New Brontë papers

Three recent Brontë-related papers:

A Breath of Fresh Air: Eco-Consciousness in Mary Barton and Jane Eyre
Margaret S. Kennedy
Victorian Literature and Culture
Volume 45, Issue 3 September 2017 , pp. 509-526
Abstract
You can continue to thoughtlessly pollute, Ruskin warns his readers, but in so doing you will destroy the earth and end your own existence. Six years earlier, in 1865, Ruskin coined the term “dis-ease” to denote a clear link between ill-being and environmental detachment. He yoked physical and mental health, elucidating “[h]ow literally that word Dis-Ease, the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expressed the entire moral state of our English Industry and its Amusements!” (“Of Kings’ Treasuries” 282). For Ruskin, nineteenth-century mills and factories, despite promising consumer satisfaction, made comfort impossible by endlessly producing frivolous, disposable goods, and thus waste. This needless consumption, a symptom of industry, produced an ignorance of true needs. Dis-ease, mental and bodily discomfort, resulted from alienation from the ecosystem, the networks of dependence between all species, and that estrangement blinded human beings to their actual role in the environment. While Ruskin focused on urban toxicity, the toxic ideological separation between humans and their environment impacted all spaces, a concern that several Victorian writers raised decades earlier than he did. This article traces the salutary cultural anxiety over improper sanitation and contaminants in two popular mid-nineteenth-century novels that demonstrate the effects of anthropogenic pollution in urban and rural environments, respectively. Published almost exactly one year apart, both Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) invoke what I call eco-consciousness in their description of urban and rural filth, portrayed as both visible and invisible toxins. Gaskell uncovers urban pollution in plain sight, going beyond smell to expose the causes of toxicity, while Brontë challenges the belief in the country as a safe haven from pollution, going beyond beauty to expose rural toxicity. Characters suffer physical disease and mental dis-ease resulting from a poor understanding of ecological relationships. Reading Jane Eyre alongside Mary Barton accentuates Brontë’s use of eco-consciousness to expose the hidden dangers of rural pollution that resulted from the very types of urban toxicity that Gaskell identifies.

Beside Myself: Fantasy, Form, and Authorship in Jane Eyre
Miciah Hussey
Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature
Number 131 (Summer 2017)  pp. 26-41

This article examines the role of fantasy as both a psychic phenomenon and a part of the aesthetic process of writing in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Looking at moments where interior life is spatialized, it contends that moments of fantasy in the text signify the continual presence of Jane Eyre as author, shaping a narrative of selfhood.

Mooring Points: Manly Leaders, Trade, and Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
Deirdre Mikolajcik
Victorians: A Journal of Culture and Literature
Number 131 (Summer 2017)  pp. 57-67

This article focuses on the often demonized mill owner Robert Moore from Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. In her character Robert Moore, Brontë portrays a manly leader who is rooted in a particular Yorkshire locale, and who, by the end of the novel, is able to help the region recover from unemployment and threats of starvation. I consider how Moore is repeatedly conflated with the mill throughout the novel, primarily through the form (and arguably, formless-ness) of the novel and discrepancies in diegetic and narrative time and argue that the compression of time within Shirley is evocative of the way communities that come under capitalism experience a speeding-up of time, of the way that production is sped up because of technological innovations like the frames. Through Brontë’s use of time and gender in her notoriously plot-less novel, she is both recuperating factories and industrial capitalism, while advocating for the importance of a specifically English locale as a mooring point for England’s economy and economic leaders.