Dislocation, Abolition and Translation

Recent Brontë-related scholar works:

Poetics of Dislocation: Comparative Cosmopolitanism in Charlotte Brontë, Flora Tristan, and Toru Dutt
Author: Jagannathan, Meera
University of Houston
2018

This thesis explores three women writers from nineteenth-century, who used the genre of autofiction to transcribe their familial trauma and dislocation to reconstitute themselves with the help of their empathic readers. Charlotte Brontë's novels, Jane Eyre and Villette, Flora Tristan's memoir from her travels to Peru, Pérégrinations d'une paria, and Toru Dutt's novella, Le journal de Mlle d'Arvers are the focus of this study. Brontë's heroines, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, Tristan's champion of the oppressed, "the pariah," and Dutt's heroine, Marguerite, are auto-portraits of the women writers themselves. The protagonists articulate their trauma through an aesthetic of wounding, which effectively transfers the burden of testimony onto the readers. Their narrative strategies rely on narration and transference for what Freud calls an "abreaction," or working through. This transference conscripts and coopts the reader into becoming a collaborator of their autofiction. Reading these three writers together offers the reader a unique opportunity to read particular moments in nineteenth-century Europe as experienced by both the metropolitan and the colonized. They were deracinated from their own communities, which made them cosmopolitan by default. Their travels to distant places mark them as exiles, but at the same time the new geographic spaces reorder their interior worlds and helped them comprehend the disenfranchised other. It is evident when reading their letters that their traumas led them to become agents of change, particularly regarding the status of women in society. I study how their individual trauma led them o engage with the collective trauma of gender, which they effectively transfer to the empathic readers through their texts. I suggest that through their masked, textual selves, they transformed their intensely traumatic, idiosyncratic experiences into public battles about women's status in patriarchal societies.

Images of Race and the Influence of Abolition in Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights
Tolbert, Laura E.
The University of Alabama

Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s masterpieces, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, respectively, reflect the sisters’ life-long investment in the abolitionist movement. Despite being written over a decade post-abolition, the novels’ retrospective settings lend weight to the sisters’ usage of distinctive language associated with the rise of slavery in the British West Indies and the subsequent push for its elimination. This language, largely centered around the characters of Bertha Mason and Heathcliff, seems to support an antislavery stance on the part of the Brontë sisters. A conflict arises, however, when considering that Bertha and Heathcliff are raciallyOthered within the texts, and their aggressive and immoral behavior does nothing to redeem or flatter their characters. Indeed, the language in both Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights leave the novels supporting the antislavery discourse of the early nineteenth century while also unsympathetically portraying stereotypical and derogatory representations of racially-Othered individuals. The Brontës’ antislavery sentiments, it seems, are not necessarily free of racial prejudice, but neither is the abolitionist rhetoric that influenced the novels. This project draws upon historical context to trace the major developments in abolition into the nineteenth century, including various sides of the debate and how rural areas throughout England influenced how the movement came to be organized on a national level. Furthermore, biographical information on the Brontës helps contextualize their personal involvement in the abolitionist movement, while an analysis of select works from their juvenilia shows how their knowledge of the movement inspired their writings from an early age. This background lays the foundation for a reading of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights that details how the conflicting sentiments of these novels are ultimately indicative of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s awareness and participation in the abolitionist movement.

"Jane Eyre". Problemas de traducción de la novela romántica inglesa 
Casadesús Hernández, Cristina
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Facultat de Traducció i d'Interpretació
2017

Analysis and comparison based on two different translations (one from Juan G. de Luaces and the other one from Carmen Martín Gaite) from one of the most renowned works of the Victorian literature: Jane Eyre from Charlotte Brontë. Based on both translations, which date back to two really different periods and political situations, and taking different problems —both cultural and linguistic—, I have been able to appreciate and analyse the different translation options that each translator has chosen in each case, and I have tried to give an explanation and give the reason why the translator has made that choice. Once all the translation problems' examples, in which I have been working in this work have been analysed (sometimes well solved, but in other cases, not really), I have come to a final conclusion, which has turned to be pretty obvious and reasonable.