The latest issue of the French scholar journal Cahiers Victorienes et Édourdiannes contains the proceedings of two different conferences: The Colloque SFEVE Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès /27 -28 January 2022 and the 60e Congrès de la SAES Université Clermont-Auvergne (2-4 June 2022).
Cahiers Victoriens et Édourdiannes
Victorian and Edwardian Interiors
Issue 97, 2023
Kate Lawson
This essay analyses the Brontë sisters’ shared writing and walking practices in the Haworth parsonage dining-room in order to explore how communal indoor walking may have influenced the composition and content of the novels that were written there: Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey, The Professor, Jane Eyre, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Shirley, and Villette. Employing the materialist theories of Thomas Rickert, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, and Karen Barad, the essay explores how the complex web of the sisters’ everyday lived experiences could constitute literary influence. While indoor walking provides only one of many possible routes for such a materialist analysis of influence, the Brontës’ daily evening walks of approximately two hours in length are well documented and can act as a focal point for an investigation of how such experiences intersect with the novels’ composition. Scenes of indoor walking in the Brontë novels foreground affective connections between a subject moved to walk by an intense emotional state and an observer who witnesses and interprets the walk and who may act in response. Communal indoor walking in the novels thus provides a model through which to read materialist influence as, in Barad’s terms, ‘intra-active’ and ‘entangled’.
Isabelle Hervouet
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Anne Brontë’s second novel, has always been the object of much scholarly attention, particularly as regards what was originally thought to be a structural flaw: the use of a frame narrative within which the story of Helen Huntingdon’s flight from a disastrous marriage is embedded. The frame narrator, Gilbert Markham, tells a traditional courtship tale which abruptly turns into Helen’s metanarrative of domestic horror. Recent scholarship has concerned itself with this split in discourse which suggests that Brontë does not challenge the conventional idea that discursive authority is masculine, making it therefore difficult to read her novel as feminist. Studies alternately focus on Brontë’s bold enterprise (the vindication in the metanarrative of a woman’s right to leave an abusive husband) or on the limitations generated by her decision to resort to a male frame narrator. This paper addresses the implications of the novel’s apparently flawed structure, notably exploring the uncertainty surrounding the improvement of Gilbert’s moral character after his reading of Helen’s diary. It contends that critical disagreement on whether or not The Tenant is a feminist novel and the embedded narrative the instrument of Gilbert’s reformation, originates, at least partially, in the generic tension at work within Brontë’s novel, and the presence of Gothic fault-lines. Anne Brontë appears unwilling to espouse realism and social criticism which, if fully embraced, might imply forgoing valued (and cherished) Gothic modes of storytelling. The uneasy co-existence of social realism and Gothic remnants (prominent in the choice of structure and modes of characterisation) may then lie at the heart of the novel’s multi-faceted ambiguity.
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