Anne Brontë died in 1848, having written two novels, Agnes Grey (1847) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). Although these novels, especially The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, initially received a favourable critical response, the unsympathetic remarks of Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell initiated a dismissive attitude towards Anne Brontë’s work. For over a hundred years, she was marginalized and silenced by a critical world that admired and respected the work of her two sisters, Charlotte and Emily, but that refused to acknowledge the substantial merits of her own fiction. However, in 1959 revisionist scholars such as Derek Stanford, Ada Harrison and Winifred Gérin, offered important, more enlightened readings that helped to liberate Brontë scholarship from the old conservatisms and to direct it into new directions. Since then, her fiction has been the focus of a robust, but still incomplete, revisionist critical scholarship. My work too is revisionist in orientation, and seeks to position itself within this revisionist approach. It has a double focus that appraises both Brontë’s social commentary and her narratology. It thus integrates two principal areas of enquiry: firstly, an investigation into how Brontë interrogates the position of middle class women in their society, and secondly, an examination of how that interrogation is conveyed by her creative deployment of narrative techniques, especially by her awareness of the rich potential of the first person narrative voice. Chapter 1 looks at the critical response to Brontë’s fiction from 1847 to the present, and shows how the revisionist readings of 1959 were pivotal in re-invigorating the critical approach to her work. Chapter 2 contextualizes the key legal, social, and economic consequences of Victorian patriarchy that so angered and frustrated feminist thinkers and writers such as Brontë. The chapter also demonstrates the extent to which a number of her core concerns relating to Victorian society and the status of women are reflected in her work. In Chapter 3 I discuss three important biographical influences on Brontë: her family, her painful experiences as a governess, and her reading history. Chapter 4 contains a detailed analysis of Agnes Grey, which includes an exploration of the narrative devices that help to reinforce its core concerns. Chapter 5 focuses on The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, showing how the novel offers a richer and more sophisticated analysis of feminist concerns than those that are explored in Agnes Grey. These are broadened to include an investigation of the lives of married women, particularly those trapped in abusive marriages. The chapter also stresses Brontë’s skilful deployment of an intricate and layered narrative technique. The conclusion points to the ways in which my study participates in and extends the current revisionist trend and suggests some aspects of Brontë’s work that would reward further critical attention. / Thesis (DLitt)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / English / Unrestricted

This report explores the ideological motivations behind Charlotte Brontë's inclusion of and alterations to gothic conventions in Villette (1853). By building on an account of the recent critical conversation concerning the conservative Enlightenment force of the gothic, this report seeks to explain the political significance of a specific, nineteenth-century mutation in the genre: Lucy Snowe as an experiment in the bourgeois paradigm. Lucy Snowe's sophisticated consciousness of genre manifests in her minute attention to dress, but the persistence of her personal gothic history means that Villette enacts political tension between individualistic "self-fashioning" and historical determinism as clashing models for the origin of identity. / text

Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-01T23:43:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 tese_10309_Tese de Sara Novaes Rodrigues - Versão Final.pdf: 1597049 bytes, checksum: c83838925b3405e264c3a433ced8ec60 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-09-29 / Em O professor, seu primeiro romance escrito com vistas à publicação, Charlotte Brontë, escritora inglesa que viveu no século XIX, faz uso de uma técnica literária denominada travestismo narrativo. Este recurso se caracteriza pelo uso de um narrador autodiegético do sexo oposto ao de quem escreve. Com vistas à análise do emprego dessa técnica, faço inicialmente um levantamento biográfico da autora, assim como da crítica que essa obra e a autora têm recebido desde a publicação. Em seguida, faço um estudo sobre a narrativa, como preparação para o levantamento sobre as diversas denominações do travestismo narrativo por diferentes escritores e teóricos e analiso o uso da técnica em estudo. Como conclusão, apresento a minha leitura de três partes do enredo, com o auxílio de textos especializados sobre a escritora e a obra selecionada.

