Gendering Madness and Doubling Disability in Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre has a well-designed structure of a bildungsroman that focuses on the pursuit of Jane’s desire and ignores the same for Bertha. The conceptual structure conveys a linear discourse to determine a prefixed understanding of Bertha, Jane, and Rochester. In Bertha’s context, the bildungsroman operates to deliver issues of race, gender, and disability in an existential quest to ascertain and establish her madness. There is a well-designed structural correspondence of bildungsroman, interplay of dark and light binary, the desire of Jane against the asexual Bertha, and the metaphor of fire in mapping the doubling. The literary devices serve as a dominant metaphorical barrier to normalcy in Thornfield. The paper considers this authorial viewpoint on Bertha’s sickness as a construct of a parallel gendered and a more potent conceptualisation of madness. In problematising madness, the paper argues a cultural narrative of representation that is affected by the impaired mind of Bertha. It will interrogate how the narrative systematically forges a doubling within which she is objectified, influenced, muted, bounded and characteristically disabled.

Caryl Phillips’s Rewriting of the Canonical Romance as a Genre

The paper considers Phillips’s rewriting of the canonical nineteenth-century romances in three of his novels – A State of Independence (1986), The Lost Child (2015), and A View of the Empire at Sunset (2018). The three texts resettle the romance genre through the postcolonial concept of ‘home’. In A State of Independence, Phillips rearranges the role of one of Jane Austen’s most orthodox characters, the landowner Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park (1814), by transposing the Austenian character’s features to his protagonist Bertram Francis, a Caribbean man who comes back to his ancestral homeland after twenty years in Britain. In The Lost Child, chronicling literary-historical events in the present tense by transferring the life of the Brontë family into the protagonists of Wuthering Heights (1847) is for the author one way of calling into question the real sense of literature. It is for this reason that Phillips constructs a cyclic narration around the figure of Branwell Brontë, fictionalised by his sister Emily in the romance protagonist Heathcliff, and mirrored in The Lost Child in the character of Tommy Wilson. In A View of the Empire at Sunset, Phillips definitely overturns the colonial and genre categories by reassessing the in-between life of the Dominican-born writer Jean Rhys through her personal return journey to Dominica: as a result, the author of Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) (an intense rewriting of Jane Eyre) becomes a fictional character, and the literary events of her life sum up the vicissitudes both of the two ‘Bertrams’ – of Mansfield Park and A State of Independence – and the protagonists of Wuthering Heights and The Lost Child.

Intertextualidad: literatura y cine

El presente artículo trata de algunos usos de la intertextualidad entre el cine y la literatura. I Walked with a Zombie (1943) es la segunda de las nueve películas producidas por Val Lewton que dieron forma al género de terror y tuvieron una influencia duradera en el lenguaje cinematográfico. La película, que replantea la clásica novela victoriana Jane Eyre en un escenario caribeño, esboza las fallas del proceso colonizador europeo mucho antes de la llegada de los estudios postcoloniales. La novela parcialmente autobiográfica de Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), reformula Jane Eyre desde una perspectiva feminista y poscolonial por medio del punto de vista de «la loca del ático». En la novela El beso de la mujer araña (de Manuel Puig), el cine y las películas, incluida I Walked with a Zombie, constituyen el medio intertextual para la creación del personaje literario y la figura de un amor que no tiene nombre.

JANE EYRE E A CONSTRUÇÃO DE UMA VOZ DE REBELDIA

RESUMO: O presente artigo tem por objetivo analisar através da trajetória da personagem título do romance Jane Eyre, escrito por Charlotte Brontë em 1847, como uma voz autoral feminina se levanta e quebra convenções sociais, questiona relações de poder e estereótipos culturalmente estabelecidos, borrando, assim, as fronteiras entre os gêneros e tendo sempre como princípio norteador seu amor próprio e sua sede por igualdade. De forma a desenvolver uma leitura crítica da obra parte-se de uma teoria feminista-marxista, a qual entende as obras literárias enquanto projetos políticos que trazem em si as lutas e contradições do momento histórico no qual nascem e do qual falam, questionando a ideologia dominante ao penetrar na realidade social, econômica, mental e política. A compreensão do feminino, assim, não se constitui como uma verdade essencial, mas como um constructo social elaborado por uma sociedade centrada na Voz do Pai. Por fim, a questão de gênero é levada para além de suas fronteiras, dissolvendo-as e propondo-se através de Jane Eyre uma identidade não presa a um sexo delimitador de atitudes e comportamentos.

Appearances

This article re-evaluates the theoretical import of networks of signification, one of Antoine Berman’s twelve deforming tendencies in translation. Taking Jane Eyre as a case study, the article considers character description as an example of a Bermanian network and traces the physical appearance of the novel’s characters across its six Russian translations. Character description represents a network that is traceable, depends on the reader’s ability to construct a visual mental image over the course of a narrative, has a tangible impact on characterisation, and remains relevant throughout a novel. It thus offers a concrete illustration of the relevance of networks of signification as a model for the systemic interpretative potential of translation variation. This analysis paves the way for further study of Bermanian networks and the ultimate integration of this concept in translation practice.

A Veiled Love in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

The particular structure and organization of Jane Eyre surely constitute only some of the traits that favor survival of this great classic for all these centuries. They represent the hallmark of Jane Eyre, through which Charlotte Brontë has spoken to a large number of readers, using different cultural, geographical and historical interrelations in unexpected ways and forms, but always suggestive and successful. This paper aims at highlighting some of the different occultation strategies brought into play by the two emblematic, magnetic and fascinating protagonists, who sit at the loving table in Jane Eyre. The ability to conceal and unveil, to allow the feeling of love to be subtended and misunderstood is certainly one of the building blocks of the soul of a classic like Jane Eyre. It offers the possibility of maturing an interior path of redemption, of knowledge and affirmation of the self, within a delicate system, in balance between drives and reason. The continuous game of parts, between presence and absence, between what is shown and what one actually is, remains mysterious, elusive, and in perpetual becoming. Hiding love thus represents a gateway to the complexity of reality and at the same time allows us to experience other fascinations and sensations that would otherwise remain only, totally ‘ideal’.

Wide Sargasso Sea e as cartas de Jean Rhys: dessacralizando o discurso colonial

O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar quão contextual é o processo de escrita de mulheres, em especial, o do texto literário, tomando como objeto as cartas de registro da produção do romance feminista pós-colonial Wide Sargasso Sea, da escritora Jean Rhys. Por meio das cartas de Rhys, abordamos os fatores que envolveram a produção da obra, desde o conflito da autora diante da representação da personagem crioula louca no romance inglês, Jane Eyre (1847), da escritora canônica Charlotte Brontë, às estratégias para validação da sua obra na Inglaterra. Tomamos como referência perspectivas pós e decoloniais para análise dos aspectos elencados nas cartas e suscitados pelo texto literário.