The Imperial Archive, Secularism and the Tory nation

Some new Brontë-related papers:

Revisiting the Imperial Archive: Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and the Decomposition of Englishness
Trevor Hope
College Literature
Volume 39, Number 1, Winter 2012
Abstract

Abstract:

Returning to the much-noted relationship between Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and noting the central role of architectural structures in both texts, this essay analyses the ways in which the later novel 'revisits' and 'reinhabits' its forerunner. It is argued that the symbolic architecture described by the texts is inseparable from the discursive practices of the 'imperial archive.' Following Derrida's analysis, however, 'archive' names not a consolidated synchronic signifying order but a series of 'consignations' which remain temporally unintegrated. Indeed, the archive works against its own principle of order in ways which are acted out by the structural 'decomposition' (and 'self-immolation') of Brontë's text, and further exacerbated by Rhys's revisiting of it. If Brontë's text performs the vicissitudes of the imperial (and patriarchal) archive, Rhys's offers an allegory of a postcolonial revisitation haunted by its own ambivalent relationship to the literary archives of empire.

Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Mid-Victorian Anti-Catholicism, and the Turn to Secularism
Micael M. Clarke
ELH
Volume 78, Number 4, Winter 2011
Abstract:

Although Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) is frequently interpreted as anti-Catholic, reconciliation between Catholic and Protestant plays a pivotal role in the novel, as Lucy Snowe’s perspective evolves from narrow sectarianism to a more open stance. Brontë accomplishes this reconciliation by elucidating the differences at their deepest level: at the point where Protestantism challenges and ultimately evolves into a separate set of institutions from Catholicism. Drawing on Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, this paper argues that, in its advocacy of the possibility of deep faith combined with religious pluralism, Villette anticipates modern secularism in the best sense of the word.

Communicating with Jane Eyre: Stagecoach, Mail, and the Tory Nation
Ruth Livesey
Victorian Studies
Volume 53, Number 4, Summer 2011
Abstract:

Critics have long read Jane Eyre as an exemplary account of liberal individualism and self-expression. This essay instead argues that the novel, written in the 1840s and depicting the 1820s, employs the stagecoach as a Tory emblem of a Britain unified through the preservation of regional customs, against an increasingly dominant railway network. Radical though Jane Eyre's claims to speak and feel may be from the perspective of liberal narratives of progressive individualism, they are best understood in this Tory context of anti-metropolitan regionalism and preservationism. Jane's self-assertions are momentary staging posts in a journey that preserves customary regional community. The stagecoach knits the smallest, most remote places and persons into the nation while preserving their distinct identities. It is a resistant Tory mode of inscribing an alternative modernity in the era of progress.

Sue Thomas in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature (Volume 29, Number 2, Fall 2010 ) and Catherine Tosenberger in Marvels & Tales (Volume 25, Number 2, 2011 ) review Heta Pyrhönen's Bluebeard Gothic: Jane Eyre and Its Progeny.