This thesis explores the notion of rurality as a form of constructed identity. Just as feminist and postcolonial studies identify the formation of hierarchies within gender and ethnicity, I argue that the rural is constructed as inferior in opposition to its binary counterpart, the urban. The effect of this is the othering of the rural. This thesis takes Emily Brontë’s novel Wuthering Heights as a case study, using a critical approach to explore the ways in which it presents rurality, and to consider its role in the creation and reproduction of rural identity. The case study suggests that the adoption of a ‘rural reading’, in which an awareness of rural othering is fostered, can be a useful and productive strategy in textual analysis and interpretation. The first three chapters of this thesis focus on rural construction generally. Chapter 1 draws on semiotic theory to examine the creation of binaries, and Derridean notions of linguistic hierarchies to suggest reasons for the inferior position of the rural. Chapter 2 considers the historical location of the urban/rural binary in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, within the context of the Enlightenment, the growth of capitalism, industrialisation and rapid urban expansion. Chapter 3 explores rural othering as a feature of contemporary culture, examining the textual presence of idyllic and anti-idyllic versions of the rural. Chapter 4 introduces the methodology of the case study, explaining the relevance of Wuthering Heights to the study of rural othering, providing a précis of the novel and an overview of previous critical responses. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 explore the three themes of nature, deviance and space. These are derived from the examination of rural construction in Chapter 3. In Chapter 5, the representation of nature in Wuthering Heights is explored, and the presence of animals within the novel in particular. In Chapter 6, the depiction of deviance in Wuthering Heights is discussed, with special focus given to the presence of deviant speech patterns, reflecting changing expectations of behavioural norms in the early nineteenth century. Chapter 7’s consideration of the relationship between space and rurality within Brontë’s novel considers her representation of landscape. Chapter 8 argues that a similar rural reading can be applied to other texts, literary and otherwise, opening up a fresh set of perspectives and possibilities for interpretation.

This thesis offers a textual analysis of Emily Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights and, to a lesser extent, her poems in an effort to understand fully the complicated relationship of gender to time that characterizes her artistic imagination. The study emphasizes the interplay of religious, psychological and sexual forces inherent in her narrative, and their effect when portraying cyclical and linear concepts of time. Narrators' and characters' interactions serve by themselves and as dyads to represent a concept of mythical or eternal time that manifests itself within historical or chronological time. These time concepts differ and complement each other through aspects of wholeness and differentiation. References to Julia Kristeva's psycholinguistic theory and to C. G. Jung's archetypes give support for a unique space and female concept of time within a male discourse. Kristeva's exemplification of time concepts as linear/chronological for the male gender and cyclical/eternal for the female gender happens to be specially relevant to the 19th century, when the patriarchal socio-symbolic order, inhibited, undermined, and/or circumscribed the participation of the feminine within the social contract. / Graduation date: 1991

This dissertation comprises an exploration of the concept of home and its link to propriety as it was imposed on women, focussing specifically on Jane Eyre and Villette by Charlotte Bronte. These novels share a preoccupation with notions of 'home' and what this means to the female protagonists. The process of writing on the part of the author, Charlotte Bronte, and the act of first-person narration on the part of the two female protagonists, Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe, is significant in that the "muted culture" of women (Showalter 1999: xx) of the nineteenth century was given authorial and authoritative power in their stories. Questions of identity and location developed from Jane Eyre's and Lucy Snowe's being orphans, penniless and without homes. Subsequently issues of ownership and self-sufficiency emerged in their stories, all of which found particular focus in the home. This "muted culture", examined through the theories of marxism and new historicism, is also illuminated by a feminist analysis of Jane Eyre and Villette which reveals that the marginal female figures are entitled to, or deserving of, the privileges of home and selfhood only once they have made some sacrifice for this "unthinkable goal of mature freedom" (Gilbert & Gubar 2000:339). The exploration of 'home' finds resonance in a post-colonial context, as Bronte encompassed marginal figures in her society who remained homeless, bereft of their stories due to the effect of drastically "interrupted experiences" (Ndebele 1996: 28) in the process of identity formation. The situated analysis of the concept of home operates in two contexts in this thesis, that of nineteenth-century Britain and twentieth-century South Africa. Njabulo Ndebele states that South Africans have been marked by the experience of homelessness, "The loss of homes! It is one of the greatest of South African stories yet to be told" (1996: 28-9). By drawing on Bronte to illuminate the concept of home, a South African reader is able to further an understanding of the multi-faceted nature of this concept and to see that the new possibilities claimed for marginal figures at the periphery may have their origins in the representation of an earlier woman writer's "double-edged" (Eagleton 1988: 73) representation of 'home' . / Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2005.

