volume 36, Issue 02, September 2008, pp 317-329

Published online by Cambridge University Press 12 Jun 2008

In Imperialism at Home, Susan Meyer explores Charlotte Brontë's metaphorical use of race and empire in Jane Eyre. In particular, she is struck by Brontë's repeated allusions to bondage and slavery and wonders, “Why would Brontë write a novel permeated with the imagery of slavery, and suggesting the possibility of a slave uprising, in 1846, after the emancipation of the British slaves had already taken place?” (71). Meyer speculates, “Perhaps the eight years since emancipation provided enough historical distance for Brontë to make a serious and public, although implicit, critique of British slavery and British imperialism in the West Indies” (71). Perhaps. More likely, I would argue, is the possibility that Brontë was thinking not of West Indian slavery, but of American slavery.

“AN INFERNAL FIRE IN MY VEINS”: GENTLEMANLY DRINKING IN THE TENANT OF WILDFELL HALL
Gwen Hyman
Victorian Literature and Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press 12 Jun 2008

Drinking was a serious preoccupation for mid-century English Victorians, and Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a novel sodden with drink. This startlingly explicit novel is a troubled and troubling anatomy of upper-crust drunkenness, obsessed with issues of control and productivity, of appetites and class, as they play out across the body of its prime sot, the wealthy playboy Arthur Huntingdon. In telling her drinking tale, Brontë is doing more than simply crafting a prurient morality story, meant to scare drinkers straight. Arthur's fall into the bottle is emblematic of the increasingly untenable role of the landed gentleman in Victorian culture, and the dire consequences of his appetites suggest the possibility of a radical social revisioning across that gentleman's prone, overstuffed body.

The Reader
Issue No 30 I Live and Write
June 2008 includes

Readers Connect is reborn with a panel of five readers giving us their ratings for Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Not to be missed. Which judge will turn out to be the Simon Cowell figure?

Categories: Journals, Scholar