Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’: Fabricating Uncertainty in the Brontë Parsonage Museum

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 279-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amber Pouliot
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Literary Celebrity ◽  
Celebrity Culture ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Critical Intervention ◽  
Domestic Cult

Abstract The 1861 sale of the Brontës’ personal effects sent relic hunters scrambling to collect the material remains of the famous family. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the collection, preservation, and veneration of relics, particularly those associated with a writer’s private, domestic life, were important aspects of literary celebrity culture and commemoration, and both the Brontë Society and the original Brontë Museum were established to collect material remains. Yet when Virginia Woolf visited the museum in 1904, she viewed Charlotte Brontë’s clothing, shoes, and accessories with considerable unease. Anticipating the concerns of the literary establishment, Woolf feared that access to Brontë’s material remains would encourage the domestic cult which had formed around her following the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). She feared it would diminish the importance of Brontë’s writing by privileging a narrative of domestic rather than literary labour. This essay considers the creative-critical intervention of Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ (2016), a collection of newly created pseudo-relics of Charlotte Brontë, framed by semi-fictional narratives that dramatize the construction, use, and significance of her personal possessions. I argue that ‘Accessories’ and biographical fiction are analogous modes of engaging with Brontë’s legacy. They respond to the anxieties articulated by Woolf through the fabrication – both literal and literary – of new pseudo-relics that (rather than emphasizing Brontë’s perceived conventional, domestic femininity) enable multiple interpretive possibilities while simultaneously acknowledging the contingent nature of our understanding of her experience.

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>

The Country Book

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-161
Author(s):  
John Evelev
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Herman Melville ◽  
Rapid Growth ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
National Space ◽  
The Social ◽  
Suburban Development ◽  
A Site ◽  
Suburban Life

Picturesque aesthetics and an increased focus on men’s domestic life shaped the rapid growth of the suburbs in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the most consequential reconfigurations of American understandings of national space. This suburban development had its own popular literary genre in the period, the country book. Although the country book is now largely forgotten and many of its more prominent examples have lapsed into obscurity, canonical writers such as Herman Melville wrote in the genre, and Thoreau’s Walden can also be understood in the context of this genre. The country book’s vision of the suburbs as a site of picturesque male domesticity that allowed for both privacy and homosocial intimacy countered a dominant vision of urban masculinity as public, individualistic, and competitive. Although the country book in general offers an idealized vision of male suburban life, individual texts also often feature deferrals, debility, and even death that threaten both male privacy and intimacy. The country book promoted the imaginative investments in suburban development at the same time that it hinted at the contradictions at the heart of middle-class masculine identity that foreclosed on that dream. In this way, as with the park movement texts discussed in Chapter 3, the country books that supported mid-nineteenth-century suburban development expressed both the social aspirations and fears of bourgeois men.

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.

WILLIAM GELL AND POMPEIANA (1817–19 AND 1832)

2015 ◽  
Vol 83 ◽  
pp. 245-281 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosemary Sweet
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Social Position ◽  
Asia Minor ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Interests ◽  
Additional Income ◽  
Archaeological Approach

This article offers an analysis of the preparation, publication and reception of the two separate versions of William Gell's Pompeiana, texts that exercised a formative influence over Victorian understanding of not just Roman Pompeii, but of domestic Roman life more broadly throughout the nineteenth century, and that highlight a transition from eighteenth-century antiquarianism to a more ‘archaeological’ approach to the past in the nineteenth century. Using unpublished correspondence that has been overlooked by other scholarship on Gell, it argues that the form and content of the volumes responded to both contemporary fascination with the history of domestic life and the need for an affordable volume on Pompeii. But the volumes also reflected many of Gell's more personal interests, developed in a career of travelling in Greece, Asia Minor and Spain, and were a product of his circumstances: they were conceived in order that Gell (and his coadjutor John Peter Gandy in the first edition) might earn much-needed additional income, and were a means through which Gell could consolidate his social position in Naples by establishing his authoritative expertise on Pompeii.

Mate Choice and Domestic Life in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Manual

1970 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gordon ◽  
M. Charles Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mate Choice ◽  
Domestic Life
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