Age Disparate Marriages, Theatre and Tea

Three recently scholar books with some Brontë content:

The January-May Marriage in Nineteenth-century British Literature
Esther Godfrey
ISBN: 9780230606739
Format: Hardback
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

By considering the disruptive potential of age disparate marriages in nineteenth-century British literature, Godfrey offers provocative new readings of canonical texts including Don Juan, Jane Eyre, and Bleak House.

Marriage between older husbands and younger wives was common in nineteenth-century literature, and as Godfrey skillfully argues, provides a useful window into the dynamics of the patriarchic paradigm. Examining canonical and noncanonical texts from Sense and Sensibility to Dracula, this study finds that literary January-May marriages respond to distinctively nineteenth-century anxieties regarding gender roles by deploying a surprising range of modes - parody, incest, aesthetics, horror, economics, and love. The January-May Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature ultimately argues that age - like race, sexuality, and class - is an essential component of gendered identities.

Feminist Theatrical Revisions of Classic Works
Critical Essays
Friedman, Sharon.
ISBN: 9780786434251
Format: Paperback
Publisher: McFarland & Co Inc

Re-visioning the classics, often in a subversive mode, has evolved into its own theatrical genre in recent years, and many of these productions have been informed by feminist theory and practice. This book examines recent adaptations of classic texts (produced since 1980) influenced by a range of feminisms, and illustrates the significance of historical moment, cultural ideology, dramaturgical practice, and theatrical venue for shaping an adaptation. Essays are arranged according to the period and genre of the source text re-visioned: classical theater and myth (e.g. Antigone, Metamorphoses), Shakespeare and seventeenth-century theater (e.g. King Lear, The Rover), nineteenth and twentieth century narratives and reflections (e.g. The Scarlet Letter, Jane Eyre, A Room of One's Own), and modern drama (e.g. A Doll House, A Streetcar Named Desire)

The essay devoted to Polly Teale's Jane Eyre is:
Expressions of "Lust and Rage": Shared Experience Theatre's Adaptation of Jane Eyre by Kristin Crouch

A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England
Julie E. Fromer
ISBN: 9780821418291
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Edition: illustrated edition

Tea drinking in Victorian England was a pervasive activity that, when seen through the lens of a century’s perspective, presents a unique overview of Victorian culture. Tea was a necessity and a luxury; it was seen as masculine as well as feminine; it symbolized the exotic and the domestic; and it represented both moderation and excess. Tea was flexible enough to accommodate and to mark subtle differences in social status, to mediate these differences between individuals, and to serve as a shared cultural symbol within England.
In A Necessary Luxury: Tea in Victorian England, Julie E. Fromer analyzes tea histories, advertisements, and nine Victorian novels, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wuthering Heights, and Portrait of a Lady. Fromer demonstrates how tea functions within the literature as an arbiter of taste and middle-class respectability, aiding in the determination of class status and moral position. She reveals the way in which social identity and character are inextricably connected in Victorian ideology as seen through the ritual of tea.
Drawing from the fields of literary studies, cultural studies, history, and anthropology, A Necessary Luxury offers in-depth analysis of both visual and textual representations of the commodity and the ritual that was tea in nineteenth-century England.

The Mansfield News-Journal reviews this book. Concerning Wuthering Heights:

In both "Alice" and Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights," much of the tension in the stories has to do with tea. At the Mad Hatter's tea party, Alice is shown no hospitality and offered no tea. Lockwood fares little better in Bronte's novel. Catherine rebuffs his offer to help with tea, then suggests that he isn't even welcome to join the others at tea.
Episodes of what Fromer terms "bad tea" are repeated throughout the novel. Readers, like Lockwood, associate tea with hospitality, unity, family and friendship. Instead it symbolizes discomfort and turmoil throughout the story. (Terry Mapes)

Categories: Books, Scholar