Canine Fidelity, Jets, Glass and Resistance

Recent Brontë-related scholar papers:

Branwell Brontë's ``Sonnet I. On Landseer's Painting-`The Shepherd's Cheif [sic] Mourner''' and Nineteenth-Century Images of Canine Fidelity
Taylor, S.B.
Victorians Institute Journal, 2011, Vol 39, pages 259-292

Relics and Death Culture in Wuthering Heights
Deborah Lutz
Novel, 2012, Vol 45, Number 3: 389-408

Heathcliff is in love with someone who has died. This love is steeped in the evangelical death culture of the time, particularly the treasuring of the physical manifestations of dying and the body: a reverence for relics. Understanding mortality—and, in fact, the love between Catherine and Heathcliff—in the novel means “reading” material, texture, the weight and heft of objects. Things, I argue, find animation through being touched, irradiated even, by death.

Adapting Victorian Novels: The Poetics of Glass in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
Monika Pietrzak-Franger
Adaptation, Vol 5, Issue 2, 268-273

Do the latest film adaptations of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s novels hint at an aesthetic turn with regard to contemporary adaptations of the Victorian era and literature? Are Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre (2011) and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights (2011) indicative of a transition in the perception of these texts, a transformation in our view on the long nineteenth century, and a metamorphosis of our relation to the Victorians? It seems that both films, which have been criticized for their ‘restraint,’ use the poetics of glass and rhetorics of window-scapes to evince the inner lives and passions of their characters. While this displacement may be responsible for the reviewers’ discontent with the films’ moderation, it also throws into relief our tastes and acquired notions of what an adaptation of a Victorian text should look like.

Jane Eyre fait de la résistance  (Jane stands up for her rights)
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.