English Literature

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English Literature
Unit 7 The Victorian Age Part II Some Women
Novelists
Edward G. Hemingway May 25th,2005
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The Brontë Sisters

• Charlotte, Emily and Anne are the three among
  five daughters of Patrick Brontë, a Yorshire
  clergyman of Irish origin.
• All the daughters seem to have been gifted, and
  all died with their single brother before their
  father their mother died in 1821.
• In 1846 Charlotte, with Emily and Anne Brontë,
  published a volume of poetry under the pen-names
  of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell only Emily's
  verse is particularly noteworthy.

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Charlotte Brontë (18161855)
Works
Charlotte has been the focus of attention for
modern feminist critics and the confined and
restless imagery of their novels is often seen as
representative of the anger of suppressed and
misrepresented women.

• The Professor, Charlotte's first novel, was not
  published until after her death
• Jane Eyre (1847), her second, was immediately
  successful.
• Shirley, her third novel, came out in 1849
• Villette is her most mature work, came out in
  1853.

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Jane Eyre 1

• This novel is in the form of a fictional
  autobiographical experience, with some authentic
  autobiographical experience.
• The experiences of the penniless, unattractive
  child at first in the household of her unfeeling
  aunt Mrs. Reed and later at Lowood Asylum--a
  charitable school--are the subject of the earlier
  and most generally admired part of the book.
• Later she becomes governess to the ward of a rich
  landowner, Mr. Rochester, whose terrible secret
  is his mad wife this part of the story is a
  mixture of romantic love, romantic horror and
  social naiveté, together with a truthfulness to
  feeling which still keeps the heroine convincing
  and interesting.

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Jane Eyre 2

• In the third section, Jane is sought in marriage
  by a clergyman, St John Rivers, a man of rigorous
  honor and ideals, whom she refuses after a
  telepathic communication from Rochester because,
  unlike the passionate but morally imperfect
  Rochester, he does not love her.
• Her marriage to Rochester at the end of the book
  is again oddly compounded of naiveté,
  romanticism, self-deception and truthfulness.

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Jane Eyre An Innovative Novel

• It ran contrary to the puritanic tradition that a
  good woman did not need to feel physical passion
  or require it
• It presented a romantic heroine whose nature and
  appearance is impossible to sentimentalize or
  idealize
• It is the first novel told in the first person in
  which the narrator's personality is not just a
  window through which the events are seen but also
  defines the quality of the events as we
  experience then through her mind.

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Jane Eyre In Critics Eye

• Jane Eyre was the text which acted as a catalyst
  in feminist criticism in the 1980s through the
  medium of S. Gilbert and S. Gubar's The Madwoman
  in the Attic (1979), in which the unstable female
  characters in texts written by women were seen as
  doubles of the same heroine and products of the
  suppression of the feminine.

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Emily Brontë (18181848)

• It is, however, for her only novel, Wuthering
  Heights (1847), that she is chiefly famous.
• The novel is unique in its structure and its
  vision the former is so devised that the story
  comes through several independent narrators.
• Her vision is such that she brings human passions
  (through her characters Heathcliff and Catherine
  Earnshaw) against society (represented by the
  households of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross
  Grange) with extraordinary violence, while at the
  same time retaining a cool artistic control.

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Wuthering Heights
The title of the book is the name of an old
house, high up in the Yorkshire moors, occupied
by the Earnshaw family.
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Wuthering Heights

• Emily Brontë's aim seems to have been to present
  an image of the feminine personality under the
  social constrictions of the civilization of the
  time.
• Women were not supposed to possess the wilder,
  instinctive feelings which were acknowledged in
  men and girls' training, among the middle and
  upper classes, was a systematic inhibition of
  anything of the sort.

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Wuthering Heights

• Cathy, has this element in herself awakened by
  her early association with Heathcliff and though
  her marriage with Edgar Linton is in many ways
  ideal both personally and socially, she can never
  afterwards be fully herself "Nelly, I am
  Heathcliff."
• Heathcliff represents the savage forces in human
  beings which civilization attempts vainly to
  eliminate them.

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Wuthering Heights

• Much of the interest of the book lies in the
  brilliant complexity of the structure, the dual
  narrative, time shifts and flashbacks, as well as
  the original handling of Gothic and Romantic
  elements, and how they color the evocation of
  houses and landscapes.

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Anne Brontë (18201849)

• Works
• Agnes Grey (1847)
• The Tenant of the Wildfell Hall (1849)

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George Eliot (18191880)
Life

• George Eliot is the pen-name of Mary Ann Evans.
• She was the daughter of a land-agent in the rural
  midlands her father's work (the management of
  estates) gave her wide experience of country
  society and this was greatly to enrich her
  insight and the scope of her novels.

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George Eliot

• Brought up in a narrow religious tradition, in
  her early twenties she adopted agnostic opinions
  about Christian doctrine but she remained
  steadfast in the ethical teachings associated
  with it.
• She began her literary career with translations
  from the German of two works of religious
  speculation in 1851, she became assistant editor
  of the Westminster Review, a journal of great
  intellectual prestige in London.

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George Eliot

• Her friendship with George Lewes led to a union
  between them which they both regarded as
  amounting to marriage this was a bold decision
  in view of the rigid opposition in the English
  society of the time to open unions not legalized
  by the marriage ceremony.

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George Eliot Works

• Adam Bede (1859), (????)
• The Mill on the Floss (1860), (????????)
• Silas Marner (1865), (?????)
• Romola (1862-3)
• Felix Holt (1866),
• Middlemarch (1871-2) and,
• Daniel Deronda (1876).

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George Eliot

• Her critical reputation has varied it declined
  somewhat after her death, her powerful intellect
  being considered to damage her creativity.
• She was defended by Virginia Woolf in an essay in
  1919, but was really re-established by inclusion
  in F. R, Leaviss The Great Tradition (1948).

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George Eliot

• With the rapid strides in feminist criticism in
  the 1980s, however, Eliot has been reclaimed as a
  major influence on women's writing and her works
  have been the focus of numerous feminist
  critiques, e.g.. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The
  Madwoman in the Attic (1979). George Eliot also
  wrote poems, but they were little regarded.

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Summary

• ? She was in a way a philosopher, and a
  reformist, but her reform lies in religion
• ? Her characters were not grotesque types, but
  real, common men and women, whose psychology
  Elliot revealed very skillfully to the reader
• ? Her work marks a retrogression. She shifted the
  centre of gravity in the novel from the social
  problems to the problems of religion and
  morality. She believed in the sentimental
  religion of humanity, and cherished the
  illusion that humanity and love could do away
  with the evils of capitalism.

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