Having posted already about a new Charlotte Brontë publication at the start of July, the month finished with a second: a chapter in this new book, Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives, edited by Amber K. Regis and Deborah Wynne and published by Manchester University Press. The book traces Charlotte Brontë’s legacies from the time she was writing to the present day and I’m delighted to have my work included among a fantastic set of contributors.
My chapter, titled “Brontë countries: nation, gender and place in the literary landscapes of Haworth and Brussels”, looks at how these two locations developed distinctly different Brontë afterlives in the 19th century and beyond. Haworth is familiar to many as a key Brontë location, and the Yorkshire landscape of “Brontë country” is central to the enduring cultural myth of the Brontës. Even before Charlotte Brontë’s death in 1855, intrigued readers had begun to visit the Parsonage, and the publication of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë in 1857 instigated a steady stream of visitors that has continued to the present day, generating a significant tourist industry at Haworth.
Brussels also holds an important place in Brontë’s work (as my last article explores, it afforded Brontë new opportunities for urban wandering that shape her novel Villette) and while on a much smaller scale, generations of readers have gone in search of another “Brontë country” to be traced in the city’s streets (as I have too – I blogged a photo-essay of Brontë’s Brussels here, and reflected on “Finding Brontë in Brussels” here).
An unofficial commemorative plaque in the Rue Terarken, Brussels
In this essay for Charlotte Brontë: Legacies and Afterlives I explore the history of literary tourism in Brussels, focusing particularly on late-nineteenth century accounts. I look at how the unofficial and less scripted nature of Brussels literary tourism – tourists typically make their own way through the streets, a copy of Villette in hand serving as guidebook – allows instead for alternative narratives of Charlotte Brontë to plotted into the cityscape, narratives which especially emphasise connections between gender, identity and place. I suggest that at the moment of her bicentenary, these narratives offer an important complement and counterpart to the dominant cultural image of Brontë as she is associated with Haworth and the Yorkshire landscape, and offer new perspectives from which to consider her works and their afterlives.
My article “‘A still ecstasy of freedom and enjoyment’: Walking the city in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette” has beenpublished online in the Journal of Victorian Culture. In this piece, I suggest that Brontë’s writing of women’s city walking makes a significant contribution to the idea of the flâneuse. Through a reading of Brontë’s letters from Belgium and her 1853 novel Villette, I argue that Brontë writes herself and Lucy Snowe into a growing canon of strolling city women, and that she brings a new perspective to the construct of the flâneuse through an embodied articulation of urban city wandering.
I start by looking at the prevalence of travel in Brontë’s letters, locating her within a new wave of women on the move in the mid-nineteenth century. There is a competing tension between the desire for mobility – “such a strong wish for wings” – and the reality of containment within the home, that runs through her letters, and this goes on to shape her fictional writing.* I then turn to her letters from Belgium: the city afforded Brontë new opportunities for “threading the streets”, and she starts to develop an attentiveness to the relationship between body, mobility and space that is developed more substantially in Lucy Snowe’s city encounter in Villette. Here, the thrill of city walking – “a still ecstasy of freedom and enjoyment” – emerges as an acutely embodied experience, and I argue that through this Brontë carves out a new discursive space for her woman walker, shifting from the spectatorship of the flâneur to a more fully sensory experience of the urban environment. This becomes crucial to the strong sense of autonomy and agency that walking affords women; at the same time, Brontë recognises the difficulties of mobility for women, and in the final section I look at how she negotiates this tension through highly embodied accounts of Lucy’s wandering in later sections of Villette.
Two book reviews published this month: my review of Jude Piesse’s British Settler Emigration in Print, 1832–1877 is now available in Literature & History 25.2, and my piece on The Brontë Sisters In Other Wor(l)ds by Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett is in the latest issue of Victorian Studies (58.4).
I will be speaking next weekend at the Literary Yorkshires workshop, taking place at the University of York on Saturday 21st May 2016. My talk ‘Brontë Countries: The Literary Landscapes of Haworth and Brussels in Charlotte Brontë’s Legacy’ will explore the different ideas that have collected around Haworth and Brussels in Brontë’s legacy, and how Brussels might offer a useful space for re-thinking some of the ideas about Brontë at Haworth.
