Brontë Dissertations (IV)

More Brontë dissertations:

Victorian masculinity in the works of Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë
Knapp, Sarah Elizabeth.
Year: 2010
Honors essay: Dept. of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2010.

Kings of their castles. Reading Heathcliff as a Caliban who succeeds
Elizabeth Kozinsky
Thesis (M.A.)--University of Georgia, 2010.

Abstract:
At first othered by his text and then given the power to marginalize the next generation, Heathcliff provides a vision of what a Caliban who succeeds would be and further explores the idea of a family producing its own outsider. Highlighting the cyclical nature of both texts, Kozinsky analyzes Heathcliff and Caliban?s shared kinship with the Medieval Wild Man to explain the varying reactions to them. She also considers Heathcliff?s affinity to the mastermind Prospero and their relationship to the tradition of revenge tragedy. By considering both the structural similarities of Shakespeare's play against Brontë's novel and the varying interpretations of both for a nineteenth century audience, a better sense of these characters emerges, why we fear and are fascinated by them.

Gothic novels after the peak of 1810 : a comparison between Bram Stoker's Dracula and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights
Imhof, Chantal.
Year: 2010
Dissertation: BA Thesis Univ. Bern, 2010.

Two Happy Endings in Wuthering Heights: Emily Brontë's Sympathy for the Rejected
Lee, Chia-Fen
Year: 2010
Dissertation: Thesis (M.A.)--National Cheng Kung University Department of Foreign Languages & Literat

The figure of the nun and the gothic construction of femininity in Matthew Lewis's The Monk, Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, and Charlotte Brontë's Villette
Hause, Marie.
2010
Dissertation: Thesis (M.A.)--James Madison University, 2010.

The treatment of nuns and convents in gothic novels contributes to the presentation of various attitudes toward women who resist normative female roles. This is illustrated in the consideration of three central, and very different, gothic or post-gothic works: Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), Ann Radcliffe's The Italian (1796), and Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853). These novels draw on conflicting popular associations of nuns and convents, including nuns as chaste, sexual, or tragic and convents as brothels, prisons, or liberating communities. In each novel, anti-Catholicism also comes into play in the way that nuns work as foci for explorations of female roles. Lewis's horrific figures of dying or dead nuns contribute to his novel‟s condemnation of sexually transgressive, active women as monstrous. Radcliffe breaks away from the presentation of female transgression as monstrous and takes a more positive view of the convent as a female community offering a limited space for female self-definition and resistance to heteronormative roles. Brontë uses Lucy Snowe's association with nuns and convents to highlight both Lucy's restraint under patriarchy and her rejection of imposed gender roles. Lucy establishes an active convent-like community of her own where she follows traditionally unfeminine intellectual and artistic pursuits, themselves connected with the nun in Villette. Lewis's The Monk, Radcliffe‟s The Italian, and Brontë's Villette, when viewed together, form a complex, layered picture of one gothic element that plays a varied part in the elaboration and transgression of normative roles for women in the gothic novel.

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