scholarly journals The Effeminized Hero or Authorial Projection: Charlotte Bronte’s The Professor

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Mahameed Mohammed
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Patriarchal Society ◽  
Feminine Roles

Charlotte Bronte in most of her novels, as suggested by Gilbert and Guber, in The Mad Woman in the Attic (1979), has worked out a vision of an indeterminate, usually female figure (who has often come “from the kitchen or some such place”) trapped—even buried—in the architecture of a patriarchal society and imagining, dreaming or actually devising escape routes, roads past walls, lawns, antlers, to the glittering world outside. Like Charlotte Bronte, many nineteenth century women almost wrote in “a state of “trance”, about their feelings of enclosure in “feminine” roles and patriarchal households. And wrote, too, about their passionate desire to flee such roles or houses” (313). 

scholarly journals "A Strange Fever of the Nerves and Blood": Nervous Illness in the Literature of the Nineteenth Century

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Sarah Parry
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Wilkie Collins ◽  
The Public ◽  
Health And Wellbeing ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Rich

<p>In the nineteenth century, the discussion of personal health and wellbeing became almost a national pastime. With publications such as the British Medical Journal and Lancet freely accessible to the everyday reader, common medical terms and diagnoses were readily absorbed by the public. In particular, the nineteenth century saw the rapid rise of the ‘nervous illness’ – sicknesses which had no apparent physical cause, but had the capacity to cripple their victims with (among other things) delirium, tremors and convulsions. As part of the rich social life of this popular class of disorder, writers of fiction within the nineteenth century also participated in the public dialogue on the subject. Authors such as Charlotte Brontë, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle all constructed narratives involving nervous sufferers, particularly hypochondriacs and victims of brain fever. Despite writing in a wide variety of genres ranging from Gothic to realist, the roles played by the illnesses within the texts of these authors remain a vital feature of the plot, either as a hindrance to the protagonists (by removing key players from the plot at a critical moment) or a method of revealing deeper aspects of their character. Nervous illnesses carried with them social stigmas: men could be rendered feminine; women could be branded recklessly passionate or even considered visionaries as ideas about the nerves, the supposed seat of emotion and passion, brought into sharp relief the boundaries between physical and mental suffering, and physical and spiritual experiences.  The central aim of this thesis is to examine the cultural understanding of nervous illness and how nineteenth-century texts interacted with and challenged this knowledge. It focuses on how nineteenth-century authors of different genres – particularly the Gothic, sensation and realist genres – use the common convention of nervous illness – particularly hypochondria and brain fever – to develop their protagonists and influence the plot. Through comparisons between literary symptoms and those recorded by contemporary sufferers and their physicians, this thesis analyses the way that the cultural concept of nervous illness is used by four principal Victorian authors across a range of their works, looking at how hypochondria and brain fever function within their plots and interact with gender and genre conventions to uphold and subvert the common tropes of each. Whether it aids or hinders the protagonist, or merely gives the reader an insight into their personality, nervous illness in the Victorian novel was a widely used convention which speaks not only of the mindset of the author, but also of the public which so willingly received it.</p>

Ballad Knowledge and the Poetics of Repetition

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-140
Author(s):  
Alexandra Socarides
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Female Figure ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Traditional Ballads ◽  
And Gender

Chapter 3 explores a genre (the ballad) that was wildly popular in nineteenth-century America, and investigates the ways in which women poets entered into discussions about authorship, poetics, and gender through their engagements with it. Focusing in particular on tropes of faithlessness, pride, laziness, and general “badness” that had long marked traditional ballads, this chapter shows how these tropes came to be associated with women and how American periodicals seemed to embrace the circulation of such ballads. But as women poets took up this genre and were faced with how to rewrite this female figure, they pushed its primary convention—repetition—to its limits in order to make explicit the particular problem that accompanies the recitation of “ballad knowledge” for women. Instead of looking away from the scenes of repetition that disempower women, these ballads go right to the center, employing repetitions to new ends.

Collapse of the Scenic Method

2021 ◽  
pp. 111-151
Author(s):  
Brian Gingrich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nathaniel Hawthorne ◽  
Henry James ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Kate Chopin

Beyond the imperative or appearance of realism, some scenic impulse in nineteenth-century fiction determines narrative pace. One looks, then, to Charlotte Brontë, to Nathaniel Hawthorne, and even to the realist Balzac in his theatrical tendencies. This chapter reckons with how the scenic impulse that engenders scene-and-summary fiction also leads to its collapse. Chapters become scenes; chapter entries become rising curtains; summaries become prologues for a scene that waits beyond the threshold. One sees it in Zola, Howells, Kate Chopin …. But the seeming culmination appears when Henry James, in the 1890s, avows that he is bound to “the scenic method.” James’s career is one of the most illuminating representations of the arc of the scene-and-summary novel, and its climax appears at the end of the nineteenth century. From there, with late James, one senses a resurgence of romance in the form of narrative lyricism, and one begins to wonder whether pace will be dissolved in that lyrical expanse.

"The Burning Clime": Charlotte Brontë and John Martin

1995 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 285-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Dynamic Relationship ◽  
Gradual Shift ◽  
The Way

The name of the Romantic painter and printmaker John Martin has long been associated with the Brontës. His pictures hung on the Brontë Parsonage walls; the Brontë children both copied his images in paint and transposed them into "print" in their tiny handsewn magazines. His sublime landscapes and gigantic imaginary scenes of ancient architecture-an amalgamation of Classical, Egyptian, and Indian styles-provided unlimited scope for the young architects of Glass Town and Angria. Yet the dynamic relationship between Martin's lurid canvases and Charlotte Brontë's writings extends beyond the simple use of pictorialism. In his work she found an analogue for her own frustrating experience, and her response to his work significantly contributed to her personal development as an artist. This essay attempts to trace the way in which Brontë's writings register her early-nineteenth-century response to Martin's work in a gradual shift from her initial enthusiasm for his landscapes toward a distrust of his illusive promises of grandeur.

scholarly journals The Kreutzer Sonata

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ali Mustofa ◽  
Fithriyah Inda Nur Abida ◽  
Fahri Fahri
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Physical Abuse ◽  
Fundamental Problem ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Patriarchal Society

Women's inferiority persists, particularly in patriarchal societies. In Russia, women have always been treated as second-class citize (Placeholder1)ns to men. As a result, because it is a system that already exists in society, women's inferiority is the fundamental problem of inequality for women in Russia. The novel The Kreutzer Sonata explores the inferiority of female characters in nineteenth-century Russia, where the church's influence is still strong. The aims of the research were to examine about women inferiority and struggle in patriarchal society as portrayed in the novel The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. The data was collected using the following methods: 1) attentively reading the novel to determine which sections featured inferiority and struggle, and 2) collecting notes and marking the facts of inferiority in the marriage and society. 3) categorizing; and 4) analyzing. Based on the research, it was discovered that there were two major forms of women's inferiority: 1) the feeling of powerlessness in decision of marriages. This powerlessness happens to both the mother and the daughters. 2) being subjected to discriminatory treatment, such as a lack of freedom and mobility based only on sexuality, as well as physical abuse and loss of inheritance.

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