Madwomen and Masculinity

Today, a paper and a recent thesis:

From a Madwoman in the Attic to a Fairy Land: A Conversation with Antoinette in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea
Prasenjit Panda
International Journal of Cognitive and Language Sciences Vol:4, No:10, 2017

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, a prequel to Brontë’s Jane Eyre, explores the history of the other and gives voices to the people who were silenced and kept under the darkness of negation and denial for a long time. Jean Wide Sargasso Sea provides an alternative understanding of Charlotte Brontë’s mad Creole woman, i.e., Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre in the postcolonial context. Rhys transforms Charlotte Brontë’s Victorian romance into a realistic narrative. In doing so, she re-reads Bertha as Antoinette, the unspeakable figure of otherness, into an unnameable self, and creates a new stage for the inner self. She in the novel is no longer a lunatic heiress in Rochester’s attic rather in this novel she finds her fantasy, dream and most importantly, voice. Rhys peeps through the character of Antoinette through her fragmented memories, dreams, and identity. Antoinette’s identity is mutilated constantly in the conflicts between colonizers and colonized, male and female, black and white. We shall use postcolonial theories like Bhaba’s hybridity and third space as a methodology to reveal the dialectics of struggle of a doubly colonized woman.We shall see that Bertha Mason was neglected by Brontë because of her madness and was locked in the Rochester’s Attic, but here Rhys beautifully converts her madness as a language of Antoinette, a language for her protest, a language for her liberation, a language for her dreams. In this present paper, we shall try to show how Antoinette tries to free her soul and body from the clutches of her multiple existences, identity, and narratives.

The Brontës and masculinityErin Nyborg
University of Oxford, 2016

This is the first comprehensive study of the Brontës' representations of masculinity. In it, I analyse the ways this family of writers depicted forms of masculinity as they developed from late-Romantic child writers to mature novelists and poets of the Victorian period. My chief concern is to situate the Brontës within the historical period of 1829-1855, from Charlotte's first Glass Town stories to the time of her death. This thesis examines the Brontë siblings' complete body of work, including Branwell's contributions to the Angrian saga, Emily's and Anne's Gondal poetry, and Charlotte's and Emily's Belgian devoirs. In undertaking this work, I model my approach on Heather Glen's precise, historical readings in Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History (2002), as well as John Tosh's social historical examination of Victorian masculinity, particularly in A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home (1999).
This study examines representations of masculinity in the modes of cultural production the Brontës were exposed to: contemporary periodicals, poetry, fiction, domestic handbooks, gift books, educational texts, clerical and medical handbooks, and labour management treatises. I track the Brontës' various engagements with and revisions of Byronic and Carlylean forms of masculinity, as well as the rise and fall of the silver fork dandy and the emergence of both the Victorian self-made man and the new professional.
This study considers how the Brontës' representations of gender formation were affected by different modes of familial literary production and collaboration. Though the Brontës shared their creative works from a young age and grew up within the same domestic literary culture, the siblings' depictions of masculinity diverge, and each sister situates herself within various cultural contexts relating, for example, to child-rearing, romance, and professional conduct. My thesis is organised thematically, with chapters examining heroic, domestic, and professional representations of masculinity in the Brontës' works.