Upsetting the Brute

Two new Brontë-related dissertations:

A Cat-And-Dog Combat: Upsetting the Brute in Wuthering Heights
Hanley Cardozo, Kristen Marie

University of California, Davis, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2021

Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s only novel, adapts the tropes of slave narrative to construct a schema of animalized humanity. By reading Wuthering Heights as a novel about slavery, not just as a novel onto which a reading of slavery can be projected, this thesis proposes a Wuthering Heights in which the greatest sin is seeking to deny one’s own beastliness by animalizing others. Brontë’s animalized humans fall on a spectrum. On one end is the classic brute, a culturally dominant figure of the brutish laborer. At the other end of the spectrum is the British brute, a trope from slave narrative, in which humans lose their humanity by denying the humanity of those they wish to dominate. Heathcliff has often been seen as the singular brute figure in Wuthering Heights, but in fact, every character in the novel is multiply animalized, compared to, paired with, and otherwise associated with nonhuman life. By focusing on this spectrum of brutishness, the racialized nature of white characters is made visible, as is their tendency to deny their own animality. The novel makes a distinction between violence and cruelty. While violence can be cruel, cruelty is not always violent, and many of the characters often

viewed by readers, including Charlotte Brontë, as the novel’s least harmful, are cruel rather than violent. I examine the Earnshaws’ enslavement of Heathcliff over two generations, the Lintons’ attempts to distance themselves from the sources of their fortune, and the ways that the two estates function as plantation space and British soil. What emerges from this reading is a picture of greater moral complexity and entanglement with the afterlife of British slavery.

El realismo psicológico en la novela Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brontë

Vilema Cóndor, E.P.

Trabajo de Titulación modalidad Proyecto de Investigación presentado como requisito previo la obtención del Título de Licenciada en Ciencias de la Educación, Mención: Ciencias del Lenguaje y la Literatura], 2021

Universidad Central del Ecuador

The present research has as general objective to recognize the characteristics of psychological realism in the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, since, in this literary work, various narrative resources are used which allow both the author and the reader to delve into the thoughts, emotions and sensations of the characters, mainly in its two protagonists, Jane Eyre and Edward Rochester. For this purpose, first, the psychological realism will be defined and its characteristics will be established as well as its relationship with psychoanalysis and psychology. Later, the literary work will be analyzed, since in it, it can be appreciated a deep reflection on the woman’s condition in the English society of XIX century. Likewise, this work, apart from being a clearly psychological novel, it is also a psychosocial treaty about the conduct and nature of woman, duality, confinement, hope and femininity, for this reason, its analysis is important since it is one of the first works to deal with issues such as feminism and woman’s rights.