In honour of Charlotte Brontë’s bicentenary later this month (21st April), the Brussels Brontë group are running a series of blog posts throughout April. I have contributed a piece on “Finding Brontë in Brussels – reflections on literary tourism” in which I reflect on the trip I made two years ago as I started to research “Brontë’s Brussels” (full photo-essay here). This research will be published later this year in a collection Charlotte Brontė: Legacies and Afterlives (ed. by Amber Regis and Deborah Wynne, Manchester University Press 2016) and in the blog post I look at how the trip helped me to conceptualise some of the ideas in that piece.
I’m very pleased to say that my monograph Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation is scheduled for publication with Palgrave Macmillan in September 2015, and a short blurb and contents can now be found on the publishers’ website.
And here’s a quick preview of the various novels discussed in chapter:
Chapter 1: ‘Wandering out into the World’: Walking the Connected Nation
Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop
George Eliot, Adam Bede
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
Chapter 2: ‘Flying from the grasp’: Embodying the Railway Journey
Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son
Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret
Chapter 3: ‘It’s all one’? Continental Connections
Charlotte Brontë, The Professor and Villette
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit
Chapter 4: ‘The distance is quite imaginary’: Travelling beyond Europe
As part of my visit to Brussels I attended the events organised by the Brussels Brontë group, who hold an annual Brontë weekend in March/April. This year the speaker was Dr Nicholas Shrimpton from the University of Oxford, and his subject was Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley (1849).
It’s fair to say that this is the least favourite of Charlotte Brontë’s novels, among readers and critics alike, and from the time of its publication to the present day has attracted far less interest than Jane Eyre and Villette. I’m in the minority who find the novel both enjoyable and of academic interest, and having taught Shirley a couple of times on The English Nineteenth-Century Novel I’ve definitely gained a much greater appreciation of it – it’s a pleasure to teach as there is simply so much to say, and the novel is rich with interesting scenes to analyse in light of gender and political debates (it’s also one of the few novels where I find myself wanting to really persuade students of how much they should love it, something I usually try to resist!).
But it has to be said that much of this interest, and indeed the novel’s scope for analysis, comes from its problematic nature in terms of thematic and structural integrity. It this that formed the basis of Nicholas Shrimpton’s talk, in which he assessed the case for and against Shirley, exploring in detail both the novel’s problems and its possibilities. Most interesting was that Shrimpton made the case for Shirley as a ‘panoramic’ novel on a par with Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: we know that Charlotte Brontë greatly admired Thackeray’s work, and Shirley, he argued, is her attempt at undertaking a novel of such scale and scope. Ultimately, it is hugely flawed, but it is also hugely ambitious. Shrimpton really captured that what makes the novel so exciting is the many fractures and disjunctures that occur throughout the text. The text’s handling of the “woman question”, and its eventual ‘failure’ at sustaining proto-feminist arguments, is an apt case in point: while on the one hand, the final marriages of Caroline and Shirley come as a disappointment after the novel’s earlier promise in questioning and challenging gender conventions, at the same time it is here that Brontë most usefully illustrates the strength of such conventions and the need for change – for both the women in the story, and for the woman writer, there simply is no other realistic option but to end with a marriage.
Shrimpton also highlighted other contextual issues that are illuminating on how we read it – he focused particularly on the Luddite/Chartist conflation (or not), and also spoke of Brontë’s worry that the text would be read as too similar to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton, published the year before. It was also interesting, in light of my literary geography excursion that weekend, to hear Shrimpton discuss the idea of ‘Shirley country’ (as distinct from ‘Brontë’ country’) as well as talking about the novel’s continental connections. The talk was an excellent reminder that Shirley deserves more attention as perhaps the most interesting, and certainly illuminating, of Charlotte Brontë’s works.
