The Brontës and the Idea of Influence. First papers

The first articles of the dossier The Brontës and the Idea of Influence, edited by Élise Ouvrard, have been published on the LISA e-journal:

Influence on the Brontës

Yukari Oda
Emily Brontë and the Gothic: Female Characters in Wuthering Heights

In Wuthering Heights, Catherine can be placed in the genealogy of Gothic heroines, and the fact that the novel has been seen as an example of the Female Gothic is further evidence that the Gothic has a far-reaching influence on Wuthering Heights. It is also noticeable that Isabella and Cathy Linton resemble Gothic heroines. I do not intend to discuss these female characters as persecuted heroines. Rather, what I would like to see in this paper is how Emily Brontë received the Gothic and how her female characters are influenced by the genre. I suggest that Emily gradually makes her female characters shift into more lively figures, and Gothic heroines are transformed into several versions of more animated women in Wuthering Heights, and echo each other, mirror each other, and collaborate with one another to provide a whole view. In short, as an opposite or an incomprehensible example, each character helps others to identify themselves. They explore others to find themselves, and see others as distorted mirrors that they are not what they are. The female figures in Wuthering Heights create a whole version of women together.

Cristina Ceron
Emily and Charlotte Brontë’s Re-reading of the Byronic hero

The widespread popularity of Byron’s work during the Victorian age introduced several subversive possibilities for reading his characters as icons of transgression and insights into the literary tabooed. For Victorian novelists, one of the most intriguing aspects of his works was his obsessive explorations of literal or symbolic sibling incest, as the possibility that desire arises from an identification between male and female versions of the same psyche. Emily Brontë’s reading of Byron privileges this dark side of the literary myth, and her main focus is on the mysterious identity and Gothic aspects of the Byronic hero. Even though several critics have actually labelled the character of Heathcliff as ‘Byronic hero’, the debate has not delved into the textual or thematic evidence of the relation between Brontë’s protagonist and Byron hypertexts. My paper aims at investigating Brontë’s reading of Byron’s works, in particular her indebtedness to Manfred and to the relationship between Manfred and Astarte for the creation of the morbid passion experienced by Heathcliff and Catherine. The study will concentrate on Brontë’s appropriation and emphasis on the Gothic elements presented in nuce in Manfred, such as the spectral nature of Astarte, or the supernatural aspects of Manfred’s nature, whose will supersedes even Fate. My hypothesis is that Brontë makes use of these aspects of Byron’s characters with the precise aim of setting the Gothic element as alternative narrative mode, as the subversive element inside a realistic novel. On the contrary, in spite of some juvenile experiments on the gothic, Charlotte’s reading of the Byronic hero is much more framed within the conventions of the realistic novel, and in the second section of my essay I maintain that what comes to the fore in Jane Eyre is the unsurpassed mastery the novelist shows in the combination of the realistic plot with the gothic elements and features of the protagonists. Far from enacting mere Romantic passion, the relationship between Jane and Rochester, just like Catherine’s liaison with Heathcliff, follows the textual dynamics of the Gothic romance, in that the woman falls prey to the more or less demonic instincts of her lover, suffers from the violence of his feelings and at the end is entangled by his thwarted passion, even though when we read the domestic happy ending we tend to forget the gothic matrix of the story…

The Brontë Influence in literature

Ivonne Defant
The Mystery of the Past Haunts Again: Jane Eyre and Eugenie Marlitt’s Die zweite Frau

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is a classic in women’s fiction. When it was published in 1847, it made an immediate impact in mid-Victorian England, partly because it drew on the paradigmatic story of a romance heroine, partly because it interpreted the needs of the women of the time. Since then, the Thornfield Hall attic where Bertha Mason is kept hidden by the master of the house, Mr. Rochester, has become the metaphor of a feminine place of imprisonment and,at the same time, of rebellion against patriarchal rules.About thirty years after Jane Eyre, another woman writer published a book which evokes the haunting atmosphere of the Thornfield Hall theme, i.e., the German writer Eugenie Marlitt, the author of Die zweite Frau ( The second wife, 1874).Interestingly, Marlitt seems to recapture, while rewriting it, the character of Bertha within the context of German domestic fiction. Bothnovels explore indeed the issue of the imprisoned and socially marginalised woman in terms of ethnicity to show how gender roles are inevitably complicit with power relations. In Jane Eyre and Die zweite Frau the house motif is a pivotal element that leads to our understanding of the female characters, but it is above all the mystery that reverberates through the houses of the two novels, represented by two women, the Creole Bertha and the Indian Lotusblume, which, being crucial to the articulation of the discursive thrust underlying the two narratives, discloses the multi-layered construction of femininity.

Jane Silvey
“We wove a web in childhood” Angria Revisited: A. S. Byatt’s The Game

Many women writers have been fascinated with Charlotte Brontë’s life and their admiration for her work has infected their own creative writing. The Game is a complex and profoundly and self-consciously ‘literary’ novel in which A.S. Byatt takes the Brontë myth and uses it to reflect on the nature and power of the creative imagination. She explores how that imagination can become an overwhelming and ultimately destructive force in the lives of reading and brooding female selves. A work of extraordinary intelligence as well as of emotional intensity, its literary illusions play a vital part in the novel’s rich density of implication.

Wolfgang Funk
“What’s Next?” Jasper Fforde’s Attempts on Jane Eyre

This article attempts to analyse the interplay of Jane Eyre with one of its most daring re-appropriations, Jasper Fforde’s 2001 novel The Eyre Affair, which will be presented as a ‘parallolotopia’ in this essay. The main focus is on the inter-textual relationship between the two texts and the interplay and entanglement of the two novels will be analysed as a particular form of post-modern pastiche (in the sense of Fredric Jameson), the main characteristic of which is its self-reflective attitude. This pastiche does not only disestablish traditional role allocations in the framework of literary communication (such as author, story and reader), it also might serve as a completely new paradigm in the relation of literature and its perception, who which (as the article attempts to point out) will be grounded in an ‘aesthetics of insolence’ rather than one of diffidence, as was traditionally the case.

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