Theses time

Recent Brontë-related theses:

"The Events of My Insignificant Existence": Traumatic Testimony in Charlotte Brontë's Fictional Autobiographies
by Haller, Elizabeth Kari, Kent State University, August 2009
Abstract
A significant gap in current criticism surrounding Charlotte Brontë's novels has led to a superficial rendering of her primary characters, situating them as mere autobiographical products of a certain place and a certain time. My study, "'The Events of My Insignificant Existence': Traumatic Testimony in Charlotte Brontë's Fictional Autobiographies,' fills this gap by establishing Brontë's primary characters as complex individuals who cannot be oversimplified and defined by their gender or their historical moment and who are not limited by their creator's frame of reference. To provide a deservedly deeper and more illuminating explication of her work, this study furthers a critical understanding of Brontë's narrative structures in her fictional autobiographies – The Professor (1857), Jane Eyre (1847), Villette (1853) – through the application of trauma theory, a theoretical stance that has yet to be utilized in analyzing any of her novels. Bronte's primary characters are each defined by a traumatic event that took root on a sub-conscious level, causing their moral and psychological growth to decline, if not cease, as evidenced by repetitive patterns of behavior that occur throughout the novels. These patterns are indicative of an originary trauma and reveal that not only are the narrators discontented in their life choices but they are writing their autobiographies as a means of providing testimony to their continued struggle with trauma in an attempt to master that trauma and experience a true revelation of self. This study covers each novel, looking at the narrator's autobiographic representation of life events as traumatic testimony with the public forum of the novel allowing the reader to serve as witness. Approaching Brontë's novels in this manner (through trauma theory) sheds insight into the traumatic stimulus of these works, mirrored in the characters who, as individuals, reveal the truth of their lives that is not entirely represented in their fictional autobiographies and that is completely overlooked in previous critical studies.

Comparison of Jane Eyre and "Cinderella" with the help of Vladimir Propp's thesis
by Öhlander, Cecilia, Växjö universitet, 2009

This is an analysis of Jane Eyre's structure and plot in comparison with Vladimir Propp's thesis the Morphology of the Folktale, which shows resemblance with the Grimm brothers' "Cinderella".

Race, Gender and Colonialism in Victorian Representations of North Africa: The Writings of Charlotte Brontë, Guida and Grant Allen
by Aimillia Mohd Ramli, University of Manchester, 2008
Abstract
Charlotte Brontë, Guida and Grant Allen are known for their novels that engage with the issue of gender, race and Empire within the context of nineteenth-century representations of French-colonised North Africa and Algeria. An analysis of colonial discourse, engaging specifically with Edward Said's Orientalism, is helpful in understanding the underlying anxieties and ambivalences regarding these issues that are present in these writers' works, and in particular Brontë's Villette, Guida's Under Two Flags and Allen's The Tents of Shem. Not only do the novels provide a chronological analysis of the gradual transformations underwent by representations of Arabs in English literature from their portrait as courageous freedom fighters, in the middle of the nineteenth century, to a mass of blood-thirsty savages less than fifty years later, they also demonstrate shifts in the types of anxieties that colonial discourse underwent during this period; from fears regarding possible contaminative effect that the East was said to assert on the treatment of women in the West in Brontë's novel, through a more ambivalent attitude towards sexual practices in the region in Guida's work and, finally, the tension that results from racial encounters and the fear surrounding degeneration in Britain in Allen's novel. While novels by Brontë and Guida imply the sources of these anxieties as coming from outside Britain, Allen's writings reflect his fear that the future of the English race was being threatened by a surplus of childless and unmarried women within the metropolitan centre. In fact, the narratives studied here deeply imbricate the race and character of the English with gendered representations of North Africans during that period. Even though colonialism is perceived as consolidating the superiority of the English race in comparison to other races, increasing encounters between it and these 'others' at the periphery, in particular North Africa, inevitably expose anxieties to be a significant part of the English colonial identity.

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