Proletarian novels and other news

We have a couple of Brontë mentions in two reviews of recent films. The Boston Herald on Coco Avant Chanel:

Poor Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (Audrey Tautou). When we first see her, it’s 1893 and she’s a cross between Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre, although you just know she adores the winged wimples worn by the good nuns of the Aubazine convent, who run the orphanage where she grows up after her mother’s death. (James Verniere)

And The New York Times on The Invention of Lying:

Over at Lecture Films, where Mark struggles as a writer, the movies are based only on true events, like the black plague. Narrated by stuffed shirts (Christopher Guest in whiskers) seated in armchairs and pompously droning into the camera, this is cinema without fictional embellishment, heaving bosoms, rustling crinolines, passion, pleasure or intrigue, kind of like “Masterpiece Theater” without Evelyn Waugh or the Brontës. (Manohla Dargis)

And now for two quite sweeping statements. The Asia Times reports a comment made by Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong's wife, in 1970-1971:

When she discovered that I had been studying English literature, she immediately pronounced that Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens' Hard Times were the only two English proletarian novels. Even as I blurted out a negative, I was thinking hard. I saw the rest of the senior leadership of the party withdraw a little in expectation of the thunderbolt to come. Jane Eyre was clearly a bit too close to home. A governess who marries the boss had too much resonance with the career of a Shanghai starlet who married the chairman. I concentrated on Hard Times, pointing out that its hero was in fact a strikebreaker - a traitor to his class in Marxist terms. (Ian Williams)

Terry Eagleton would probably agree.

But at least that statement wasn't coming - allegedly at least - from a Professor of English, as relayed by The Etownian:

[Dr David] Downing also made an interesting remark that, as of the last fifty years, literature has taken on two extremes. Authors are either pumping out accessible, plot-driven novels such as Dan Brown’s religious mysteries or the Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer, or they’re publishing academic literature that’s only read by scholars and those in a collegiate environment. “I am concerned about how literature has become bifurcated,” he said. “In the 19th century everyone was reading Dickens and the Brontës, and there was a shared cultural experience in that. Today, we have plot-driven novels with very little literary merit or beautiful academic novels that are intellectually challenging but not widely read.” (Samantha T. Phillips)

First of all it is interesting to see how the Brontës are both claimed by highbrow and lowbrow defenders. Secondly, we find it quite shocking that a Professor of English would fail to take into account things such as illiteracy or how expensive books were back then, which surely account for a lot of things. The number of people reading was much smaller than it is nowadays, not to mention the fact that that number was restricted to a very homogeneous social group who right from the start had a 'shared cultural experience', thus much less variety was needed. The final statement, though not at all related to the Brontës, we must say we find awfully snobbish.

The Independent writes about 1994 book Motherless Daughters, by Hope Edelman.

Edelman cites a long list of female high achievers who lost their mothers young: George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, Dorothy Parker, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna. (Sarah Gabriel)

As for the blogs, Den of the Ogress posts about the Twilight-like cover of a recent edition of Wuthering Heights. Könyvmolyok writes in Hungarian about The Professor and Scriitori Celebri posts a biography of Emily Brontë in Romanian.

Categories: Books, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, References