New Brontë-related (and quite different) research:
Jane Eyre, Identified
Yung-Hsing Wu
Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History
Vol. 9, No. 1 (2017), pp. 82-86
Jane Eyre has long been held up as a novel from which feminist literary criticism in its early days learned how to read. This article suggests that intense identifications gave this emergent critical practice the momentum it needed to integrate textual and political thinking.
Psychocriminological and medicolegal considerations on Wuthering Heights: a story of passion, paranoia and perversity?
Bénézech M. Ann. Med. Psychol. (Paris) 2017; 175(1): 23-30.
Abstract
In a criminological and forensic perspective, the author first presents the main biographical data concerning Emily Bronte and summarizes the plot of her famous novel, Wuthering Heights (1847). He then discusses the following: assault and battery, kidnapping and unlawful detention, the state of corpses, violations of burial sites, and other issues. In analysing the reciprocal passion that burns between Catherine and Heathcliff, the author reveals the latter to be suffering from a serious personality disorder with paranoid, borderline and antisocial features associated with depressive and sadistic evil tendencies. This former vagabond, who becomes the "master" of two patrician families in order to gain revenge, presents several characteristics of dangerousness, and it is surprising that he did not kill Catherine and/or her husband Edgar. The absence of sexual relations between the two lovers, who were childhood friends, probably played an important role in preventing him from perpetrating the act of murder. Unable to accept the separation from Catherine (marriage and death of the latter), Heathcliff allows himself to die so that he can be buried next to her and finally attain an absolute amorous relationship with the object of his passion.
« She made mouths at me instead of speaking » : Marie Broc, l’idiote de Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853)
Isabelle Hervouet-Farrar
L'Atelier, Vol. 9, No 1 (2017)
Villette (Charlotte Brontë, 1853) examines the dialectics of the time that Lucy Snowe, the narrator-protagonist, and Marie Broc, a retarded child, spend together at the boarding school. Marie Broc is a peripheral figure because of her location on the margins in the diegesis (the boarding-school where young girls are groomed to become accomplished young ladies) but also in terms of the novel itself since she is only a transient character. Her transience is however belied by the key significance of the section in which she appears, which ends with Lucy’s physical and mental collapse.
Marie Broc is a specular image of Lucy and her apathy reflects the stasis that threatens Lucy’s progress and Bildung. When read in the light of Julia Kristeva’s discussion on abjection, Marie Broc’s inertness mirrors the terrible consequences of failing to categorize the mother as other and the attending impossibility of emerging as individualised. Marie Broc’s idiolect (“she made mouths at me instead of speaking”) engages with Kristeva’s “semiotic” and draws critical attention to the permanence of the mother-child dyad. The cathartic dimension of the character is assessed against Lucy’s other engagements with the abject, and this brief episode may be better understood within the context of the various threats of annihilation that Lucy must grapple with.
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