Yesterday (31st March) marked the anniversary of the death of Charlotte Brontë, and it is fitting that I have just returned from a weekend exploring an oft-overlooked part of her life: Charlotte Brontë’s time in the city of Brussels. Although it is well known that two of her novels, Villette (1853) and The Professor (published 1857) are based on her time as a student and teacher in the Belgium capital, the importance of Brussels is typically given less attention other than as a topographical reference-point for her novels. In my research I’m exploring the legacy of Charlotte Brontë in Brussels over the past 150 years, and this visit was the first step in seeing the sites for myself and meeting the Brussels Brontë Group: the group’s regular events and tours bring together people of all nationalities who are united by their love of the Brontës, with a special interest in Emily and Charlotte’s time in the city. I had a wonderful time attending a lecture (more of which in the next post), having dinner with the group to talk all things Brontë and Brussels, and then going on a walking tour of Brontë locations. I also retraced the route alone, and what follows here is a photo-essay of my journey around this lesser-known “Brontë country” – if you’re unfamiliar with the Brontë story, you can start by reading more about what brought the sisters to Brussels, and how it influenced their work, here.
Focusing on the question “what constitutes 19th century studies today?” this one-day conference at the University of Sheffield provided an interesting set of papers on the poetry, novels, photographs, spaces and journeys across the nineteenth century and into its cultural afterlives today. While the day demonstrated that nineteenth-century studies remains a lively and active field in its own right, there were also noticeable cross-overs with the themes and questions raised at the Neo-Victorian Cultures conference last month, suggesting that there are many useful cross-currents between the two fields.
On that note it was unfortunate that I missed Mark Llewellyn’s keynote paper, but in a later panel on Churches and Asylums, the resonances between 19th-century topics and the present day were at the fore of discussions of space and geography. Stef Eastoe explored the spatial design and geographical location of asylums to reveal new perspectives on the communities that formed within asylums, and on the relationship between asylums and the local area. Her work on the Caterham asylum revealed fascinating insights into the ways in which asylums were designed and suggested important ways in which asylums were integral to the local community, playing an active role in shaping the history and development of the local area. In the ensuing discussion, Stef also spoke about the contemporary conversion of asylums and workhouses (for example, into luxury apartments) which can seek to erase the history of the building’s former use. In contrast, Adam M. Klups‘s paper on converting disused nineteenth century churches for residential use discussed how these conversion projects have to retain key features of the original architecture; this can produce a kind of doubleness in the appearance of buildings that are as much products of the era of their conversion – and of their geographical location – as they are of their nineteenth-century context.
Another key area of focus was the Brontës, and I was pleased to join fellow Brontë scholars Erin Johnson and Jenny Pearce on a panel about the Brontës and governesses. Erin’s paper traced the trajectory of the Byronic hero throughout Charlotte Brontë’s work, from the early Angrian stories through to Jane Eyre; from this perspective, Brontë’s first novel becomes situated as an end-point in terms of its narrative of masculinity. This provided an interesting recognition of the significance of cross-period development in Brontë’s work, drawing attention to the way in which seminal texts of the Victorian era demonstrate continuity with the concerns and themes of earlier periods in the century. My paper (abstract here) took Villette as an example of how reading 19th century novels through their journey narratives provides new perspectives on familiar concerns around nation, and I looked at how the journey narrative rearticulates the way in which we understand the England-Belgium relationship throughout Villette. The theme of journeying was explored further in Jenny Pearce’s paper about travelling governesses. Looking at the narratives of two governesses that travelled with families to Egypt, Jenny’s analysis raised interesting issues about how the social position of the governess afforded her a different experience of, and approach to, travel; these governesses were experiencing places usually far beyond the realm of women (and men) in their social position, but being outside the typical model of the English traveller means that their perspectives on tourist sites represent some interesting divergences from the usual views expressed in travel writing.
Throughout the day, other papers covered some fascinating insights into nineteenth-century poetry and criticism, the role of photography in literature, and gothic and fantasy narratives. One of the key issues that the title “Rethinking the Nineteenth Century” provoked was that of the relationship between Victorian Studies and Nineteenth Century Studies, and how the two terms are applied and used by scholars; for those of us that bridge both categories, how, when and why do we position ourselves as Victorianists or Nineteenth-Centuryists? Following some interesting conversations on this subject at Neo-Victorian Cultures (which also brought to mind the question of neo-Victorian vs. neo-Nineteenth Century), I’m going to blog further about this in my next post for the Journal of Victorian Culture onlinewhich will be released in the next couple of weeks.
