Picturing Charlotte Brontë’s Artistic Rebellion? Myths of the Woman Artist in Postfeminist Jane Eyre Screen Adaptations

Adaptation ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-269
Author(s):  
Catherine Paula Han
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Women Artists ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Return Home ◽  
Franco Zeffirelli ◽  
Silent Era

Abstract Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (1847) has been regularly adapted for the screen since the silent era. During the 1990s, a trend emerged in which cinematic and television versions of Brontë’s novel paid increased attention to the protagonists’ identities as amateur artists. To explain this phenomenon, this article examines Jane Eyre (Franco Zeffirelli, 1996), Jane Eyre (ITV/A&E, 1997), Jane Eyre (BBC, 2006), and Jane Eyre (Cary Fukunaga, 2011). It proposes that these productions contribute to the evolution of Brontë’s authorial mythology by heightening their heroines’ similarities with the writer, another amateur artist. In so doing, these adaptations benefit from the reputations of Brontë and her work as rebelliously feminist. Nevertheless, these women artists’ rebellions are distinctly postfeminist. To demonstrate its argument, the article contextualizes contemporary Jane Eyre adaptations within their postfeminist cultural landscape. Postfeminism, however, is a contested term. Hence, this analysis participates in broader debates that interrogate postfeminism as a concept and its persistent fascination with nineteenth-century creative women. Through comparisons of the adaptations, this article will delineate the development of the woman artist trope to reveal how postfeminist conceptualizations of women’s creativity have shifted since the 1990s. In particular, the woman artist displays an increased desire to ‘return home’. Such retreatist narratives exploit but also obscure the fact that Brontë has long signified the perceived tension between traditional, highly domestic female gender roles and women’s creativity. As such, these postfeminist adaptations have a shaping effect on the myths that continue to circulate about Brontë’s feminism and authorship.

Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Images ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Advocacy Role ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.

Blackface Minstrelsy and the Reception of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-320
Author(s):  
Julia J. Chybowski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Social Class ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Black Swan ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Blackface Minstrelsy ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis article explores blackface minstrelsy in the context of Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield's singing career of the 1850s–1870s. Although Greenfield performed a version of African American musicality that was distinct from minstrel caricatures, minstrelsy nonetheless impacted her reception. The ubiquity of minstrel tropes greatly influenced audience perceptions of Greenfield's creative and powerful transgressions of expected race and gender roles, as well as the alignment of race with mid-nineteenth-century notions of social class. Minstrel caricatures and stereotypes appeared in both praise and ridicule of Greenfield's performances from her debut onward, and after successful US and transatlantic tours established her notoriety, minstrel companies actually began staging parody versions of Greenfield, using her sobriquet, “Black Swan.” These “Black Swan” acts are evidence that Greenfield's achievements were perceived as threats to established social hierarchies.

scholarly journals Writing their Own Way: American Women, Palestine’s Bedouins and Issues of Safety in the Nineteenth Century

1970 ◽  
pp. 52-57
Author(s):  
Jim Ross-Nazzal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
American Women ◽  
Women Travelers ◽  
Return Home ◽  
Travel Accounts

Throughout the nineteenth century, more and more Americans traveled abroad, especially after the American Civil War (1861-1865). Many, upon their return home, published their travel accounts. I have collected and analysed the published accounts of fifty American women. What follows is an investigation into how American women travelers who ventured to Palestine perceived and interacted with Palestine’s Bedouin populations by examining their published travel accounts.

scholarly journals Synchronicity of social change and the construct of gender roles: Traditionalism and modernity as contents of mainstream model of female gender roles in women's magazines during the last quarter of 20

2002 ◽  
pp. 267-278
Author(s):  
Isidora Jaric
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Women's Magazines ◽  
Self Management ◽  
Research Model ◽  
Women's Magazine

The main intention of the research is to retrospectively decode changes in mainstream construct of female gender roles within the period of ''developed self-management socialism'' (1970s), period of structural crisis of socialism (1980s) and post-socialist period of Serbian/Yugoslav society. The mainstream construct of female gender roles will be reconstruct from Serbian women's magazine 'Bazar''. Through the basic presumptions of theoretical framework the research will try to conceptualize theoretical approach which will correspond with co called 'new communicative research model' which will be capable to incorporate contemporary changes within the process of communication among the emitter and recipients in order to better understand the content of the message.

Making Advice Modern

2021 ◽  
pp. 9-21
Author(s):  
Julie Golia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Conduct Books ◽  
Traditional Gender Roles ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The Way

From early periodicals to conduct books, advice in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries was largely a one-way transmission from advice giver to receiver. It also served conservative ends, reinforcing traditional gender roles to wide audiences, and soothing male anxieties about cultural change. But transformations in media and in American culture at the end of the nineteenth century paved the way for a new and strikingly modern paradigm of advice—one that was interactive, public, flexible in topic and form, and woman-centered. This chapter offers an overview of the rise of the advice column and frames its genesis in the context of the changing newspaper and advertising industries.

Gender

2015 ◽  
pp. 31-48
Author(s):  
Emily Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Gender Roles ◽  
Female Gender ◽  
Gender Performativity ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Male Nurse ◽  
Gender Characteristics ◽  
Opposite Gender

This chapter evaluates how Pedro Almodóvar's Talk to Her (2002) plays with the idea of gender being a fixed attribute and sees gender instead as something flexible and fluid. Gender roles in Talk to Her are arguably represented as a socially constructed rather than innately determined with characters in careers typically assigned to the opposite gender. Lydia is a female bull fighter in a typically chauvinist industry and Benigno is a male nurse in a very female heavy environment. Almodóvar's blurring of the strict rigid definitions of masculinity and femininity can be viewed as postmodernist. The chapter then considers gender performativity in relation to Almodóvar's body of films. In Talk to Her, Lydia, Marco, and Benigno can be seen to perform both male and female gender characteristics at different times.

The Romance

2021 ◽  
pp. 63-92
Author(s):  
Nerina Rustomji
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
Jewish Women ◽  
Christian Women ◽  
Nineteenth Century Literature ◽  
Oriental Tale ◽  
Male Authority ◽  
Century Literature

This chapter demonstrates how nineteenth-century literature transcended religious frameworks and questioned the nature of male authority and feminine purity. Although the houri may have been based on assumptions about Islam, the term “houri” eventually was applied to Jewish and Christian women. The chapter surveys mentions of the houri in the form of the “Oriental tale” and argues that writers made use of the figure of the houri to present their own ideas of idealized Christian and Jewish women. Texts in the chapter include poems by Byron, Ivanhoe, Jane Eyre, Algerine Captive, Book of Khalid, engravings, and American monthly magazines for ladies.

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