BAVS Conference 2008

The recent British Association for Victorian Studies Ninth Annual Conference (9^th BAVS 2008. Victorian Feeling: Touch, Bodies, Emnotions) which took place at the University of Leicester last month (1-3 September) included several Brontë related talks. From the conference programme:

1st September - Panel: Women’s Writing, Faith and Feeling
Feeling, faith and reason in Anne Brontë's Poetry, Rebecca Styler, University of Lincoln

The recent rehabilitation of Anne Bronte as an author worthy of study has been entirely grounded in her fictional writing. From this she has been reassessed as an enlightenment writer, more in the tradition of rational moralists like Edgeworth and Austen than romanticists such as Emily and Charlotte Bronte. But Anne Bronte‘s poetry tells a different story: faith and fulfilment are conceived in terms of ecstatic emotion, and reason is adopted reluctantly as compensation when feeling fails.
Bronte‘s poetry embodies an understanding of religious experience which is structured by the discourses of sensibility, in particular its expressions in evangelicalism and romanticism. Her religious ideal is an epiphany of felt conviction, fusion of the subjective world with the divine other. The poems are structured as quests, to depart from the lower world, associated with confinement and an isolated sensibility, and to reach the upper world, figured as expansion and liberatory feeling. Yet these attempts repeatedly fail, as numerous poems record. The poet‘s consequent sense of alienation in the earth-bound life reaches existential proportions. In this, Bronte shares themes with her sister poet Emily, and by using a Christian framework she becomes an early Victorian poet of doubt.
Bronte turns to reason-based, ethical religion to counter the absence of felt ecstasy. Critics have often read this as a capitulation to orthodoxy, in contrast with Emily‘s heretical boldness. But Anne Bronte offers an astute analysis of the quest for religious ecstasy, variously regarding it as unattainable, undesirable, and unethical. She finds in the rational religious life, based on a humanist understanding of God and a commitment to moral self-training, a pragmatic solution to the felt absence of divinity. Yet in these later poems there is often a sense of inner battle, and self-persuasion. The old longing for an epiphany haunts the poems, showing that Bronte has a more complex relationship with feeling and reason, romance and reality, than her novels suggest.

2st September Panel: Charlotte and Emily Brontë
“A subject too painful to be dwelt on”: Emily Brontë, Victorian Feeling and Embodied Memory, Alexandra Lewis, Trinity College, University of Cambridge

