This thesis covers the entire range of British and American film adaptations of Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights, as no cumulative study on this larger selection has been done thus far. However this will not be the only objective of this thesis, as I create a link between the author’s life to her novel, between the novel to the early criticism, and the criticism to later adaptations, forming a chain of transformation down the ages, to the original novel. By linking the adaptations to the earlier reception of the novel, a change of social interaction will be uncovered as one of its reasons for surviving. These examples of adaptation will be shown to be just as relevant to popular culture history as its original inspiration. This is the result of an unfolding movement of change and mutation, where each adaptation pushes to connect with the past and future. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

A presente tese analisa a peça We Are Three Sisters - escrita em 2011 pelo poeta e dramaturgo britânico Philip Blake Morrison - com o objetivo de discutir as ligações entre as instâncias do ficcional, do real, do imagético e do biográfico. Morrison utiliza como pano de fundo para a elaboração de We Are Three Sisters o texto As Três Irmãs (1902) do dramaturgo russo Anton Chekhov. Morrison preenche sua peça com dados sobre a vida das irmãs Brontë, como retratados pela historiadora e biógrafa Juliet Barker em The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, que foi curadora da biblioteca da Brontë Society durante anos, confiou a Morrison os dados de sua pesquisa e o auxiliou a transportá-los para a peça que ele estava escrevendo. Considero importante examinar como se dá esse processo de esgarçamento das fronteiras entre o real e o ficcional através do conteúdo simbólico e imagético, porque ele reflete um tipo de prática cada vez mais utilizada por autores contemporâneos. O diálogo entre a Rússia de Chekhov da virada do século XIX/XX e o cenário (interiorano) do norte (industrial) da Inglaterra no período vitoriano, quando equacionados por Morrison no contexto dos dias de hoje, convidam-nos a traçar considerações que muito têm a nos dizer sobre os parâmetros da dramaturgia contemporânea. Além de serem três grandes autoras do cânone vitoriano, as irmãs Brontë surgem também como ícones culturais britânicos, tantas vezes já representadas como personagens em biografias ficcionais, romances, filmes, balés e peças de teatro. Para escrever sua apropriação da vida das Brontë, Morrison ampara-se na biografia de Juliet Barker, ao mesmo tempo em que utiliza a peça de Chekhov como um texto-sombra, uma matriz que serve como base para sua criação, um andaime em torno do qual constrói seu enredo. O movimento de entrelaçamento de realidade e ficção realizado por Morrison e a produção do conteúdo simbólico através da análise de imagens arquetípicas são o principal foco de interesse desta tese. Escolhi como metodologia de trabalho a aproximação entre os três textos, o de Morrison, o de Barker e o de Chekhov, através de ferramentas dos Estudos do Imaginário, representados pela análise de conteúdos imagéticos nos termos propostos por Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung e Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, uma vez que a tese aponta para possibilidades dialógicas entre imagem e palavra dentro dos paradigmas da cena teatral contemporânea. / This PhD dissertation analyzes the play We Are Three Sisters, written in 2011 by the poet and British playwright Philip Blake Morrison, in order to discuss the links between the instances of the fictional, the real, imagery and biography. Morrison uses as a backdrop for the elaboration of We Are Three Sisters the text Three Sisters (1900), by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Morrison fills his play with data on the life of the Brontë sisters, as depicted by the historian and biographer Juliet Barker in The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, who was for years curator of the library of the Brontë Society, entrusted Morrison data from her research and helped Morrison to transport them to the play he was writing. I consider it important to examine how this process of fraying of the borders between the real and the fictional, through symbolic imagery and content, takes place, because it reflects a kind of practice increasingly used by contemporary authors. The dialogue between the turn of Chekhov’s Russia of the nineteenth/twentieth century and the (countryside) scenario (industrial) north of England in the Victorian period, when equated by Morrison in the context of today, invites us to make some considerations that have much to tell us about the parameters of contemporary dramaturgy. Besides, being three great authors of the Victorian canon, the Brontë sisters also come as British cultural icons, so often represented as characters in fictional biographies, novels, movies, ballets and plays. To write his appropriation of the Brontë’s life, Morrison is supported by Juliet Barker’s biography, while using Chekhov’s play as a shadow text, a matrix which serves as the basis for its creation, a scaffold around which he builds its plot. The intertwining movement of reality and fiction conceived by Morrison and the production of symbolic content through the analysis of archetypical images are the main focus of this PhD dissertation. I chose as a working methodology the approach of the three texts, Morrison’s, Barker’s and Chekhov’s, through the tools of the Studies of the Imaginary, represented by the analysis of imagery content as proposed by Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung and Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, since the work points to dialogic possibilities between image and word within the paradigms of the contemporary theater scene.

