Castration, Moral Management and Self-Discovery

New scholar Brontë-related papers:

Pre- Oedipal Lucy Snowe: Isis Unbound Over Castrated Male Body
Onur Ekler
Electronic International Journal of Education, Arts, and Science,  Vol 1, No 1,  77-84 (2015)

Villette written by Charlotte Brontë is a journey of a woman called Lucy who absolves her ‘self’ of the representation of the Victorian ideals, which patriarchal authority always wished to impose on the woman in 19th century. This paper attempts to show the reader how Charlotte Brontë achieves to create pre- Oedipal female identity and the necessity of the physical or metaphorical death of the patriarch for the revolutionary change in woman’s social, economical standing in Victorian period. I will attempt to prove my argument in this paper basing a mythical analogy to Isis- Osiris myth and Nina Baym’s famous article The Madwoman and Her Languages.

Illegible Minds: Charlotte Brontë’s Early Writings and the Psychology of Moral Management in Jane Eyre and Villette
Beth Tressler
Studies in the Novel, Volume 47, Number 1, Spring 2015, pp. 1-19

This essay situates Charlotte Brontë’s novels Jane Eyre and Villette, along with her letters and unpublished poetry, within the nineteenth-century discourse of phrenology and moral management, exposing her ultimate critique of these popular theories as devices of power. Deriving from faculty psychology, both hinged upon self-regulation as a moral necessity, determined by the decipherability of the self. Brontë resisted this established relation between legibility and self-regulation, preferring a theory predicated upon her own developing concept of illegibility—a potentially limitless imaginative space. The majority of psychologists commonly associated any state of imaginative withdrawal with a lack of inner regulation and moral weakness leading to immorality and insanity. Brontë’s work shows how it is the unrelenting regulation of the imagination through incessant self-control that creates various forms of insanity and becomes ultimately devastating to the self, advocating instead the moral basis of a complex dialectic between self-control and ecstatic self-loss.

Lucy’s Quest for Self-discoveryKevser Ates
Electronic International Journal of Education, Arts, and Science,  Vol 1, No 1,  55-61 (2015)
This article aims to show the female narrator, Lucy Snowe’s self-discovery through her experiences in a patriarchal society from a feminist point of view. Through this courageous and unconventional female narrator, Charlotte Brontë questions her society’s expectations from women while also criticizing women’s willingness to obey the rules defined by men. The traditional characterizations of women and men consequently result in binary oppositions which give “reasonable” and “strong” men the right to control “emotional” and “weak” women. Lucy has to face a lot of difficulties as she does not accept to be guarded by any men. In this novel called Villette, refusing her traditionally assigned social, passive role, Lucy tries to create her own identity as an independent individual.