Childhood Passions and Pathologies

A new scholar book with Brontë-related content:

Parents and Children in the Mid-Victorian Novel
Traumatic Encounters and the Formation of Family
by Madeleine Wood
Springer Verlag
ISBN 978-3-030-45468-5

This book produces an original argument about the emergence of ‘trauma’ in the nineteenth-century through new readings of Dickens, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Collins, Gaskell and Elliot. Madeleine Wood argues that the mid-Victorian novels present their protagonists in a state of damage, provoked and defined by the conditions of the mid-century family: the cross-generational relationship is presented as formative and traumatising. By presenting family relationships as decisive for our psychological state as well as our social identity, the Victorian authors pushed beyond the contemporary scientific models available to them. Madeleine Wood analyses the literary and historical conditions of the mid-century period that led to this new literary emphasis, and which paved the way for the emergence of psychoanalysis in Vienna at the fin de siècle. Analysing a series of theoretical texts, Madeleine Wood shows that psychoanalysis shares the mid-Victorian concern with the unequal relationship between adult and child, focusing her reading through Freud’s early writings and Jean Laplanche’s ‘general theory of seduction’.

The book includes the chapter: Emily and Charlotte Brontë—Childhood Passions and Pathologies: Wuthering Heights and Shirley

In this chapter, Madeleine Wood draws together one of the most highly regarded of the Brontës’ novels with one of the least: Wuthering Heights (1847) and Shirley (1849). Wood shows that parent-child traumatisation propels both novels, despite their radically different styles, and in each, family trauma is inseparable from ambivalence concerning modernity. The chapter is split into two readings: ‘The Primacy of the Child: The Ghostly Encounters of Wuthering Heights’, and ‘Family Longing and the Maternal Blessing: Shirley’. In the first, Wood argues that Wuthering Heights is founded on an unknowable trauma, which repeats and haunts, circulating beyond the limits of Cathy and Heathcliff’s story, presenting the violent aftermath of a primal scene which remains intangible. Shirley is founded on primal parental failure: Robert Moore’s family debt; Caroline’s debauched father and absent mother, with Shirley’s seemingly protected orphanhood juxtaposed against this.