My dissertation, Understanding the Gray:Aging Women in Victorian Culture and Fiction, explores the cultural construction of aging for middle-class Victorian women and how aging was experienced and then depicted within novels. Chiefly, I work from midcentury to the end of the century in order to understand the experience of aging and ways women were ascribed age due to their position in society as spinsters, mothers, and progressive women. I explore how the age of fictional women reflects and contributes to critical debates concerning how Victorian women were expected to behave. Debates over separate spheres, how women were perceived in British society, and how women’s rights changed during the 19th century highlight how aging affected women and how they were treated throughout the century. Victorian fiction illustrates the ways women achieved different roles in society and how age and the perception of age affected their ability to do so. Understanding how aging was experienced, understood, and ascribed to Victorian women who fought in various ways for new terms of citizenship and mobility helps us begin to trace how we treat and respond to aging in women today. The first chapter outlines the social status of unmarried women and spinsters, considering how age affected women’s ability to lead professional lives in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). The second chapter, on George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical, explores older motherhood through Mrs Transome and illustrates how the novel seeks to teach younger women of the pitfalls of unequal marriages. The third chapter builds a cultural understanding of how aging was linked to progressive, anti-domestic womanhood and racial impurity through the New Woman and in H.R. Haggard’s She.

If you knew my thoughts; the dreams that absorb me; and the fiery imagination that at times eats me up and makes me feel Society as it is, wretchedly insipid you would pity and I dare say despise me. (C. Brontë, 10 May 1836) Before Charlotte Brontë wrote her first novel for publication, she admitted her mixed feelings about imagination. Brontë’s letter shows that she feared both pity and condemnation. She struggled to attend to the imaginative world that brought her pleasure and to fulfill her duties in the real world so as to avoid its contempt. Brontë’s early correspondence attests to her engrossment with the Angrian world she created in childhood. She referred to this world as the “infernal world” and to imagination as “fiery,” showing the intensity and potential destructiveness of creativity. Society did not draw Brontë the way that the imagined world did, and in each of Brontë’s four mature novels, she recreated the tricky navigation between the desirable imagined world and the necessary real world. Each protagonist resolves the struggle differently, with some protagonists achieving more success in society than others. The introduction of this dissertation provides critical and biographical background on Brontë’s juxtaposition of imagination/desire and reason/duty. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic supplies the basis for understanding the ways that the protagonists express imagination, and John Kucich’s Repression in Victorian Fiction defines the purposefulness of repression. The four middle chapters examine imagination’s manifestations and purposes for the protagonists. The final chapter discusses how the tension caused by the competing desires to express and repress imagination distinguishes Brontë’s style.

This essay investigates the narration in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre by applying narratologist Great Olson’s model of unreliable narration to Jane, the novel’s narrator. Further, the novel discusses how Jane’s reliability affects the portrayal of the character Bertha Mason. The essay argues that the narrator’s characterization of Bertha Mason is deliberately misleading.

The Victorian governess occupied a difficult position in Victorian society. Straddling the line between genteel and working-class femininity, the governess did not fit neatly into the rigid categories of gender and class according to which Victorian society organized itself. This troubling liminality caused the governess to become implicitly associated with another disturbing domestic presence caught between worlds: the Victorian literary ghost. Using Henry James’s novella The Turn of the Screw as a touchstone for each chapter, this thesis examines how the spectral mirrors the governess’s own spectrality – that is, her own discursive construction as a psychosocially unsettling force within the Victorian domestic sphere.

This thesis is a study of the presentation of the orphan child in eighteenth and early nineteenth century English literature, and focuses on William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. It is concerned with assessing the extent to which the orphan children in each of the works are liberated from familial and social constraints and structures and to what end. Chapter One examines the major thematic concern of the extent to which the motif of the orphan child represents a wronged innocent, and whether this symbol can also, or alternatively, be presented as a revolutionary force that challenges society's status quo in Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience. Chapter Two considers the significance of the child "lost" and "found", which forms the explicit subject of six of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and explores the treatment of these conditions, and their differences and consequences for the children concerned. Chapter Three focuses on Charlotte Bronte's depiction of the orphan in Jane Eyre, which presents two models of the orphan child: the protagonist Jane, and Helen Burns. The chapter examines these two models and their responses to orphan-hood in a hostile world where orphans are mistreated by family and society alike. Chapter Four determines whether the orphan constitutes a subversive threat to the family in Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights and also explores the notion that, although orphan-hood often entails liberation from adult guardians, it also comprises vulnerability and exposure. The thesis concludes by considering the extent to which orphan-hood can involve a form of liberation from the confines of social structures, and what this liberation constitutes for each of the three authors.

