Brontë Studies. Volume 40, Issue 3

The new issue of Brontë Studies (Volume 40, Issue 3, September 2015) is already available online. We provide you with the table of contents and abstracts:

Editorial
pp. iii-iv Author: Adams, Amber M.

The Problem of Rendering Psychological Content in V. Vladimirov’s Translation of Jane Eyre (1893)
pp. 181-186   Author:    Syskina, Anna A.; Kiselev, Vitaly S.
Abstract:
The article focuses on the ways in which V. D. Vladimirov’s translation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, modifies her artistic method and genre. In 1893 the St Petersburg Publishing House, M. M. Lederle, published a full translation of the novel by V. D. Vladimirov which was well received by critics. It was 590 pages long and divided by the translator into two parts, though the original text consisted of three volumes each numbered afresh. Vladimirov apparently consulted Irinarkh Vvedensky’s translation and was influenced by it, but despite this fact he made his translation closer to the original text. He fitted his translation to the genre of mature psychological realism and balanced it between the traditions of Victorian autobiographical and Russian educational novels. The features of subjectivity and originally romantic emotional excess were smoothed over by the translator, but the general centripetal structure of the novel was retained. The psychological image of Jane Eyre was transformed as well, becoming strongly motivated in comparison to the previous images of Irinarkh Vvedensky, Sofya Koshlakova and Dmitry Mansfeld and closer to the original version.

Sibling Collaboration and Literary After-life: The Case of the Brontës
pp. 187-200   Author:  Malfait, Olivia ; Demoor, Marysa
Abstract:
This article argues that Charlotte Brontë effected a thorough mediation of Emily Brontë’s authorial image after her death by becoming her sister’s editor. For the 1850 edition of Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, Charlotte extensively edited Emily’s poetry and wrote an influential ‘Biographical Notice’ and ‘Preface’. She also composed new lines for some of the poems, establishing herself as a true co-author of her sister’s work. Her purpose, as this article argues, was to soften the ‘coarse’, masculine image that the critics’ reviews had attributed to the writer of Wuthering Heights. Thus, Charlotte created the image of a more innocent, female poet, in a deliberate (?) attempt to replace the existing view of Emily as a rough, unfeminine writer.

Charlotte Brontë’s Fictional Epistles
pp. 201-214      Author: Earnshaw, Steven
Abstract:
Charlotte Brontë’s Villette is notable for its engagement with epistolarity. In particular, its ending finally resolves issues that the author has wrestled with throughout her fictional work and in some real-world correspondence. By bringing the reader’s attention to the ontology of letters, Villette is able to foreground the primacy of writing, and to proffer it as a potential bridge between souls, as well as showing how the physical world is transcended by means of this ontology.

‘I am the picture of Aunt Ginevra’: Marriage Plotting, Sub-Plotting and the Spectacle of Beauty in Villette’s Economy of Female Worth
pp. 215-228      Author: Ioannou, Maria
Abstract:
This article examines the marriage sub-plots in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (especially the sub-plot concerning Paulina Home’s parents) to argue that they operate as an indicator of the forms of female rebellion the novel is prepared to endorse. Marriage plotting and sub-plotting in Villette have gone unnoticed by critics for the way they problematize ideas about women’s freedom and acceptable feminine behaviour. In Villette’s economy of female worth, only a specific type of woman is allowed to rebel, the woman who is also unconventional in appearance. Women with the conventional feminine appearance are lauded if they comply, and condemned if they do not. Marriage plotting and sub-plotting in Villette reveal the insidious way(s) in which stories between women are used in order to achieve female discipline.

House and Home in Wuthering Heights
pp. 229-239     Author: Tytler, Graeme
Abstract:
Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange constitute the principal settings of events and actions taking place in Emily Brontë’s novel. Both houses are interesting not only for making a strong physical impression on the reader, partly through numerous references to their interiors, their outbuildings and their grounds, but for serving as means of throwing light on Heathcliff, Edgar Linton and Hindley Earnshaw, especially as owners and masters of those properties. But at the same time as Emily suggests here and there in the narrative how close is the link between the concept of the house and that of the home, she touches on a central theme of her book, namely, nostalgia and homesickness, and that chiefly through her presentation of Lockwood, Isabella and the elder Catherine. It is, however, through her portrayal of the second Catherine that house and home have been most poetically fused in this fictional masterpiece.

‘No net ensnares me’: Bird Imagery and the Dynamics of Dominance and Submission in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
pp. 240-251     Author: Anderson, Kathleen; Lawrence, Heather R.
Abstract:
The word ‘bird’ occurs over thirty times in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, in which the motif effectively delineates the heroine’s personal growth within a succession of oppressive contexts and her developing connection with Mr Rochester. The kindred spirits are drawn to each other’s distinctive blend of individual strength with an intense attachment to the other that manifests their emotional interdependency. The novel’s bird imagery vividly captures the phases and influences in Jane’s development and in her conflicted relationship with Rochester.

The Sinister Menagerie: Animality and Antipathy in Wuthering Heights
pp. 252-262     Author: Cooper, Isabella
Abstract:
Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights avoids the devices which have traditionally been seen as functioning in novels to invoke sympathy, even basic character identification. Wuthering Heights is an antipathetic novel in this sense: Emily Brontë refuses to awaken the capacity for sympathetic identification in her readers. Moreover, her novel destabilizes the idea of a common ‘human nature’ which sets mankind apart from animal nature. Her animalizing language undermines the singularity of ‘the Human’ as a unitary concept. There is in Wuthering Heights such variety within human nature that there is no fundamental common essence to human beings, no ‘human nature’ at all, in which sympathy as traditionally understood can take root.

Reviews
pp. 263-268