Gendering Madness and Death in Victorian Literature

Two more  recently published papers:

Gendering Madness and Doubling Disability in Jane Eyre

Sunanda Sinha

The Grove - Working Papers on English Studies, 28, 111–126 (2021)

Jane Eyre has a well-designed structure of a bildungsroman that focuses on the pursuit of Jane’s desire and ignores the same for Bertha. The conceptual structure conveys a linear discourse to determine a prefixed understanding of Bertha, Jane, and Rochester. In Bertha’s context, the bildungsroman operates to deliver issues of race, gender, and disability in an existential quest to ascertain and establish her madness. There is a well-designed structural correspondence of bildungsroman, interplay of dark and light binary, the desire of Jane against the asexual Bertha, and the metaphor of fire in mapping the doubling. The literary devices serve as a dominant metaphorical barrier to normalcy in Thornfield. The paper considers this authorial viewpoint on Bertha’s sickness as a construct of a parallel gendered and a more potent conceptualisation of madness. In problematising madness, the paper argues a cultural narrative of representation that is affected by the impaired mind of Bertha. It will interrogate how the narrative systematically forges a doubling within which she is objectified, influenced, muted, bounded and characteristically disabled. 

The theme of Death in Victorian and Modernist Literature: a comparison between the poetry of Emily Brontë and D.H. Lawrence
Giuseppe Giordano

International Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Studies, Volume 3; Issue 6; Nov-Dec 2021; Page No. 13-16

In poetry, fiction, and drama, death is considered as a central theme commonly used to elicit an emotional response in the reader or audience. Death often refers to the end of life and is frequently related to a loss and to emotional reactions such as mourning and sadness. In the Victorian age, death has been often the interest of writers and poets with a particular
emphasis on the emotional aspects while in Modernism the depiction of death is less sentimental and more concrete and factual. This paper is a discussion of the differences between the representation of death in Victorian and Modernist poetry in relation to two poems that deal with death: A Death-Scene by Emily Brontë and A Woman and Her Dead Husband by D.H. Lawrence. The language adopted by the authors, the structure and rhyming arrangement of the poems, the contrasting use of imagery and figures of speech as well as the different approach to the representation of death are widely discussed.