A presente tese analisa a peça We Are Three Sisters - escrita em 2011 pelo poeta e dramaturgo britânico Philip Blake Morrison - com o objetivo de discutir as ligações entre as instâncias do ficcional, do real, do imagético e do biográfico. Morrison utiliza como pano de fundo para a elaboração de We Are Three Sisters o texto As Três Irmãs (1902) do dramaturgo russo Anton Chekhov. Morrison preenche sua peça com dados sobre a vida das irmãs Brontë, como retratados pela historiadora e biógrafa Juliet Barker em The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, que foi curadora da biblioteca da Brontë Society durante anos, confiou a Morrison os dados de sua pesquisa e o auxiliou a transportá-los para a peça que ele estava escrevendo. Considero importante examinar como se dá esse processo de esgarçamento das fronteiras entre o real e o ficcional através do conteúdo simbólico e imagético, porque ele reflete um tipo de prática cada vez mais utilizada por autores contemporâneos. O diálogo entre a Rússia de Chekhov da virada do século XIX/XX e o cenário (interiorano) do norte (industrial) da Inglaterra no período vitoriano, quando equacionados por Morrison no contexto dos dias de hoje, convidam-nos a traçar considerações que muito têm a nos dizer sobre os parâmetros da dramaturgia contemporânea. Além de serem três grandes autoras do cânone vitoriano, as irmãs Brontë surgem também como ícones culturais britânicos, tantas vezes já representadas como personagens em biografias ficcionais, romances, filmes, balés e peças de teatro. Para escrever sua apropriação da vida das Brontë, Morrison ampara-se na biografia de Juliet Barker, ao mesmo tempo em que utiliza a peça de Chekhov como um texto-sombra, uma matriz que serve como base para sua criação, um andaime em torno do qual constrói seu enredo. O movimento de entrelaçamento de realidade e ficção realizado por Morrison e a produção do conteúdo simbólico através da análise de imagens arquetípicas são o principal foco de interesse desta tese. Escolhi como metodologia de trabalho a aproximação entre os três textos, o de Morrison, o de Barker e o de Chekhov, através de ferramentas dos Estudos do Imaginário, representados pela análise de conteúdos imagéticos nos termos propostos por Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung e Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, uma vez que a tese aponta para possibilidades dialógicas entre imagem e palavra dentro dos paradigmas da cena teatral contemporânea. / This PhD dissertation analyzes the play We Are Three Sisters, written in 2011 by the poet and British playwright Philip Blake Morrison, in order to discuss the links between the instances of the fictional, the real, imagery and biography. Morrison uses as a backdrop for the elaboration of We Are Three Sisters the text Three Sisters (1900), by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Morrison fills his play with data on the life of the Brontë sisters, as depicted by the historian and biographer Juliet Barker in The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, who was for years curator of the library of the Brontë Society, entrusted Morrison data from her research and helped Morrison to transport them to the play he was writing. I consider it important to examine how this process of fraying of the borders between the real and the fictional, through symbolic imagery and content, takes place, because it reflects a kind of practice increasingly used by contemporary authors. The dialogue between the turn of Chekhov’s Russia of the nineteenth/twentieth century and the (countryside) scenario (industrial) north of England in the Victorian period, when equated by Morrison in the context of today, invites us to make some considerations that have much to tell us about the parameters of contemporary dramaturgy. Besides, being three great authors of the Victorian canon, the Brontë sisters also come as British cultural icons, so often represented as characters in fictional biographies, novels, movies, ballets and plays. To write his appropriation of the Brontë’s life, Morrison is supported by Juliet Barker’s biography, while using Chekhov’s play as a shadow text, a matrix which serves as the basis for its creation, a scaffold around which he builds its plot. The intertwining movement of reality and fiction conceived by Morrison and the production of symbolic content through the analysis of archetypical images are the main focus of this PhD dissertation. I chose as a working methodology the approach of the three texts, Morrison’s, Barker’s and Chekhov’s, through the tools of the Studies of the Imaginary, represented by the analysis of imagery content as proposed by Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung and Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, since the work points to dialogic possibilities between image and word within the paradigms of the contemporary theater scene.

In La Migration des coeurs, Maryse Condé rewrites Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights in a Caribbean context. Through its intertextual connection to Brontë's novel, Condé's text can be read in relation to Wuthering Heights according to the rhizomatic structure posited by Deleuze and Guattari, and further employed by Édouard Glissant in his Poétique de la Relation. The rhizome allows a comparison that resists a hierarchical comparison of the texts, and permits dialog and mutual influence between the two novels. Condé's critics, reinforcing this intertextual relation, have rarely considered La Migration des coeurs independently of Brontë's Wuthering Heights. However Windward Heights, Richard Philcox's English translation of Condé's novel, has not been previously considered worthy of a place in the rhizome. As a rewriting of Condé's own rewriting, Philcox's translation merits analysis in relation to the other two novels. This study will examine the nature of translation and rewriting in a postcolonial context. Primarily focusing on La Migration des coeurs, it will show how Condé uses the latent imperialist frame of Wuthering Heights to expose social inequalities in Guadeloupe, and how Philcox communicates this critique back to the English metropolis in Windward Heights.

