A Brontë-related paper published in a French journal:
Guillaume Braquet
Leaves, 10(19) (2024)
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens's Great Expectations are nineteenth-century English Bildungsromane that present a tension between future and memory. As these coming-of-age novels trace the protagonist's progression toward a fulfilled identity and social integration, they are underpinned by a teleological structure. However, as these works also adopt an autobiographical form, they depend on memory, which is essential for relating a series of events supposedly experienced in a first-person narrative. In these retrospective texts, memory itself seems questioned and hindered by the main character's orphan condition. The way memory is hindered manifests itself from the beginning of the novels, as the orphans, grappling with fragments of memory, rely on objects of memory. A double constraint then weighs on the memory object, since it is the starting point of the narrative, which it precedes and authorizes. Yet, while doing so, the memory object is itself reconstructed by the text. To address this contradictory state of affairs, this article first focuses on the seemingly incompatible functions of the memory object, which is both an authoritative pre-text and a textual reconstruction. This tendency toward reconstruction also affects the subject, made object, in a process mixing remembrance and self-formation. Finally, the study addresses how the protagonist's progression paradoxically proceeds from the past since Jane and Pip must deal with memory objects and integrate them into the narrative of their lives.
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