Violence Towards Animals and Yorkshire Folklore

New scholar Brontë-related publications:

Embodied Violence Towards Nonhuman Animals in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey

by  Valerie L. Stevens

Society & Animals, Online Publication Date: 23 Dec 2021

Aware of her pupil’s plans to torture and kill a nest of birds, and with no authority to stop him based on her class, gender, and professional positions, the governess-heroine of Anne Brontë’s (2010/1847) Agnes Grey kills the nonhuman animals to keep them from needless suffering. Building on Brontë scholarship as well as animal studies understandings of violence and embodiment, this article considers expectations that Victorian sympathy will be a simplistic and pretty play on reader emotions to argue that nineteenth-century sympathetic feeling was more theoretically and ethically complex than we might imagine. Agnes Grey demonstrates how human-animal violence was thought to be an acceptable expression of middle- and upper-class masculinity, while proper women were expected to be complicit with this treatment of nonhumans. By looking at the close relationship between wanton and merciful embodied violence, the article shows how grotesque Victorian human-animal sympathy could be.

An Artistic Perspective of Yorkshire Folklore and its Cultural Significance through Emily Brontë’s Novel Wuthering Heights

by Belmerabet Fatiha

Algerian Scientific Journal Platform, Volume:06../ N°:01 (2021) p 174

Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights seems to be frequented by the British folklore that is not an element from stories published in Victorian Journals; it is lively present in the life of Yorkshire people. Moreover, it symbolizes an ongoing agitation that governed the relationship between the middle and the lower classes in 19th century Britain. The middle-class Victorian folklorists worked to collect folkloric materials like songs and old stories. This activity was engaged in constructing the British cultural identity yet, it was intentionally involved in excluding some cultural groups like the rustic northerners. Therefore, and throughout creating a biased image, they deemed these people’s arts and culture as strange and primitive. Wuthering Heights appears to rival the folklorists' assumptions and depicts another perception. The present paper tries to shed light on two folkloric elements utilized by E. Bronte in Wuthering Heights. It also analyses the way they interact in the story and the way the author depicts their cultural significance differently from other authors.