Melodramatic Impulse and Talks

A recent paper:

“Unconditionally and Irrevocably”: Theorizing the Melodramatic Impulse in Young Adult Literature through the Twilight Saga and Jane Eyre
Katie Kapurch
Children's Literature Association Quarterly
Volume 37, Number 2, Summer 2012
pp. 164-187

(...) Intriguingly, Twilight fan responses are comparable to reader sympathy with another pair of fictional lovers: first-person narrator Jane Eyre and the secretive, brooding Edward Rochester, who, like Edward Cullen, also happens to be ridden with guilt and in need of salvation only the heroine can supply. Sandra M. Gilbert offers a central insight into the appeal of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), explaining how the novel challenged Victorian literary norms in part through the intensity of characters’ expressive discourse, another tenet of melodrama:

Unlike most of her predecessors, too, [Brontë] endowed her main characters—hero as well as heroine—with overwhelmingly powerful passions that aren’t always rational and often can’t be articulated in ordinary language. This sense of unspeakable depth or fiery interiority imbues both Rochester and Jane with a kind of mystery that has always been charismatic to readers.

Accounting for Jane Eyre’s sustained popularity, Gilbert identifies the main characters’ passionate feelings as part of the reason for female readers’ continued captivation with Brontë’s text (357). One cannot deny the phenomenal (and global) popularity of Meyer’s series for contemporary readers, particularly (though not limited to) Western girls and adult women, who may be compelled by textual qualities that mirror those in Jane Eyre.
While the Twilight and Jane Eyre readerships are not identical and cannot be regarded as one homogenous group, awareness of their sympathetic and empathetic reactions permits us to consider both texts through the framework of melodrama. As works characterized not only by similar heroines, heroes, and romantic plots, Brontë’s and Meyer’s novels share a melodramatic reader response. An exploration of melodrama’s significance in these female coming-of-age stories,...

And some recent talks:

March 21-24, 2012
Nineteenth Century Studies Association 34th Annual Conference
Fresno, California

- The Spiritual Quest of Helen Huntington (Brontë), Tomaro Scadding, California State University, Fresno
- Combative Spiritualism in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Leila May, North Carolina State University
Black Magic Woman: Christophine on Celluloid in John Duigan’s Film Adaptation of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Caron Knauer, LaGuardia Community College

18-20 April, 2012
Conference Identity, Migration and Diaspora: New Sexualities and Gender Identities
The Iberian Association for Cultural Studies
University of Málaga, Spain

- Lust and Sexuality in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Rhy’s (sic) Antoinette Mason., María José Coperías Aguilar, Universitat de València (Spain)
- Sexuality and Gender Identity in Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea, Lucía García Magaldi, Universidad de Córdoba.

March 22-25, 2012

INCS 2012:  Picturing the Nineteenth Century
University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY



- Still Life: The Ethics of Absorption in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Elisha Cohn, Cornell University
- Who I am, I Left Behind: The Buried Artist in Jane Eyre, Carol MacKay, University of Texas at Austin
- Broadway’s ‘Jane! Jane!’: Victorian Feminism, Impressionism, and the Gothic in Jane Eyre:  The Musical, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, Louisiana State University
- Wuthering Heights, Landscape, and the Ideology of the Picturesque, Keya Kraft, Washington University

November 4-6, 2011
Hosted by Indiana State University
57th Annual Mid-West Conference on British Studies
Terre Haute, hosted by Indiana State University

- ‘I began to see’: Biblical Models of Disability in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Essaka Joshua, University of Notre Dame
- Sir Charles Bell, Jane Eyre, and a New System of ‘Natural Sympathy’, Rebecca Summerhays, Harvard University
- The Wife and the Widow: Coverture Law in Wuthering Heights and Middlemarch, Jennifer Swartz, Lake Erie College

11-14 August, 2011
NASSR 19th Annual Conference
Park City, Utah (co-hosted by Brigham Young University and the University of Utah)

Negotiating Gendered Capital in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda and Charlotte Brontë’s Juvenilia, Sara D. Nyffenegger, University of Zurich