Marriage Plots

A new scholar paper and a book review:

Breaking the Idol of the Marriage Plot in Yeast and Villette
Timothy L. Carens
Victorian Literature and Culture (2010), 38:337-353

Nineteenth-century Protestant culture generally held marriage in high esteem, and the notion that marriage was “made in heaven” often explicitly undergirds the conventional resolution of domestic fiction. Despite many indications of a harmonious relationship between human love and religious faith, a countervailing cultural trend reveals a deep conflict between the two. Victorian Protestants worried that passionate love for another mortal creature might lead to heretical extremes, that human love might slip into idolatry, the worship of false and material gods. Jane Eyre memorably confesses that she has “made an idol” of Rochester, although she, of course, looks back upon this transgression from the vantage of marital happiness (274). In this essay, I focus on works in which misgivings about idolatrous love arise with more disruptive force. The marriage plots of Charles Kingsley's Yeast: A Problem (1851) and Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) both abruptly collapse, bringing into sharp focus a Protestant religious anxiety that subverts the conventional device with which Victorian domestic novels achieve closure.

And a review of Sandra Hagan & Juliette Wells's The Brontës in the World of Arts:

The Brontës in the World of the Arts (review)
Eva Badowska
Victorian Studies - Volume 52, Number 3, Spring 2010, pp. 480-482

The Brontës in the World of the Arts, edited by Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells; pp. xii + 256. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008, £55.00, $99.95.
The useful collection Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells have put together places the Brontës in what the editors call “the wider world” of nineteenth-century arts (9). While acknowledging previous groundbreaking work on the Brontës and the visual arts, especially that by Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars in The Art of the Brontës (1995), this collection helpfully opens up and extends the meanings of “art.” It takes into account the traditional areas of concern for Brontë critics—such as painting, drawing, sketching, and engraving—but focuses as well on book illustration, music, fashion, and the material culture of the period. The collection is interdisciplinary also in that it includes, among its eleven articles, three contributions by scholars of music and fashion history. This expansion brings the scholarship on the Brontës and the arts up to date by including new scholarship by key Brontë scholars like Alexander and Richard J. Dunn, but also by...

Categories: Journals, Scholar