Emily Brontë‘s foray into painful Victorian feeling in Wuthering Heights centres around loss and bereavement as subjects "too painful to be dwelt on‘⁽¹⁾, and which are yet capable of insistently intruding upon the unquiet mind: functioning, in extreme instances, as forms of psychic wounding which manifest in bodily pain and disintegration. Taking up and moving beyond prevailing early- to mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of the workings of remembrance and recollection (including those of Dugald Stewart, John Reid, John Conolly, John Barlow and Thomas De Quincey)⁽²⁾, Brontë‘s text imaginatively explores nascent psychological understandings – and modes of narrative representation – of embodied memory in the context of arrested emotion and mourning, taking a central place in what I identify as a developing discourse of psychic trauma in nineteenth-century British literature.
Published in 1847, Wuthering Heights appeared some years before the concept of trauma as a psychic wound had begun to permeate the Victorian medical mindset, a movement occurring largely in response to the high incidence of psychic injuries stemming from accidents on the burgeoning railway system in the 1850s and 60s. Through an engagement with Brontë‘s representations of suspended affect and embodied memory in Wuthering Heights, this paper seeks to historicise interpretations of trauma, by tracing the earlier development of related and constituent concepts in nineteenth-century medical, cultural and literary discourse: in this instance, Victorian theories of the unconscious mind, memory, dream, hallucination and monomania, subjects known to have been well represented among the reading materials available to and philosophical discussions within the Brontë household, and with which Emily Brontë may be seen to engage in her portrayal of characters‘ altered states of consciousness. On the periphery of this analysis is the sense that current trauma theory provides twenty-first-century readers with insights which might focus and heighten our encounter with Victorian literature, and with characters and texts seen to be living on the edge both of their own psychic spaces and of scientific discourses contemporaneous with their composition. Although, as Jenny Bourne Taylor has aptly remarked of the sciences of the mind in general, it is important to "be aware of the dangers of […] reading one paradigm in light of a later, dominant one"⁽³⁾, Rick Rylance‘s study of Victorian Psychology and British Culture: 1850-1880 reinforces the notion that, in a very "real way, for all their difference, we are still in active conversation with Victorian ideas" regarding "certain deep conceptual problems in psychology"⁽⁴⁾. The work of Gillian Beer,
Sally Shuttleworth and others has shown that literature, rather than merely reflecting
prevailing scientific discourse, may often anticipate future developments⁽⁵⁾, and I suggest that Brontë‘s imaginative incursions into a number of disturbed and fragmented inner worlds may be viewed as an important precursor of theories of the traumatised mind which emerged later in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In his influential late-eighteenth-century work, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Dugald Stewart defined memory as "that faculty, which enables us to treasure up, and preserve for future use, the knowledge we acquire"⁽⁶⁾: an inherently positive and enabling function, particularly when viewed in light of Victorian notions of indomitable selfwill. Exploring the interplay between Emily Brontë‘s frames of narrative testimony and early Victorian ideas of memory as a palimpsest, daguerreotype or storehouse of images, I contend that Brontë complicates prevailing theories regarding the amount of agency or conscious control involved in the process of recollection, bringing to a wide Victorian readership the concept of preserved memory as unmanageable pathology. Not only are there subjects "too painful to be dwelt on", giving rise to willed avoidance of the past; some overwhelming events, Brontë‘s text reveals, might stun the mental processes, resulting in arrested feeling and a form of intrusive memory which plays upon the suffering body as well as upon the unquiet mind.

(1) Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), ed. Pauline Nestor (London: Penguin, 2003), 166.
(2) Dugald Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792), 6th edn, 2 vols (London: T. Cadell & W. Davies, 1818); John Reid, Essays on Hypochondriasis, and Other Nervous Affections (1816), 3rd edn, revised (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823); John Conolly, An Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity: With Suggestions for the Better Protection and Care of the InsaneOn Man’s Power Over Himself to Prevent or Control Insanity (London: William Pickering, 1843); Thomas De Quincey, Suspiria de Profundis, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 57-58 (March, April, June, July 1845), vol. 57 (269-285, 489-502, 739-751); vol. 58 (43-55).
(3) Jenny Bourne Taylor, ‘Obscure recesses: locating the Victorian unconscious’, in Writing and
Victorianism, ed. J.B. Bullen (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 137-179, 141.
(4) Rick Rylance, Victorian Psychology and British Culture: 1850-1880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2.
(5) See, for example, Gillian Beer, Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. First published 1983), and Sally Shuttleworth, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Science: The Make-Believe of a Beginning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) and Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology
(6) Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, I: 403. According to Clifford Whone, Stewart’s work was available at the Keighley Mechanics’ Institute Library in 1841: ‘Where the Brontës Borrowed Books: The Keighley Mechanics’ Institute’, Brontë Society Transactions, 11 (1951), 344-358, 347.

The inside and “outside of things”: Charlotte Brontë, materiality and the weather, Jo Waugh, University of York

