Girl Talk: "Jane Eyre" and the Romance of Women's Narration

Kaplan, Carla

doi:10.2307/1345845

Cited by 19 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 25 publications

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“…Carla Kaplan cites this scene as a triangulation in the “erotics of talk” in which Jane finds herself outside the intimacy she seeks, excluded from Miss Temple's and Helen's conversation. My sense from this passage is rather of a younger girl who is thrilled to be a part of this trio as an observer of female beauty and listener to female wisdom – and later, recalling this scene, the adult writing Jane describes hearing Helen's reading of Virgil, “my organ of Veneration expanding at every sounding line” (76).…”

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Brontë Violations: Liminality, Transgression, and Lesbian Erotics in Charlotte Brontë'sJane Eyre

Morse

2017

Literature Compass

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Among the many 2016 works celebrating Charlotte Brontë's life and work in her bicentenary year, several essays were published that urge reinterpretation of her sexuality. Influenced by decades of work in gender studies, these essays intervene not only in Brontë scholarship but also more widely in long‐running debates on lesbian historiography of the 19th century that considers whether erotic attraction between women was manifested in passionate “romantic” friendship or in sexual practice. Jane Eyre includes deep currents of lesbian desire, a reading that violently upends the marriage plot. The intense friendships that Jane finds with other women throughout her narrative pilgrimage have traditionally been viewed in Brontë scholarship from a biographical perspective or through the feminist lens of female community. This essay argues instead that Jane's Lowood relationships with Miss Temple and even more with Helen Burns are erotic, with desire and consummation frustrated. Further, memoirist and visual artist Jane painstakingly delineates other women in sketches or paintings as well as in her narrative, displaying a transgressive expression of lesbian desire under the cover of conventional feminine auspices that is most evident in the miniatures she creates of Blanche Ingram and Rosamond Oliver. If the most canonical Brontë novel – and one of the most canonical of all Victorian novels – can be newly interpreted in relation to lesbian desire, there is undoubtedly even more exciting scholarship to come not only on the Brontës' life and work but also on other Victorian novelists, particularly noncanonical writers.

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Brontë Violations: Liminality, Transgression, and Lesbian Erotics in Charlotte Brontë'sJane Eyre

Morse

2017

Literature Compass

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Voice and the Victorian Storyteller

Kreilkamp

2005

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The nineteenth-century novel has always been regarded as a literary form pre-eminently occupied with the written word, but Ivan Kreilkamp shows it was deeply marked by and engaged with vocal performances and the preservation and representation of speech. He offers a detailed account of the many ways Victorian literature and culture represented the human voice, from political speeches, governesses' tales, shorthand manuals, and staged authorial performances in the early- and mid-century, to mechanically reproducible voice at the end of the century. Through readings of Charlotte Brontë, Browning, Carlyle, Conrad, Dickens, Disraeli and Gaskell, Kreilkamp re-evaluates critical assumptions about the cultural meanings of storytelling, and shows that the figure of the oral storyteller, rather than disappearing among readers' preference for printed texts, persisted as a character and a function within the novel. This 2005 study will change the way readers consider the Victorian novel and its many ways of telling stories.

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“The best man of all”: mythologies of the storyteller

Kreilkamp

2005

Voice and the Victorian Storyteller

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Girl Talk: "Jane Eyre" and the Romance of Women's Narration

Cited by 19 publications

References 25 publications

Brontë Violations: Liminality, Transgression, and Lesbian Erotics in Charlotte Brontë'sJane Eyre

Brontë Violations: Liminality, Transgression, and Lesbian Erotics in Charlotte Brontë'sJane Eyre

Voice and the Victorian Storyteller

“The best man of all”: mythologies of the storyteller

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