The path out of Haworth: mobility, migration and the global in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and the writings of Mary Taylor

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jude Piesse
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Labour Migration ◽  
Global Space

Following Elizabeth Gaskell’s defence of her friend’s posthumous reputation in The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Brontë has frequently been associated with ideas of static and feminised local place. In Shirley, however, the extent of Brontë’s preoccupation with a more expansive vision of global space and mobility becomes apparent. This chapter explores Shirley’s sophisticated understanding of global space and mobility and reveals Brontë’s topical fascination with labour migration for single, middle-class women in the light of her friendship and correspondence with the emigrant Mary Taylor, the model for Shirley’s Rose Yorke. It concludes by showing how Taylor’s own powerful fiction and travel writing can be viewed as one of Brontë’s most radical legacies; one which has been obscured by Gaskell’s more famous memorialisation.

Good women for empire: educating overseas female emigrants in imperial Japan, 1900–45

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 436-460 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sidney Xu Lu
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Women's Education ◽  
Pacific Coast ◽  
Labour Migration ◽  
Japanese Imperialism ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Education Campaigns ◽  
Imperial Japan ◽  
Transnational Space

AbstractThis article examines two tutelage campaigns launched by Japanese social reformers targeting Japanese emigrant women in Manchuria and California in the first two decades of the twentieth century. It reveals how these two middle-class-based social campaigns jointly paved the way for the Japanese state's ‘continental bride’ policy in the late 1930s, which mobilized and exported women from across the nation to Manchuria on an unprecedented scale. Synthesizing the stories of Japan's colonialism in Manchuria and Japanese labour migration to the American Pacific coast, this study traces the convergence and flows between the women's education campaigns in Japanese communities on both sides of the Pacific. It moves the debate of Japanese imperialism beyond Asia and situates it in a transnational space encompassing the local, the national, and the global.

Visiting Earlswood: The Asylum Travelogue and the Shaping of ‘Idiocy’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick McDonagh
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Charles Dickens ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Primary Documents

In the 1850s, visitors to the Earlswood Asylum, also known as the National Asylum for Idiots, in Reigate, Surrey, wrote about their experiences for publication. Frequently, these reports were presented as forms of travel writing, with the narrator recounting the customs of the asylum natives. The middle-class, sane and (one assumes) intelligent target audiences lived far beyond the asylums, in terms of identity if not geography. The asylum inhabitants, meanwhile, are resolutely ‘other’, subjected to the visitors’ inquisitive, evaluative gaze. This chapter draws on primary documents including works by Charles Dickens and asylum propagandists such as Joseph Parkinson, Cheyne Brady and the Reverend Edwin Sidney, as well as numerous anonymous pieces, to explore how these asylum travelogues, through their own representations of ‘idiocy’, helped shape ideas of idiocy and inform social policy that affected the lives of people identified as ‘idiots’ and ‘imbeciles’ in the 1850s, 1860s and after.

“The Song They Sing Is the Song of the Road”

Transfers ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 23-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Walter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Travel Writing ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
The Road ◽  
Spatial Practice ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Static Nature

When, in the early twentieth century, British middle-class writers went on a tour in search of their country, travel writing not only saw the re-emergence of the home tour, but also the increasing appearance of the motorcar on British roads. With the travelogue playing the role of a discursive arena in which debates about automobility were visualized, the article argues that, as they went “in search of England,” writers like Henry Vollam Morton and J. B. Priestley not only took part in the ideological framing of motoring as a social practice, but also contributed to a change in the perception of accessing a seemingly remote English countryside. By looking at a number of contemporary British travelogues, the analysis traces the strategies of how the driving subjects staged their surroundings, and follows the authors' changing attitudes toward the cultural habit of traveling: instead of highlighting the seemingly static nature of the meaning of space, the travelogues render motoring a dynamic and procedural spatial practice, thus influencing notions of nature, progress, and tradition.

scholarly journals Seeking Wild Eyre: Landscape and the Environment in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre // En busca de la salvaje Eyre: paisaje y medioambiente en Jane Eyre de Charlotte Brönte

2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 150-165
Author(s):  
Jennifer D Fuller
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Charlotte Bronte ◽  
Environmental Awareness ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Jane Eyre ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Natural Landscape

Applying techniques from the growing field of ecocriticism, this article uses Jane Eyre to explore a growing environmental awareness among middle-class Victorians and demonstrate how their need to preserve a “wild” or “natural” landscape coincides with ideas of liberty and freedom prevalent in the novel. By looking at Jane’s changing interactions with and interpretations of the natural world, we can gain a better understanding of the value and interpretation of landscape to the Victorians. In Jane Eyre, Jane’s journeys continually lead her to finding a way to balance her human wants and needs with the “wildness” of the natural world.   Resumen   Aplicando técnicas del creciente campo de la ecocrítica, este artículo utiliza Jane Eyre para explorar una conciencia ambiental cada vez mayor entre los victorianos de clase media y demostrar cómo su necesidad de preservar un paisaje "salvaje" o "natural" coincide con las ideas de libertad en la novela. Al observar las interacciones cambiantes de Jane con el mundo natural y sus interacciones con éste, podemos comprender mejor el valor del paisaje y cómo se interpretaba en la época victoriana. En Jane Eyre, los viajes de Jane continuamente la llevan a encontrar una manera de equilibrar sus deseos y necesidades humanos con el "salvajismo" del mundo natural.

The Life of Charlotte Brontë

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
Keyword(s):  
Charlotte Bronte
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