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.

Thesis advisor: Rosemarie Bodenheimer / This dissertation considers England's imperial rivalry with France and its influence on literary production in the long nineteenth century. It offers a new context for the study of British imperialism by examining the ways in which mid-Victorian novels responded to and were shaped by the threat of French imperialism. It studies three canonical Victorian novels: William Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1846-1848), Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) and Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities (1859), and argues that even though these texts deal very lightly with the British colonies and feature very few colonial figures, they are still very much "about empire" because they are informed by British anxieties regarding French imperialism. Revolutionary Narratives links each novel to a contemporary political crisis between England and France, and it argues that each novelist turns back to the Revolutionary period in response to and as a means to process a modern threat from France. This project also explains why Thackeray, Brontë and Dickens would return specifically to Revolutionary history in response to a French imperial threat. Its first chapter traces the ways in which "Revolutionary narratives," stories about how the 1789 French Revolution had changed the world, came to inform and to lend urgency to England and France's global, imperial rivalry through their deployment in abolitionist writings in both countries. Abolitionist tracts helped to fuse an association between "empire" and "Revolution" in the Romantic period, and recognizing this helps us to understand why Victorian writers would use Revolutionary narratives in response to imperial crisis. However, this dissertation ultimately asserts that Vanity Fair, Villette and A Tale of Two Cities revive Revolutionary history in order to write against it and to lament its primacy in popular discourse. In the mid nineteenth century, public discussion in England and France tended to return quickly to the history of the Revolutionary period in order to contextualize new political drama between the two countries. This meant that history often seemed to be repeating itself when it came to England and France's rivalry. Thackeray, Brontë and Dickens use Revolutionary history in their novels as a way to react against this popular use of history and in an effort to imagine a new path forward for England and France, one not burdened by the weight of the past. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

While some people enjoy reading full-length novels, most people have a difficult time concentrating on reading or even finding the time to do it. Audio books, especially abridged ones, may be a way for people to enjoy fiction without having to read the whole novel and they can listen to the text at the same time as they do other things. The purpose of this essay is to study whether the abridged audio books can be a valid replacement for the full novel in terms of genre. The essay compares Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë in its full length with three abridged audio books of the same novel. In these three audio versions the original text has been abridged in varying degrees so that the shortest version runs to fifty minutes, the second shortest to three hours and the longest to six hours. The three genres I focus on are the Romance, the Gothic novel and the female Bildungsroman. I present genre-specific features and then analyze how these characteristics are affected in the abridged versions of Jane Eyre.

In this essay, I will argue that looking at translation and multilingualism both as a mode of storytelling and as a theme of Brontë's second published novel Shirley can help to uncover previously untapped moments of connection and understanding in the novel. Brontë's exploration of translation and use of multilingualism reveals a sincere urge to connect in spite of tremendous difficulties—connect her characters to each other, connect her narrator to her readers. It is an ambitious, over-reaching goal, which Brontë did not ultimately attain. Yet, for Brontë, her (especially female) characters, and her narrator, translation in all its forms represents their earnest, if ultimately unfulfilled, desire to communicate—to be correctly comprehended and "well-rendered" as texts, whether they are translated by other characters within the novel or by an unseen reader without.

This essay examines the theme of conformity in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre. It highlights in particular the protagonist’s conflict with conformity as criticism of social inequality in terms of gender. The analysis builds on the patriarchal concept of the angel of the house, as described by Lois Tyson and Alastair Henry and Catharine Walker Bergström, which is a definition of the governing codes of behavior women of the nineteenth century were expected to follow within both the domestic and professional sphere. Specifically, these spheres are organized through significant Victorian institutions such as the household, the education and employment of women and the marriage. The behavior of Jane is discussed in relation to these institutions as a means to support the argument of the protagonist distancing herself from contemporary gender norms. The conclusion of the essay shows that Jane’s circumstances within these institutions leads to her deviation from behavioral norms as a deliberate action. / Den här uppsatsen undersöker temat konformitet i Charlotte Brontës verk Jane Eyre. Den framhäver i synnerhet protagonistens konflikt med konformitet som en kritik riktad mot sociala ojämlikheter mellan könen. Analysen bygger på det patriarkala konceptet ängeln i hemmet, så som det beskrivs av Lois Tyson och Alastair Henry och Catharine Walker Bergström, vilket är en definition av de rådande uppförandekoderna som kvinnor under den viktorianska eran förväntades att leva upp till inom familje- och yrkessfären. Dessa sfärer utgör viktiga inrättningar inom det viktorianska samhället. I synnerhet hemmet, skolan, yrket och äktenskapet. Jane Eyres uppförande diskuteras i relation till dessa inrättningar som ett led i att understödja argumenten för protagonistens distanserande från samtida könsnormer. Uppsatsens sammanfattning visar att Janes omständigheter inom var och en av dessa inrättningar leder till hennes avvikande från uppförandekoderna i form av medvetna handlingar.

Aus literaturwissenschaftlicher Position heraus argumentiert Christine Borsch (M. A., M. Ed.) in ihrem anglistischen Beitrag, Männlichkeitskonstruktionen und ‚Female Masculinity‘ in Charlotte Brontës Roman Jane Eyre. Bescheinigt sie doch ihrem Untersuchungsgegenstand – Brontës viel beforschtem feministischem ‚Kult-Roman‘ von 1847 – die Qualität, ästhetisch ein Wissen zu gestalten, das erst von der gegenwärtigen Geschlechterforschung theoretisiert und formuliert ist. Borsch nähert sich dem genderrelevanten Bedeutungspotenzial des Romans, der mit dem rollentransgressiven Ausgangsprofil seiner Heldin wie mit seinem regressiven Ende an Astons deutschsprachigen Roman unmittelbar ‚anzugrenzen‘ scheint, indessen nicht mit Butler, sondern mit prominenten Theoremen der Masculinity Studies. Im Rekurs auf Connell, Kimmel und insbesondere Halberstam leistet Borsch nicht nur eine Neuausrichtung des analytischen Blicks auf die männlichen Figuren mit ihrem ‚Geschlechtsrollenstress‘ und ihren scheiternden Versuchen, Geschlechtsidentitäten und soziale Beziehungen innerhalb der engen Grenzen der viktorianischen Geschlechterordnung zu leben. Es gelingt auch ein neuer, begrifflich präziserer Blick auf die Protagonistin und ihre prekäre Weiblichkeit. Jane, die den ‚weiblichen‘, privaten Bereich nur als provokante Begrenzung erlebt und, so Borsch, alle Kategorien kultureller Rollenvorgaben sprengt, die sich selbst ‚männlich‘ attribuiert und von ihrer Umwelt als „animal“, „alien“ und „queer little thing“ bezeichnet wird, erscheint mit Halberstam nun als literarische Präfiguration einer ‚Femal Masculinity‘ außerhalb des Geschlechterbinarismus, wo die Koppelung von biologischem Körper, Begehren und Verhalten gelöst sind, geschlechtliche Fixierungen entgrenzt und Positionswechsel nicht sanktionsbedürftig, sondern Ausdruck universeller ‚Genderfluity‘. Mehr noch: In diesem Zugang entfaltet sich das Aktualitätspotenzial dieses Traditionstextes – es liegt, so die Verfasserin, im vorausschauenden, kreativen Umgang mit lebensweltlichen Zwängen.

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.