Reading for Growth and Vitalizing Power

New scholar Brontë research:

Epigenetic emergence: reading for growth in Jane Eyre
Anna Neill
Textual Practice, Pages 1-16 | Received 05 Mar 2017, Accepted 26 Jul 2017, Published online: 21 Dec 2017
DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2017.1417897 

Abstract
The potential for an intervention by epigenetics into cultural theory and literary analysis has been a topic of recent inquiry from several directions. However, these approaches sometimes too easily align epigenetics with the Lamarckian ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’, which presumes the direct influence of environment on the existence of particular traits across generations. This emphasis on environment in turn looks back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racial science that attributed degrees of civilisation or savagery to the combined influence of heredity and climate. By instead tracing epigenetics in the older concept of ‘epigenesis’ from Romantic biology, we can identify the interpretive role of the organism itself in the expression of inherited traits and in the mediation of environmental stimuli. An epigenetic reading of Jane Eyre identifies how Brontë uses the creative agency of the developing body to challenge the ‘genetic’ and environmental coordinates of racial anthropology. In so doing, she links imperial violence to domestic tyranny and protests against the injustice of both.

 A recent Ph.D. dissertation:

"The Violent Take It by Force": Heathcliff and the Vitalizing Power of Mayhem in Wuthering Heights
Jeff LeJeune
University of Louisiana at Lafayette, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë employs the character Heathcliff as both a real and mythic being in order to challenge class conventions in Victorian society. She shares this societal contention with other Victorian novelists, but where her contemporaries are typically realistic in their works, Brontë creates a concurrent mythic realm alongside the real in order to allow Heathcliff the space and license to be a Revenant, a symbol used in the folk tradition of the Scots, which I contend was a likely influence on Brontë’s work. Heathcliff’s real nature clashes with this symbolic one, especially when reality will not allow him to be with Catherine, the woman he loves. Her rejection of him serves two central purposes: 1) for the author to spotlight the arbitrary nature of the class system and the decisions individuals make inside it; and 2) for the author to provide a pivot point in the story at which she transforms Heathcliff from a real character to a mythic one. Heathcliff spends the latter half of the novel exacting redemptive punishment on all who have wronged him (and the marginalized he represents), including Catherine herself, a reality he struggles with because he still loves her despite her class-motivated marriage to the hated Edgar Linton. In the end, Heathcliff transgresses his symbolic purpose by going too far in punishing the innocent Hareton, at which point Bronte has him die as unceremoniously as she did Catherine earlier in the novel. Young Hareton and Cathy’s relationship is the fruit of the Revenant Heathcliff’s redeeming work, an ending that, for Bronte, seems to merge more than just the two houses; it seems to also reconcile divergent and conflicting ways of thinking inside the class system.