Engl 360: The Brontės

The 1840s were a tumultuous period in Britain: the aftermath of the Abolitionist and Reform debates had left the nation exhausted and keen to get on with the business of "just living." The increasing prosperity and standard of living for an expanding middle-class seemed to promise just that. Yet, food shortages of the early ‘40s, the famine in Ireland (1845-50), revelations of brutal working condition in factories and mills, the mushrooming of unplanned cities, and the increasing gap between rich and poor ("the two nations") stirred unrest amongst many in the lower classes. In this rich ferment, the Brontė sisters – Charlotte, Emily, and Ann – wrote their remarkable novels.

Writing from the remote-from-London locale of Yorkshire, the unmarried daughters of a struggling parson, the Brontės seem removed from the 40s tumultuous history; yet, their novels were hardly outside history. Variously hailed as powerful, original, vulgar, coarse, intense, passionate, and peculiar, these novels clearly touched a nerve. Indeed, despite their seeming marginality – geographical, gender, social, marital – the Brontės were firmly embedded in their social and cultural moment. The premise of this course is that their novels were simultaneously reflecting as well as reshaping 19th-century debates and concerns; they participated in, responded to, and offered resolutions to the day’s most charged issues. We will immerse ourselves in some of these issues, specifically on gender as it intersected with questions of race and class. We will read 19th c treatises on women, their role in society and aspirations for independent lives, their simultaneous alliance with and oppression of the working classes and racial others, and their appropriation and displacement of the languages of class oppression and abolition in developing a "proto-feminist" position. As we trace the reception of the Brontė sisters’ controversial novels in the 19th century as well as their status as ur-feminist texts in the 20th, we will consider how definitions of "feminism" have shifted over time.