A presente tese analisa a peça We Are Three Sisters - escrita em 2011 pelo poeta e dramaturgo britânico Philip Blake Morrison - com o objetivo de discutir as ligações entre as instâncias do ficcional, do real, do imagético e do biográfico. Morrison utiliza como pano de fundo para a elaboração de We Are Three Sisters o texto As Três Irmãs (1902) do dramaturgo russo Anton Chekhov. Morrison preenche sua peça com dados sobre a vida das irmãs Brontë, como retratados pela historiadora e biógrafa Juliet Barker em The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, que foi curadora da biblioteca da Brontë Society durante anos, confiou a Morrison os dados de sua pesquisa e o auxiliou a transportá-los para a peça que ele estava escrevendo. Considero importante examinar como se dá esse processo de esgarçamento das fronteiras entre o real e o ficcional através do conteúdo simbólico e imagético, porque ele reflete um tipo de prática cada vez mais utilizada por autores contemporâneos. O diálogo entre a Rússia de Chekhov da virada do século XIX/XX e o cenário (interiorano) do norte (industrial) da Inglaterra no período vitoriano, quando equacionados por Morrison no contexto dos dias de hoje, convidam-nos a traçar considerações que muito têm a nos dizer sobre os parâmetros da dramaturgia contemporânea. Além de serem três grandes autoras do cânone vitoriano, as irmãs Brontë surgem também como ícones culturais britânicos, tantas vezes já representadas como personagens em biografias ficcionais, romances, filmes, balés e peças de teatro. Para escrever sua apropriação da vida das Brontë, Morrison ampara-se na biografia de Juliet Barker, ao mesmo tempo em que utiliza a peça de Chekhov como um texto-sombra, uma matriz que serve como base para sua criação, um andaime em torno do qual constrói seu enredo. O movimento de entrelaçamento de realidade e ficção realizado por Morrison e a produção do conteúdo simbólico através da análise de imagens arquetípicas são o principal foco de interesse desta tese. Escolhi como metodologia de trabalho a aproximação entre os três textos, o de Morrison, o de Barker e o de Chekhov, através de ferramentas dos Estudos do Imaginário, representados pela análise de conteúdos imagéticos nos termos propostos por Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung e Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, uma vez que a tese aponta para possibilidades dialógicas entre imagem e palavra dentro dos paradigmas da cena teatral contemporânea. / This PhD dissertation analyzes the play We Are Three Sisters, written in 2011 by the poet and British playwright Philip Blake Morrison, in order to discuss the links between the instances of the fictional, the real, imagery and biography. Morrison uses as a backdrop for the elaboration of We Are Three Sisters the text Three Sisters (1900), by the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov. Morrison fills his play with data on the life of the Brontë sisters, as depicted by the historian and biographer Juliet Barker in The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors (2010). Barker, who was for years curator of the library of the Brontë Society, entrusted Morrison data from her research and helped Morrison to transport them to the play he was writing. I consider it important to examine how this process of fraying of the borders between the real and the fictional, through symbolic imagery and content, takes place, because it reflects a kind of practice increasingly used by contemporary authors. The dialogue between the turn of Chekhov’s Russia of the nineteenth/twentieth century and the (countryside) scenario (industrial) north of England in the Victorian period, when equated by Morrison in the context of today, invites us to make some considerations that have much to tell us about the parameters of contemporary dramaturgy. Besides, being three great authors of the Victorian canon, the Brontë sisters also come as British cultural icons, so often represented as characters in fictional biographies, novels, movies, ballets and plays. To write his appropriation of the Brontë’s life, Morrison is supported by Juliet Barker’s biography, while using Chekhov’s play as a shadow text, a matrix which serves as the basis for its creation, a scaffold around which he builds its plot. The intertwining movement of reality and fiction conceived by Morrison and the production of symbolic content through the analysis of archetypical images are the main focus of this PhD dissertation. I chose as a working methodology the approach of the three texts, Morrison’s, Barker’s and Chekhov’s, through the tools of the Studies of the Imaginary, represented by the analysis of imagery content as proposed by Gaston Bachelard, Gilbert Durand, Carl Gustav Jung and Castor Bartolomé Ruiz, since the work points to dialogic possibilities between image and word within the paradigms of the contemporary theater scene.