The Brontë Birthplace in Thornton has been awarded £1,271.92 through a grant from the 2024/2025 Lord Mayor’s Appeal, headed by the then Lord Mayor of Bradford, Councillor Bev Mullaney.
The funding comes from a series of fundraising events and donations.
Nigel West, fundraising co-ordinator for the Brontë Birthplace, said: "We are entirely self-funded and depend on grants such as the Lord Mayor’s Appeal to help continue our work.
"We are so grateful for this donation, it will help us to keep the Brontë story alive and ensure it remains an inspiring and welcoming space for generations to come." (Harry Williams)
The more modern “madwoman in the attic” trope emerged in the novels of the early 1800s. In fact, this expression itself alludes to Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 novel Jane Eyre, in which Mr. Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason, is kept secretly locked away in the attic of his home, Thornfield Hall, having long ago lost her mind.
Inspired by Brontë, the literary critics and feminist writers Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar famously used Madwoman in the Attic as the title of their landmark 1979 work, which explored the portrayal of women in Victorian literature. Authors like Charlotte Brontë—as well as her sister Emily, Jane Austen, and Mary Shelley, the pair argued—typically featured women in their novels that were either idealized ingenues or grotesque monsters, a dichotomy that naturally emerged in response to the distorted literary landscape (long shaped by male writers) into which their work was being taken.
Given the understanding of mental illness at the time in the 1800s, consequently, having a female character who had lost her mind was an easy way of providing a story with a dangerous and unpredictable “monster” character—the perfect antagonist for the ingenue heroine, and a literary creation with which the reader was unlikely to sympathize. Charlotte Brontë, for instance, portrays Bertha as little more than a monstrous threat, with little agency nor much in the way of an explanation for her madness, leaving the reader to sympathize with Mr. Rochester instead. (Paul Anthony Jones)
Once again we will point out that Charlotte Brontë grew to regret her portrayal of Bertha. As she wrote in a letter to William Smith Williams on January 4th, 1848:
Emerald Fennell’s new film, Wuthering Heights opens with sounds of moaning and heavy breathing, which are revealed to be emanating from a man being executed by hanging, rather than in the throes of sexual ecstasy. His post-mortem erection causes an outpouring of emotion, including sexual arousal, in the rambunctious crowd. Among the audience witnessing the bizarre spectacle is the young version of the heroine of the film, Catherine Earnshaw.
As Fennell explained in an interview: “it was important to acknowledge early on that arousal and danger are kind of the same thing, and it was important that the first thing we see is Cathy, this young girl, seemingly frightened but then actually delighted. It tells us so much about who she is, but so much about Brontë, too…”
Notably, this scene is not in Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, but it is uniquely Fennell, and also ensures the film falls squarely into the genre of Gothic Romance. The Oxford-educated Fennell is additionally making an allusion to another novel of Gothic Romance, Daphne du Maurier’s My Cousin Rachel, which opens with the narrator looking back on a moment as a seven-year-old when he witnessed a man who had just been hung. “See what a moment of passion can bring upon a fellow,” his guardian tells him.
The disturbing juxtaposition of sex and death lies at the core of Gothic Romance, and, indeed, Victorian society, as well as our own. In her article “Sex and Death in Wuthering Heights,” Maria Kosikinen observes that both sex and death were perceived as threats to rational Victorian attitudes and thus both were highly regulated and ritualized. Fennell makes her audience as complicit as the onlookers in the perverse opening scene, revealing and shocking our own 2026 sensibilities as well.
Arguably, the most important aspect of Gothic Romance, and the Gothic more broadly, explains its lasting appeal, which can be summed up by the great (Gothic) writer, William Faulker: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” [...]
Say what you will about his character, but the only “ghosting” one can imagine Brontë’s Heathcliff doing is the literal kind, which perhaps explains his lasting appeal, even if the Byronic hero is still being blamed for today’s dating woes. In Olivia Petter’s excellent Vogue article from January, “My Love for Wuthering Heights Is Why I Also Love Terrible Men,” she blames Heathcliff, whom she deems “literature’s original fuckboy,” for inspiring her frustrating pursuit of toxic men: “The bar is absurdly low…men will get a round of applause for texting us back or booking a restaurant. Where are the ones who’ll cry for us on the moors and dig up our graves? They might not be healthy, but at least they’re interesting. [...]
Fennell’s Wuthering Heights, like the lauded 1939 adaptation, does not feature the second half of the novel, which deals with the aftermath of Cathy and Heathcliff’s toxic love-story. It therefore delves more into the romance, rather than the Gothic aspects of the plot and the repercussions of the first on subsequent generations. Why only adapting the first half of Emily Brontë’s novel was permissible in 1939 but not now is anyone’s guess. [...]
Love or hate it, any film that revives public discourse, notably among young people, around a Victorian novel written by a woman two hundred years ago can be seen as a win, especially in a time when Humanities and English departments are at all-time low enrollment.
In Gothic fiction, repressed things from the past return to haunt us. In today’s world, amidst new technologies including AI, and a far-reaching digital record, the secrets in our individual and collective pasts have never been more ephemeral, and, paradoxically, more immortal. What could be more Gothic than that? (Joanna Margaret)
0 comments:
Post a Comment