Scholar Publications (I) ~ BrontëBlog

Friday, November 21, 2008

Scholar Publications (I)

Friday, November 21, 2008 12:02 am by M. in Journals, Scholar No comments

Several recent scholar publications (as can be read in James Ogden's article in the latest issue of Brontë Studies):

Bertrandias, Bernardette
De Shirley à Villette : comment Jane Eyre peut-elle vieillir ?
Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens. — N° 63 (avril 2006).

While Jane Eyre obliterates the process of getting old, not so for Charlotte's two subsequent novels which introduce singular characters whose connection with the heroine suggests that ageing is now part of the issue of self development with which her writings are concerned. In Shirley, the old maids are monitory figures, but in Villette, Miss Marchmont, on the one hand (whose fate can be read as the alternative of Jane Eyre's), and the monstrous Malevola, on the other hand, frame Lucy Snowe's progress in life in a paradoxical structure of closeness/strangeness regarding the process of ageing. This article attempts to read the function of those figures as part of the problematic maturation of the woman subject, as uneasy with the codes of the Bildungsroman as such, as with those of patriarchy at large. For if Malevola illustrates the ultimate degradation of feminine stereotypes, she also embodies the parodic obverse of the woman writer's manipulative power, and as such maybe the last mirror in which Brontë contemplates herself, with the issue of autonomy and self-fulfilment dramatically unresolved.

Cicely Palser Haveley
Troubles with Men
English Review, 17:2 (2006) 21-3

Alison Searle
An Idolatrous Imagination? Biblical Theology and Romanticism in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre
Christianity and Literature, Autumn 2006, Volume 56 Issue 1, 35-61

Emily Griesinger
Charlotte Brontë's Religion: Faith, Feminism, and Jane Eyre
Christianity and Literature, Autumn 2008, Volume 58 Issue 1
EDIT: Available here.