New scholar Brontë-related papers:
“You are exactly my brand of heroin(e)”: Convergences and Divergences of the Gothic Literary Heroine
Guillard, Julianne
Girlhood Studies, Volume 4, Number 1, Summer 2011 , pp. 49-66(18)
What brand of heroine can be found in the Twilight series? What discernible characteristics of a heroine can be found in gothic fiction and do these characteristics contribute to a social definition of girlhood/womanhood? In an analysis of the Twilight series' protagonist as a gothic heroine in contrast to Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, I claim that the author, Stephenie Meyer, constructs a particular category of contemporary gothic heroine. Drawing on the statement made by the novel's leading male character, Edward, to Bella that she is his “brand of heroin,” this article plays with the idea that Meyer merged elements of the bildungsroman and the Female Gothic to create her brand. This brand of heroine fulfills the three distinct categories of girlhood/womanhood that characterize both the Gothic novel and the bildungsroman: a dependent stage, a caretaker stage, and a wife stage.
After Mrs. Rochester: Rewriting as re-vision
Macedo, Ana Gabriela
Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, Volume 3, Number 3, 1 January 2011 , pp. 271-289(19)
Departing from a play by the London based playwright and director Polly Teale entitled After Mrs. Rochester (2003), this essay focuses on the intricate network of intertexts that construct it and the manifold discourses that traverse it. Issues of rewriting, revision and adaptation are the main focus of this essay, given that the play consists of the revisitation of Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Rhys's own biography by Carole Angier, Jean Rhys (1985), Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre: an Autobiography (1847), while it also openly revisits Paula Rego's series of lithographs and pastels Jane Eyre (2001/02), as well as her composition Wide Sargasso Sea (2000).
The analysis of this text, which is so densely permeated by the memory of other texts and literally haunted by past heroines and the echo of their voices, draws on the understanding that intertextuality, as Susan Stanford Friedman (1991) argues, is essentially a dialectical, conflictual and anti-hegemonic process rooted, via the work of Julia Kristeva, in the Bakhtinian notions of heteroglossia and dialogism. Moreover, it suggests, as Ziva Ben-Porat (2003) claims, that the strategy of rewriting is a trigger of a particular reading pact with wide potential functionalities. My own understanding of re-writing as both a reforming and a writing back to (a wrighting process which undertakes a critical-interpretive gesture, to borrow a term coined by Chantal Zabus), as tested on this polyphonic case-study, shares these concerns.
Another Possible Source for Bertha Mason in Jane Eyre
Franssen, Paul J. C. M.
Notes and Queries, Volume 58, Number 1, 10 March 2011 , pp. 88-89(2)
In a recent article in Notes and Queries, Helena Kelly has convincingly argued that a literary source for the figure of Bertha Mason, the notorious madwoman in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), could be found in Charlotte Smith’s Ethelinde (1789). The latter features a madwoman, whose husband makes a mistress of his governess and moves to Paris with her; besides, the book is partly set in Jamaica, where we find a character named Anthonietta, which is quite close to Bertha Mason’s second name, Antoinetta.
There is, however, another literary source, as yet unacknowledged, that may have contributed some of the inspiration for Bertha Mason's character, her fiery end, and even her first name.. In Nathan Drake's gothic novel Montchensey, part of his miscellany Noontide Leisure (1824), the hero is no less than William Shakespeare himself who uses his psychological insight to unravel a mysterious plot. On a visit to the house of his friend Montchensey, he is confronted by a nocturnal appearance that seems very similar to a scene from his own Macbeth...
Categories: Journals, Scholar
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