Angels of the Home and the return of the Dionysian

A new Brontë-related article: 

Ángeles del hogar y el retorno de lo dionisíaco sobre relecturas y transposiciones de Jane Eyre
María Luz Revelli, Universidad Nacional de Río Cuarto
Revista académica liLETRAd, ISSN 2444-7439, Nº. 8, 1, 2024 (VI Jornadas Internacionales y el II Congreso Internacional de Literatura y Medios Audiovisuales en Lenguas Extranjeras: En homenaje a Samuel Beckett), págs. 311-323

More than 150 years after its first publication, the stereotypes encapsulated in the characters of Jane Eyre and Bertha Mason in the canonical novel Jane Eyre (Brontë, 1847) continue to operate in the Anglophone tradition and beyond it. Victorian novels in general “tend to perpetuate extreme and debilitating images of women as angels or monsters” (Gilbert & Gubar, 1979, p. 68), which continue to be evoked and reinterpreted. In an understanding of adaptation as repetition without replication (Hutcheon, 2006) the ways of being a woman enabled in contemporary rewritings pave the way to question more than the past; they allow the reflection on what survives and how it is resignified from the present. From a Warburgian logic, what survives a culture is “the most repressed, the most obscure, the most distant, and the most tenacious (…) the most deeply buried and the most phantasmal; but equally the most living, because the most moving, the closest, and the most impulsive and instinctual (Didi-huberman, 2017, p. 91). Our objective is then to retrace the monstrous woman constructed in Brontë’s novel and her (de)/(re)construction in the twentieth century in the surviving images of Bertha Mason in Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys, 1966) and the feature film of the same name directed by John Duigan (1993).