Feminist Poetics, Resistance, Jealousy and Rebecca

Recent Brontë scholar work:

Negation, Selection and Substitution: Charlotte Brontë's Feminist Poetics
Sadiq Ebtisam
English studies A. 2012, vol. 93, n° 7, pp. 833-857 [25 pages]
This article examines an early dramatic monologue by Charlotte Brontë and finds that Brontë pre-dates Victorian women poets in use of the form. Her early practice makes her a contemporary of Robert Browning and gives her precedence over Alfred Tennyson. The study investigates both how Brontë developed the form and why she introduced it into poetry. Without denying her childhood training in depiction of fictional figures, the findings point in the direction of Brontë's readings in seventeenth-century drama and her earlier writing of a short play as a more directly relevant background that made the monologue possible. Her personal motive for using it in poetry is initially a reaction to Robert Southey's discouraging response to her experience of poetry writing. The poem complains of literary marginalisation and asserts female poetic potentials. It embodies Brontë's culturally forbidden dream in an objective manner. However, the dramatic form proves to be more than a personal mask. It allows Brontë to contradict Romantic ideology and challenge patriarchal culture. Brontë's experience with the dramatic monologue in this poem on both formal and contextual levels should grant her better recognition in the poetic canon than that assigned to her so far.

Jane Eyre fait de la résistance
Claire Bazin
Cahiers victoriens & édouardiens, 2012, no75, [Note(s): 31-39 [11 p.]]

"Speak I must; I had been trodden on severely and must turn". It is with these unspoken but no less eloquent words that Jane starts attacking her baffled aunt, who is not used to being addressed in this way by one who is usually obedient and silent. The scene, which follows the incarceration in the red room and Brocklehurst's visit, can be read as a "Vindication of the rights of Jane" and also as both a metamorphosis and a reversal: Jane is out of herself and rebels against the enemy who gradually turns into a powerless child, ready to cry, unable to recognize this new Jane whom she vainly tries to propitiate. If Jane comes out victorious from this verbal confrontation, her triumph has a bitter after-taste and her previous exaltation is followed by a kind of depression, which is often the case with her. I propose to study this emblematic scene firstly by following three axes: a double metamorphosis where Jane defeats Mrs. Reed who loses her composure, in a spectacular reversal of roles, and then by analysing Jane's ensuing inner monologue, where the narrator's I takes over from the character's in this splitting of the narrative voice that is common to both novelistic and fictitious autobiographical forms.

Emily Brontë's Heathcliff: His Journey of Jealousy
Kitty Carlisle
The Explicator, Volume 70, Issue 1, pp 46-48, 2012

Echoes in Gothic Romance: Stylistic Similarities Between Jane Eyre and Rebecca
Stephanie Haddad
Student Pulse, 2012, Volume 4, Issue 11 pp 1-4

When Daphne DuMaurier's acclaimed Gothic romance novel Rebecca debuted in 1938, it was devoured by the female readers of its day. Ultimately, however, criticisms of DuMaurier's most famous novel were quick to point out its irrefutable resemblance to another Gothic romance novel written nearly 100 years prior: Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). Whether it was intentional or not, DuMaurier never commented on the novels' similarities, but the evidence speaks for itself, extending far beyond heroines and plotlines.