My visit to Liverpool this week for the Neo-Victorian Cultures conference signalled a bit of a change in direction from my usual research interests. Although I’ve long had an interest in neo-Victorian fiction and enjoy reading it in my spare time, my research has stood firmly in the Victorian period since the start of my PhD. Over the last year, however, I’ve become increasingly interested in the ways in which the Victorians are situated in contemporary culture and how these engagements with the Victorian past are put to cultural work. This stemmed, of course, from the Dickens bicentenary which I’ve written about frequently on this blog, and I’d also begun to explore the intersections of place, nation and mobility in some of the bicentenary celebrations that focused on “Dickens and London” in a couple of recent papers.
Victorians at the Olympic Opening Ceremony, 2012
I felt, though, that it would be beneficial to put this research into a slightly different context and to consider the ways in which the issues around place and nation intersected with debates and trends in neo-Victorian culture more widely, and to think about what these cross-currents might offer both areas of the field. So my paper “Locating the Victorians: Mobility, place and the past in neo-Victorian culture” was something of an exploration in this line, testing the neo-Victorian waters to see how these conversations might take shape. While in previous work I’ve focused on the local-global iterations of Dickens and London in the 2012 context, in this paper I considered literary tourism as a negotiation between past and present, seeking to understand the ways in which it might fit within neo-Victorian frameworks of reinterpretation and rediscovery. The panel proved to be both interesting and helpful, and I was grateful to the very engaged audience who asked interesting questions about the bicentenary, different forms of exploration of Victorian places, and authenticity of experiences. I also very much enjoyed fellow panellist Ben Poore’s paper about three Victorian spaces that have been restored in recent years – and if you’re in London this week looking for something to do, consider going to the Dalston House art installation which looks like a lot of fun!
Victorian spaces
The rest of the conference was highly stimulating and enjoyable. Margaret Stetz’s keynote looked at laughter in neo-Victorian fiction, questioning when did we begin to laugh at the Victorians, and would that moment constitute the moment at which we can define “neo-Victorianism” coming into existence? Helen Davies’ keynote on sex and the neo-Victorian freak show looked at the way in which conjoined twins Chang and Eng were interpreted in their own day and retrospectively, focusing on how issues around sex and morality are handled both in Victorian discourses and in neo-Victorian reinterpretations of these.
The panel on rewriting Jane Eyre raised some interesting questions about the cultural afterlives of the Brontë’s: why always Jane Eyre, and Charlotte Brontë, as the focus of interest? Do we need to know the Brontës before we understand the fictions they inspire – how would Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea read without prior knowledge of Jane Eyre? A panel on Neo-Victorian Geographies explored the use of space in neo-Victorian fiction, film and TV, from the labyrinthine underground spaces of horror films such as Death Line and Creep (Paul Dobraszczyk), to the (overground) railways as spaces evocative of Victorian criminality (Joanne Knowles). Material culture was also well represented in a panel about authenticity and neo-Victorian fiction: Kym Brindle’s discussion of A.S. Byatt’s Possession looked at the novel’s fascination with material texts – bundles of letters, for example – as fetishized, desired objects that summon up ideas around the authenticity of the past. Joanne Ella Parsons explored the meanings of different foods in Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet, taking us through discussion of oysters, chocolate and watercress to consider why food remains such an evocative symbol in the neo-Victorian novel.
The final part of the conference (for me) was the roundtable on Global NeoVictorianism with Ann Heilmann, Kate Mitchell, Rosario Arias, Monika Pietrzak-Franger and Patricia Pulham. The papers set in train some indicative ideas around the global manifestations of neo-Victorian culture: what counts as neo-Victorian fiction, and how much validity does “neo-Victorianism” have in a global context’ – should we move to think about “neo-nineteenth-centuryism”? What engagement is demonstrated with British Victorianisms in other global contexts – such as Australian writing about nineteenth-century Australia? And how do we define Victorian, let alone neo-Victorian?
Sadly I had to leave at this point in the conference, but the roundtable took me full circle to my paper and the negotiations between past-present in a local-global context that I had started to tease out, so I left with a head full of ideas for future directions. I thought the conference was an excellent forum for debate, well attended with a lively and enthusiastic audience, and I’m sure much of this was thanks to the fabulously hard-working team behind the conference, so thank you for putting on such an enjoyable few days!
Dr Charlotte Mathieson 