Quest for Home, Queerness and Justice

Scholar works in South Korea and BanglaDesh:

Displaced Women's Quest for Home in Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and The Woman of Color
Soyoun Kim
근대영미소설, Modern English and American Novels, Volume 25, Issue 2, pp.59-78 (2018)

Abstract
This article investigates the ways in which the marriage plots help to marginalize and isolate the biracial daughters of white colonizer and colored woman. While the three novels, Jane Eyre, Wide Sargasso Sea, and The Woman of Color, portray three women's journeys, only Jane Eyre recovers each home by inheriting money from her uncle. Jane's use of the slave-trope betrays the colonial mechanism that invades the invader and the invaded. Although Jane uses the rhetoric of a fugitive slave, she becomes a traveler who recovers home. By contrast, the mulatta characters fail to find a home after their fathers' country, being regarded as intruders though they are in fact invaded and suppressed by white people.

The Queerness of Fairytale Romance in Jane Eyre
Richard Bonfiglio
근대영미소설,, Modern English and American Novels, Volume 25, Issue 2, pp.5-24 (2018)

Abstract
Since its publication in 1847, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre has captured the imagination of reading audiences through its gripping romance combined with graphic depictions of violence against women. The novel draws its readers into a fairytale world in which a poor orphan girl discovers love and happiness with an aristocratic gentleman while also thrilling its audience with numerous episodes of betrayal and suffering. Recent criticism has addressed the problem of violence in the novel by stressing Jane’s intimate relationship with women as a means of overcoming patriarchal violence and achieving agency. This criticism has viewed Jane’s relationship with women as spanning from motherly and sisterly forms of nurture to more erotic expressions of same-sex desire which either downplay the novel’s heterosexual narrative or imagine female same-sex relationships as a model for Jane’s marriage to Rochester. This article builds on and complements these recent queer readings of the novel, but, rather than focusing on Jane’s same-sex intimacy with other women, I analyze the queerness at the center of the novel’s romance between Jane and Rochester. I argue that the novel’s extensive use of fairy tales introduces these mythical tropes as forms of queer performativity that strive to effect an egalitarian relationship through the enunciation of imagined male same-sex desire.

The Unjustified Justice: A Re-reading of Wuthering Heights
Asma Majid, Northern University of Business and Technology Khulna, Bangladesh
Journal of Arts & Humanities, Vol 7, No 9 (2018)

For the last hundred and fifty years, Wuthering Heights has been studied and criticised minutely in countless ways. For any person reading the novel, a door opens in front of him to shed a new light to look on. This article of mine is a result of that; re-reading the novel, the characters, the plot, the actions, and the judgment that has been carried out on both, the responsible and the innocent ones. Heathcliff’s position in the novel shifts from hero to the villain, more of a like an anti-hero, when he becomes the embodiment of unjustified justice. For splitting him from his spiritual-twin, ‘Cathy,’ he fastidiously worked out his scheme to avenge. He seemed so sure and self-righteous about his right to avenge on Hindley, Edgar, Isabella, and then on the children who were not even born at the time of the supposed crime. For this, interestingly my perception about Heathcliff kept changing through the novel, villain or victim, on like this. Although Heathcliff and his actions have been scrutinized in thousand ways, my paper is an attempt to evaluate those actions from a paradoxical view: that Heathcliff’s role as the judge, jury and executioner actually served him to be the epitome of unjustified justice.