This paper explores Charlotte Brontë‘s close and hitherto largely unremarked engagement with contemporary medical discourses on the weather‘s influence on both body and mind. Throughout Victorian literature, characters are made ill or psychically disturbed by climatic phenomena, but this trope is especially interesting in Brontë‘s novels since, as this paper will show, she was consistently concerned about the weather and its effects, in ways which demonstrate a direct legacy from medical treatises and theories in currency during her lifetime. Though the cold and forbidding weather depicted in Jane Eyre (1847) and Wuthering Heights (1847) has come to represent a typical "Brontë climate" in readings of both Charlotte Brontë‘s life and her novels, I argue that Charlotte Brontë‘s experience of and response to weather was also closely implicated in her vision of the interdependence between what Sally Shuttleworth has termed in her essay "Medical Discourse and Popular Advertising in the Mid-Victorian Era" (1990) "the physiological, mental and emotional economies of womanhood".
William Buchan‘s Domestic Medicine (1772) in particular emphasized the continuum between mind and body, and the effects of the atmosphere on both. This treatise was widely read in the Victorian period, and was owned by the Brontë family. Though Janis McLaren Caldwell has argued in Literature and Medicine (2004) that Buchan‘s work was an important source for Emily Brontë‘s vision of health and resilience in Wuthering Heights, this paper argues that Charlotte Brontë was also heavily influenced by Buchan‘s text. For Buchan, the correct response to the changeable British climate was to expose oneself to the weather as often as possible, and develop a robust frame which could withstand change. For Brontë, however, the question of wresting control of the weather was far more vexed. Though in Jane Eyre, Brontë created a heroine with a "constitution both sound and elastic", whose mind and body remain defiantly immune to the extremes of climate to which she is exposed, her correspondence demonstrates extreme anxiety over and monitoring of the weather, which intensified markedly when she or a family member was unwell. During Anne Brontë‘s terminal illness from tuberculosis, for example, almost every letter Brontë wrote described the state of the weather, its possible impact on her sister, as well as its effects on her own mental state. In this paper, I also relate such connections to Brontë‘s dislike of doctors, who appeared to her to deal only with "the outside of things", and ignore what Brontë perceived as an interconnected bodily economy. "Feeling", it appeared, could not be contained within one area of mind or body, but was always implicated in both, and could be caused by the same external influences wherever it occurred. The paper explores weather and "feeling" in Brontë‘s correspondence, and then discusses Villette (1853), arguing that Brontë‘s concerns about the female body and its responsiveness to the weather formed an important part of her narrative construction of the individual and materiality.

Tasting as knowing: feeling sweetness in Charlotte Brontë‟s Villette, Rosemary Dunleavy, University of Oxford

Bodies, and especially female bodies, are subject to excessive surveillance in Charlotte Brontë‘s Villette: a novel in which everybody watches, and likewise everybody is watched. Seeing appears to be the best way of knowing in the text and traditional readings of the novel have focussed on the role of vision as a privileged quality. I will suggest that Charlotte Brontë develops a discourse of nutrition in Villette in which taste also seems be a reliable indicator of morality. In particular, the taste of sweetness seems to have a distinctive resonance for female characters. While praised for the sweetness of their virtue, eating sweet food is problematic for women in the novel, who in order to become "sweet" are expected to reject bodily feelings such as taste. But while Villette appears to conform to conventional notions of femininity an alternative discourse also seems to be taking place in the novel in which physical appetite is symptomatic of emotional health. This discourse is supported by contemporary medical theories which emphasised the importance of the well-developed female body to reproduction, and at the same time pointed out the role of sugar as nutrition. To figure sugar as nutritious repositions the body as the site of moral knowledge in the novel and feeling as the locus of both physical and emotional health. Drawing on contemporary medical evidence and within a context of eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy (in which taste becomes, according to Kant, its own way of knowing) this paper will explore the ways in which physicality anticipates aesthetic and moral feeling in the novel.

Panel: Urban Vibes
Embodying the City in the Victorian Novel, Charlotte Mathieson, University of Warwick

"I got into the heart of city life. I saw and felt London at last […] To do this, and to do it utterly alone, gave me, perhaps an irrational, but a real pleasure." (Charlotte Brontë, Villette, Chapter VI).

The experience of spatiality and interpretations of the built environment were issues of growing significance throughout the Victorian period; whilst the development of railways effected a shift in conceptual experiences of space and time, as well as facilitating movement from the country to the city, the problems that resulted from growing levels of urban populations prompted widespread debate about city spaces, bringing spatial awareness to the forefront of public concern. Although the city is not an entirely new subject of the novel, it is frequently portrayed as a new phenomenon throughout the period: novels such as Brontë‘s Villette, or Dickens‘ David CopperfieldGreat Expectations, depict protagonists coming into the city of London for the first time, and these literary representations of the new spatial experience of the city frequently negotiate city spaces through the body. This paper will explore how the city is interpreted through spatially embodied subjects, with particular interest in the change effected by movement from the country to the city: how does the body adapt to a new spatial experience and mediate the built environment? Elizabeth Grosz‘s essay "Bodies-Cities" will provide a starting point for this discussion, whilst work by Judith Walkowitz, Deborah Epstein Nord, and Deborah L. Parsons will contribute to thinking about the positioning of bodies within gendered city spaces. The paper will propose ways in which reading the interaction between the body and city spaces offers new approaches to reading embodiment in the Victorian novel, emphasising the significance of theorising embodiment within a spatial context.