Wuthering Heights is a composite of opposites. Its two houses, its two families, its two generations, its two planes of existence are held in place by Emily Bronte's careful manipulation of repetitive, yet differentiated, symbols associated with each of these pairs. Using symbols to develop her polarities and to unify them along the imaginatively rendered horizontal axis connecting Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, the vertical axis connecting the novel's several "heavens" and "hells," and the third dimensional axis connecting the spiritual and corporeal worlds, Emily Bronte gives the divided world of Wuthering Heights an almost perfect symmetry. This study divides the more than seven hundred symbols into physical and nonphysical. The physical symbols are subdivided into setting, animal life, plant life, people, celestial objects, and miscellaneous objects. The fewer nonphysical symbols are grouped under movement, light, time, emotions, concepts, and miscellaneous terms. Verticality and thresholds, the two most important symbolic motifs, are drawn from both physical and nonphysical symbols.

Charlotte and Emily Brontë both incorporate folk traditions into their novels, which help define and complicate notions of class and identity in their work. This thesis examines the folklore of the novels, including customs, folktales, and material folk culture, and explores how these elements work within the worlds created by the Brontës. While scholars such as Micael Clarke, Lauren Lepow, and Heta Pyrhönen have established the presence of folk tale, ballad, and supernatural motifs in the Brontës’ work, few have discussed the ways in which folk culture, in particular, underscores the notions of class and identity.

Wuthering Heights was significantly shaped by the pre-Darwinian scientific debate in ways that look ahead to Darwin's evolutionary theory more than a decade later. Wuthering Heights represents a cultural response to new and disturbing ideas. Darwin's enterprise was scientific; Emily Brontë's poetic. Both, however, were seeking to find ways to express their vision of the nature of human beings. The language and metaphors of Wuthering Heights suggest that Emily Brontë's vision was, in many ways, similar to Darwin's.

My dissertation examines the roles of Emily and Anne Brontë as nineteenth-century women poets, composing in a literary form dominated by androcentric language and metaphor. The work of Mikhail Bakhtin, particularly concerning spoken and implied dialogue, and feminists who have pioneered an exploration of feminist dialogics provide crucial tools for examining the importance and uses of the dialogic form in the development of a powerful and creative feminine voice. As such, I propose to view Emily's Gondal poetry not as a series of loosely connected monologues, but as utterances in an inner dialogue between the dissenting and insistent female voice and the authoritative voice of the non-Gondal world. Emily's identification with her primary heroine, Augusta, enables her to challenge the controlling voice of the of the patriarchy that attempts to dictate and limit her creative and personal expression. The voice of Augusta in particular expresses the guilt, shame, and remorse that the woman-as-author must also experience when attempting to do battle with the patriarchy that attempts to restrict and reshape her utterances. While Anne was a part of the creation of Gondal, using it to mask her emotions through sustained dialogue with those who enabled and inspired such feelings, her interest in the mythical kingdom soon waned. However, it is in the dungeons and prisons of Gondal and within these early poems that Anne's distinct voice emerges and enters into a dialogue with her readers, her sister, and herself. The interior dialogues that her heroines engage in become explorations of the choices that Anne feels she must make as a woman within both society and the boundaries of her religious convictions. Through dialogue with the church, congregation, and religious doctrine, she attempts to relieve herself of the guilt of female creativity and justify herself and her creations through religious orthodoxy. Yet her seeming obedience belies the power of her voice that insists on being heard, even within the confines of androcentric social and religious power structures.