Diaries and Paintings and Brontëan Narrative

A new Spanish scholar publication with a couple of Brontë-related chapters:

Documentando la Memoria Cultural: Las Mujees en las (Auto)narraciones exocanónicas
Coords: Miriam Borham Puyal, Jorge Diego Sánchez y María Isabel García Pérez
Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca
ISBN: 978-84-1311-376-0

Diaries and Paintings on the Margins: Helen Graham’s Artistic Resistance to Abuse in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848)
by Marta Bernabeu

Cultural representations of the Brontë sisters generally favour Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). However, recent scholarship such as Samantha Ellis’ Take Courage: Anne Brontë and the Art of Life (2017) attempts to vindicate the revolutionary nature of the apparently most quiet and religious sister, as well as the modernity of her works, in particular The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Considered a proto-feminist text, The Tenant narrates the story of a woman, Helen Graham, who abandons her husband due to his ill-treatment of her and starts a new life as a painter with her infant son in a society that sees her as an outsider. Helen Graham’s story is especially significant because she progressively builds her determination and resistance from emotion by gathering her feelings in a diary and using them to find the agency to act upon her marginal situation. As Clementine Sykes points out, it is indeed through Helen’s account of her story that the reader comes across “the female’s realization of her own oppressed state”. What is more, Helen not only collects her emotions in her diary, but she also confronts them through her role as an artist, which also allows her to explore the possibility of independence from her husband and defend her position at the threshold of society. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to show the extent to which Helen’s role as an artist and a writer on the margins of society is key to the personal assessment of her affective life, allowing her to make a living outside her abusive marriage.

Study of the Brontëan Narrative: Approximation to the Psychological Dimension of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë
by Ana Pérez Porras

Emily Brontë (1818-1848) satisfies her desire for literary creation through the imaginary construction of fictional fiction. This study presents an analysis of the psychological dimension of the characters in the narrative of Wuthering Heights (1847). The novel portrays Catherine and Heathcliff’s passionate relationship, but it is a work with a deep psychological dimension. From this point of view, we will check several psychological states of the characters, including orphanhood, obsession and aggressiveness. The novel invites the psychological analysis of its characters, who show lack of affection and must face certain emotional conflicts and dissatisfied desires. Of all of them, Heathcliff, considered as the central axis of the story, is one of those who suffers the most from these states. Wuthering Heights (1847) describes a sadistic world, in which children, without the protection of their mothers, have to fight for their lives against adults. The behavior of the
characters shows us that they have an obsessive-compulsive personality, a disorder caused by the repression of their desires. In addition, these appear in the novel manifesting wild behavior, while on other occasions they appear as victims.