Radical, Mimicry and Ideals

New scholar papers published in the last few weeks:

The Radical Politics of Wuthering Heights 
by Marisa Mercurio
Journal of Victorian Culture, March 25, 2020

In 1847, when Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights under the male pseudonym Ellis Bell, reviewers didn’t quite know what to make of it. Many were dismissive and a handful recognized it as a work of genius, but all were baffled.

The Kingdom Where Nobody Dies: Shirley’s Caroline Helstone and the Mimicry of Childhood Collaboration
Richardson, Ann-Marie (2019)
The University of Liverpool, UK
English Literature, 6, 15-32.

Abstract This essay explores Charlotte Brontë’s 1849 novel Shirley as a literary endeavour to recreate the sibling dynamic of the Brontës’ childhoods, and the psychological
effect of being the ‘surviving’ sibling of a formally collaborative unit. In their adolescent
years, the Brontës famously forged fictional kingdoms together, known collectively as
“The Glass Town Saga”. Throughout adulthood, each Brontë continuously returned to
these stories, oftentimes due to nostalgia and occasionally for creative reinvention. However, by the summer of 1849, their familial collaboration was at an end. Charlotte was
the last sibling standing, having lost all her co-authors in the space of nine months. In
despair, as a form of catharsis, she turned to her writing and this essay will focus on how
protagonist Caroline Helstone became an elegy for both Branwell and Anne Brontë. Mere weeks before Charlotte began volume 1 of Shirley, Branwell was determined to return to a heroine created in his childhood, also named “Caroline (1836)”. This juvenilia piece explores themes of waning sibling connections, death and heartbreak – issues which tormented Branwell and Charlotte throughout his prolonged final illness. Yet Caroline Helstone’s ethereal femininity and infantilization mirrors Anne Brontë’s reputation as the ‘obedient’ sibling, as well as the views expressed in her semi-autobiographical novels Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)

Cultural Ideals versus Woman’s Passion: A textual analysis of Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011)
by Tecla González Hortigüela and Eva Parrondo Coppel
Área Abierta. Revista de comunicación audiovisual y publicitaria 20 (1), 95-121

The hypothesis we put forward in this paper is that in the reworking of the novel Jane Eyre by   Charlotte Brontë (1847), the film’s screenwriter Moira Buffini and filmmaker Cary Fukunaga do two things: first,    they recover and highlight the interweaving between violence and sexuality that characterizes literary and cinematographic stories belonging to the female Gothic genre. Secondly, through their screenwriting and directorial adaptation, they update that genre, insofar as they deepen in the structural opposition between cultural ideals on the one hand, such as female purity or women’s independence and, on the other, the passionate heterosexual desire of some women