Reading but not eating on the Spanish Stage

New Brontë-related scholar research:

Jane Eyre On the Nineteenth-Century Spanish Stage: Intertextuality and Adaptation in Francisco Morera's Version of Charlotte Brontë's novel
by SM Calzada
Odisea nº 17: Revista de estudios ingleses, 2017

Abstract:
This paper examines Francisco Morera's Juana Eyre (1869), a stage  version of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre which can be regarded as the first significant  evidence of works by the Brontë sisters appearing in Spain. Morera's text is based on the French stage version by Lefèvre and Royer (1855), which was, in turn, inspired by the German adaptation by Birch-Pfeiffer. The Spanish adaptor creates a conservative rewriting of Jane Eyre and introduces relevant changes in Bertha Mason's storyline in order to eliminate the elements that would challenge the moral conventions of the time.

Reading (not-)eating in the works of Emily and Charlotte Brontë
by Sarah Pearce
Outskirts: feminisms along the edge. 2017, Vol. 36, p1-21. 21p.

Abstract:
This paper offers a contemporary feminist reading of the cluster of themes surrounding consumption and food in Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853) by Charlotte Brontë, and Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë. I explore key textual episodes of (not-)eating in light of contemporary feminist theory on women, food, the body, eating disorders and food refusal throughout history. In order to explore issues surrounding female food refusal, I look to those periods of history in which female fasting (or anorexia) was particularly prevalent, such as the early medieval period and the nineteenth-, twentieth-and twenty-first-centuries. In so doing, I highlight an array of significant issues relating to women and food: the pervasive and to some extent a-historical cultural perception of female appetite as 'bad' and dangerous; adherence to nineteenth century codes of femininity; the attempt to gain control through food refusal; the physical expression of psychic states in the absence of a heard voice; and the potentially subversive or rebellious nature of female starvation and wasting. In much the same way that nineteenth century conceptions of femininity were partly defined by the paradox of the angel and the monster or whore, the act of food refusal is also defined by paradoxical gestures toward both acquiescence and rebellion. Therefore, I propose a need to counter traditional readings and thus de-story, or re-story, these texts by allowing these textual female bodies, as they refuse food and waste away, to make multiple, simultaneous, metaphorical and literal, paradoxical gestures.