Manual and Mindreading Matters

A Touch of the Hand. Manual Intercourse in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Kimberly Cox
Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 72 No. 2, September 2017; (pp. 161-191)

Characters in the works of Anne Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker communicated their passions, reciprocated desires, and negotiated the power dynamics of their social and romantic relationships through their hands. Despite the recent work on Victorian hand studies, little attention has been paid to such moments when characters’ hands touch. This essay introduces the term “manual intercourse” as a way of referring to all literary depictions of tactile encounters (whether handshakes, caresses, uninvited grasps, or other accidental manual interactions) while acknowledging the silent, embodied communication and exchange inherent in such moments of physical connection. Taking Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) as an example par excellence, this essay explores how reading a novel through characters’ manual intercourse opens new ways of understanding and interpreting intense moments of emotional intimacy that language fails to represent adequately. Since emotions can be communicated through the quality, pressure, duration, and circumstance of a touch, manual intercourse in such novels allows for the possibility of excess sentiment that cannot be simply expressed through speech. Further, though nineteenth-century etiquette books dedicated entire sections to delineating types of handshakes acceptable in certain social situations, this essay suggests that some Victorian novelists challenged traditional gender ideology and the power structures inherent in it through representations of manual intercourse that either adhere to or deviate from traditional handshake etiquette.

Mindreading matters: A study of Jane Eyre and Emma, in search of empathic response in the narrative, through theory of mind, for the purpose of scaffolding
Holm, Stina
Linnaeus University, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Department of Languages.
2017 (English)
Independent thesis Advanced level

The aim of this study is to use a cognitive approach to analyse two novels that are considered to be part of the British literary canon: Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë and Emma (1816) by Jane Austen. The study aims to utilise close reading and thematic analysis of human emotion. The themes are as follows: the fear of losing a loved one, morals and values in relation to love and marriage, and feelings of disgust, aversion, antipathy and shame. Quotations from each novel are analysed with the theoretical framework of “theory of mind” and placed within the emotional frame of the thematic analysis. The aim of this is to provide possible scaffolding for learners of English as a foreign language, in an attempt to make canonised literature more easily accessible. Scaffolding may be needed for Swedish EFL learners to overcome the language barrier presented in literature from the 19th century. Further benefits of emotional scaffolding conform to requests of the Swedish Agency of Education and the Curriculum’s demands that education be conducted in such a way as to promote empathy, compassion and understanding for fellow humans.
The analysis shows that strong emotional connection in the novels provide ample opportunity to analyse readers’ possible empathetic response, thus resulting in the opportunity for these responses to serve as scaffolding as well as an opportunity to improve empathetic ability.