Panel: Responding to Slavery
"Fast and Rank": Landscape, the Body, and the Jamaican Gothic, Rebecca Wigginton, University of Pittsburgh.

Victorian literary and periodical discourse was fraught with anxiety over the British metropole‘s relationship with the West Indian colonies, an anxiety which took the form of novel and article alike, including such infamous examples as Thomas Carlyle‘s 1849 ―An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.‖ Of special concern was the island of Jamaica, whose geography was consistently descrived as monstrously fertile and disturbingly hellish, with language drawn from a rich British gothic tradition. In the nineteenth century Anglophone Caribbean, Jamaica was arguably the most turbulent site of political and social change and upheaval; the largest and at one time most productive of the British West Indian islands, the early and mid-nineteenth century saw Jamaica‘s sugar production drastically reduced and the planter economy replaced by one of small farmers. My argument sees the gothic depiction of Jamaica as the result of the fears and tension produced by these changes, and particularly tied to the land itself, the particularly commodity so often the basis for Jamaican conflict and/or despair. I address nonfiction depictions of the Jamaican landscape as gothic, culminating in a reading of Charlotte Bronte‘s 1848 Jane Eyre and a discussion of metropolitan reactions to the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion. My interest, however, is in Bronte‘s brief portrayal of the Jamaican landscape, and how the Jamaican body of Bertha Mason Rochester imports that gothic landscape into the interior of the English Thornfield Hall. Bronte‘s domestication of the Jamaican gothic landscape is successful for the conclusion of Jane Eyre, but limited regarding the Victorian cultural imagination. As shown in later narratives (such as Anthony Trollope‘s The West Indies and the Spanish Main), and English accounts of the Morant Bay rebellion, the spectre of demonic and threatening Jamaica continued to haunt the nineteenth century. This threat is best illustrated when physically embodied, demonstrated in the spectacle of a "creeping, and climbing, and clawing" landscape or contained and mobilized in the body of a displaced Creole woman. How is it, though, that topographical depictions of an island halfway across the world occupy such a resilient image in the nineteenth century British imaginary? Doris Y. Kadish suggests that part of the resonance of a ―narrative landscape‖ is found in its superior ability to embody "individual and collective psychological forces" and express attitudes connected to the point of view of a text‘s speaker. Thus, Jane Eyre‘s tendency to consciously express her mind as a mental landscape reflective of the physical landscape around her, and the travel writer‘s use of geographical description to demonstrate indirect (or direct) indications of discomfort with the colonial enterprise assume a continually surfacing significance for the imperial observer. The threat of the invasive landscape of the Other best illustrates the idea of the uncanny at the heart of Gothic fears: just as Rochester‘s failed attempt to convince Jane to believe that it is her mind that produces the nocturnal vision of Bertha allows the demented spectre to occupy a space both within and without Jane, the Gothic colonial landscape reflects threats both inside and outside of the metropole.

EDIT:
And an alert for tomorrow October 6:

University of Glasgow
Department of Adult and Continuing Education

The Brontes and their worlds
The intense and passionate worlds of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte have captured the imaginations of generations of readers. But does the 'Bronte myth' overshadow their remarkable achievements as writers? We will discuss the sisters' fascinating lives and some of their classic novels, including Jane Eyre, Villette, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Enrolment limit 20
Andrea Mullaney MA PgDIP
G046 £43.00 21.50
14.00-16.00 Mondays from 06 October 2008
(6 meetings) University Campus

Categories: Scholar, Talks