Charlotte and Esther

 Inspired by an article from the latest issue of Brontë Studies, Jewish News Syndicate tells how 'Throughout her career, novelist Charlotte Brontë drew on ‘Book of Esther’'.

Brontë had “a prolonged intertextual relationship with the ‘Book of Esther’” throughout her career, reaching a peak in her 1853 novel Villette, Channah Damatov, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Bar-Ilan University, wrote on March 15 in the journal Brontë Studies.

Considering Brontë’s writings in light of both the persecution of women and Jews, Damatov studies the ways that “Brontë uses the biblical story to address sexism and xenophobia with a triply disadvantaged Esther figure in Lucy Snowe.”

“Villette thus offers one of the first proto-feminist, intersectional readings of Vashti and Esther, setting the stage for more emphatic female-authored exegesis to champion Vashti and Esther as paragons of action against oppression,” Damatov writes. “In this sense, Brontë’s approach to the ‘Book of Esther’ as a source text for her unique brand of fictionalized proto-feminism and social criticism is an as yet unrecognized pioneer of such hermeneutics.”

The daughter of an Anglican Christian clergyman, Brontë “held the Bible close—and in her vocation as a writer, she held the ‘Book of Esther’ even closer,” according to Damatov, who notes that Branwell Brontë painted a scene depicting Queen Esther when his sister, the writer, was 14. The work was prominently displayed in the parish.

“That she was meditating on the ‘Book of Esther’ throughout her career, there can be no doubt; its figures—from Vashti’s mutinous, dramatic and tragic character to Esther’s demure, strategic and successfully heroic one, and from Ahasuerus’s egoistic self-service to Haman’s vindictive power-hunger—serve Brontë well,” Damatov writes. [...]

In Brontë’s most famous novel, she writes the biblical book directly into a dialogue between Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester, who reference the biblical King Ahasuerus’s repeated offers to Esther of “half of my kingdom.”

“‘Jane Eyre’ demonstrates a stronger take on Queen Esther, as someone who has a refined sense of right and wrong and exercises greater choice based on her conscience, and against her self-interest,” Damatov writes. “Brontë offers an overt window into her reappropriation when Mr. Rochester, eager to secure the novel’s heroine as his wife, presses the wary Jane to make her request and says, ‘Utter it, Jane: but I wish that instead of a mere inquiry into, perhaps, a secret, it was a wish for half my estate.’” [...]

Damatov concludes that Brontë is one of the first writers to interpret the story of Esther “with an eye for its treatment of women and the national—religious minority, the ‘other,’ in tandem.”

Brontë’s and her characters’ words, and perhaps Esther’s, too, “will live on to give her readers the courage to defy gender expectations,” she adds, “and pursue a daring outer life that reflects their own inner will.”

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