Masculinity and Fantasies

The latest issue of SEL: Studies on English Literature 1500-1900 contains a couple of Brontë-related papers:

Priti Joshi
Masculinity and Gossip in Anne Brontë's Tenant
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 - Volume 49, Number 4, Autumn 2009, pp. 907-924

Abstract:

This paper examines Anne Brontë's novel against debates about women and women's influence. It argues that Brontë forges a middle ground between Mary Wollstonecraft and Hannah More, rejecting not only the former's repudiation of women's culture but also the latter's aggrandizement of women's influence. Brontë exposes some of the most dearly held fictions of femininity, even as she sympathetically explores its engagement with the production of a "new masculinity." To this end, she offers the very "feminine" behavior of "gossip" or "idle chat," rather than women themselves, as a tool to rehabilitate men who are drawn to a hypermasculine culture of violence.

Kate Lawson, Lynn Shakinovsky
Fantasies of National Identification in Villette
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 - Volume 49, Number 4, Autumn 2009, pp. 925-944

Abstract:

In investigating the role—part invented and part real—that national and nationalist affiliations play in Villette, as well as the ways in which Lucy Snowe's shifting consciousness interprets and reinterprets these constructs, this paper argues that Charlotte Brontë employs mid-Victorian national histories as a prism through which to investigate the nature of national identification itself and its relationship to imagination, invention, and even hallucination. Lucy ultimately accommodates herself to Labassecourien national history through an affiliation with its narrative of liberation that, when seized pragmatically by M. Paul, provides Lucy with, as she says in the final chapter, "a wonderfully changed life, a relieved heart."

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