John Bowlby’s work on attachment theory in the 1960s altered the cultural understanding of parent-child relationships. Bowlby argued that the ability for an individual to form attachments later in life, be that familial, romantic, or friendship is affected by whether or not that individual formed a strong attachment to a primary caregiver in early childhood. My thesis uses Bowlby’s theory as a critical lens to examine three novels by the Brontës: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë. I use this theory in order to demonstrate that these novels are what I have termed proto-attachment narratives, which is to say narratives about attachment before formal attachment theory existed, and, further, that they work to bridge the gap between the contemporary nineteenth-century debate on child rearing and Bowlby’s theory. In addition, I discuss how each of these novels exemplifies, complicates, and expands upon Bowlby’s theory in its own way. Wuthering Heights demonstrates the cyclical nature of damaged attachments and works to find a way to break from that cycle. Jane Eyre gives a clear understanding of an individual’s lifelong struggle with failed attachments and the importance of a balanced power dynamic to forming healthy attachments, and, finally, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall examines how even properly formed, healthy parent-child attachments can lead to development problems, if the power granted to those parental attachment figure is not used responsibly. I further theorize that we can use these novels as a starting point to discuss how we might define attachment narratives as a genre, as they hold many similarities with more clearly defined modern attachment narratives.

Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were published more than forty years before the appearance of the feminist type that the Victorians called the “New Woman;” yet, both novels contain characteristics of New Woman fiction. By considering how Brontë's novels foreshadow New Woman fiction, the reader of these novels can re-enact the “gentlest” Brontë as an influential feminist whose ideology informed the construction of the radical New Woman. Brontë, like the New Woman writers, incorporated autobiographical dilemmas into her fiction. By using her own experiences as a governess, Brontë constructs Agnes Grey's incongruent social status and a morally corrupt gentry and aristocracy through her depiction of not only Agnes's second employers, the Murrays, but also the morally debauched world that Helen enters upon her marriage to Arthur Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Moreover, Brontë incorporates her observations of Branwell's alcoholism and her own religious beliefs into The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Although Brontë's novels contain autobiographical material, her heroines are fictional constructions that she uses to engage her readers with the woman question. Brontë accomplishes this engagement through her heroines' narrative re-enactments of fictional autobiographical dilemmas. Helen's diary and Agnes's diary-based narrative produce the pattern of development of the Bildungsroman and foreshadow the New Woman novelists' Kunstlerromans. Brontë's heroines anticipate the female artist as the protagonist of the New Woman Kunstlerromans. Agnes and Helen both invade the masculine domain of economic motive and are feminists who profess gender definitions that conflict with dominant Victorian ideology. Agnes questions her own femininity by internalizing the governess's status incongruence, and Helen's femininity is questioned by those around her. The paradoxical position of both heroines anticipates the debate about the nature and function of art in which the New Woman writers engaged. Through her reconciliation of the aesthetic and the political, Brontë, like the New Woman novelists who will follow, explores the contradiction between art and activism.

In the first chapter of Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Gilbert Markham invites his reader to join him as he attempts to recall the past. Because Gilbert uses the journal of another to supplement his own memories, the novel's frame narrative structure becomes saturated with complex memory-based issues and problems. Thus, the complicated frame narrative provides fertile ground for exploring the novel through memory. In studying the frame narrative, scholars have typically devoted their criticism to Gilbert and how he shapes the frame. Few scholars afford the other primary narrator of the novel, Helen, any power in shaping that frame. However, both Gilbert's and Helen's narratives exist separately yet function codependently. Using recent studies in memory as well as Derridean and Foucaultian archive theory as a lens, I will explore how Tenant presents an anarchic narrative structure that simultaneously gives its own semblance of power and order without assigning complete narrative power to one person or to one gender.

This dissertation aims to examine the various ways in which three Victorian novels, such as Wilkie Collins?s The Woman in White (1860), Anne Bront�?s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), Charlotte Bront�?s Villette (1853), address the relationship between storytelling and self-formation, showing that a subject formulates a sense of self by storytelling. The constructed nature of self and storytelling in Collins?s The Woman in White shows that narrative is a significant way of attributing meaning in our lives and that constructing stories about self is connected to the construction of self, illustrating that storytelling is a form of self-formation. Anne Bront�?s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall exemplifies Bront�?s configuration of the relational and contextual aspect of storytelling and self-formation in her belief that self is formed not merely through the story he/she tells but through the triangular relationship of the storyteller, the story, and the reader. This novel proves that even though the writer?s role in constructing his/her self-concept through his/her narrative is important, the narrator?s triangular relationship with the reader and the text is also a significant component in his/her self-formation. Charlotte Bront�?s Villette is concerned with unnarration, in which the narrative does not say, and it shows that the unnarrated elements provide useful resource for the display of the narrator?s self. For Charlotte Bront�, unnarration is part of the narrative configuration that contributes to constructing and presenting the storyteller?s self-formation. These three novels illuminate that narrative is more than linguistic activities of the symbolic representation of the world, and that it cannot be fully conceived without taking into consideration the storyteller?s experience and thoughts of the world.

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