A couple of new scholar papers appearing in
English Studies:
Reading Polly Teale’s Dog Women in After Mrs Rochester and Brontë
Sue Thomas
English Studies, 01 Dec 2020
Playwright and director Polly Teale’s biodramas After Mrs Rochester (2003) and Brontë (2005) boldly feature dog women to embody the psychological shadows of Jean Rhys and Charlotte Brontë respectively. In developing the figures Teale draws inspiration most explicitly from artist Dame Paula Rego’s Dog Woman series (1994) and Charlotte Brontë’s blurring of the species boundary human/animal in her representation of Bertha Mason Rochester in Jane Eyre (1847). The intersections between the aesthetics of Teale and Rego provide, I show, a critical frame within which to read their dog women. To weigh Teale’s treatment of her biographical subjects, intimacy and the relation between sexuality and writing I also draw out the scope of her engagement with canine images in Rhys’s fiction and a letter Brontë wrote to Constantin Héger.
English Studies Volume 101, 2020 - Issue 7, Pages 833-848
Patrick Brontë’s Winter-evening Thoughts (1810) is thought to have been published in response to a national day of fasting and humiliation held on 28 February 1810. The rhetoric of national humiliation which Brontë employs can also be detected in fast-day sermons and war poetry published during the Peninsular War (1808–1814). This essay argues that the annual, systematic practice of national fast days throughout the Napoleonic Wars encouraged schematic modes of imagining and representing war. Literary traces of this ideological framework of nationalism are evident in the use of particular rhetorical devices which connect individual and nation, and language that is often biblical or eschatological. By highlighting these devices in a period that was thoroughly immersed in the ideology and practice of national humiliation, this essay expands on existing scholarship of national humiliation and Romantic literature with the aim of facilitating textual analysis in other periods in which national humiliation has been practiced.
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