Ideology and Femininity

New examples of recent Brontë-related scholar works:

Ideology and Femininity in Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Sarah Bliss

Honors Thesis Spring 2021, Florida Southern College

Between 1847 and 1848, the literary market of Victorian England convulsed under the influence of two novels from previously unknown authors: Currer Bell’s Jane Eyre and Ellis Bell’s Wuthering Heights. Known to a slightly smaller number was a novel by a third Bell: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Acton Bell. Despite the authors’ relative obscurity, these novels quickly drew popular attention—and incited controversy.

Wide Sargasso Sea, Rhys' Reading of Jane Eyre
Mostafa Bagheri, Issa Soleymani 
Research in Contemporary World Literature (Iran), 2021

Generally, when studying texts, reference to other texts is obligatory and this is what intertextuality and the interconnectedness of texts means. One example is Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, influenced by Brontë’s Jane Eyre, though Rhys with her twentieth century point of view has created a new world. David Herman knows the creation of this new world as the result of Rhys’ use of “weighing” technique based on which the occurrences of Jane Eyre’s exist in Wide Sargasso Sea, but Rhys’ point of view for evaluating the occurrences differs and the result becomes Wide Sargasso Sea. Wolfgang Iser believes that, while reading a literary text, the reader provides the parts not provided by the author. The present article, by referring to Rhys’ reading of Jane Eyre and her providing needed information not brought by the author, attends to the creation of Wide Sargasso Sea and Rhys’s weighing of Jane Eyre’s occurrences.