Abstract
This introductory chapter examines the intersections between embodiment, material culture, and Charlotte Brontë’s life and writing. It charts the evolution of Brontë studies following the rise of New Historicism and seminal scholarship from the 1990s and early 2000s by critics and biographers such as Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars, Juliet Barker, Lucasta Miller, Sally Shuttleworth, and Margaret Smith. The chapter goes on to discuss how the “material turn” and recent theories of embodiment inform twenty-first -century approaches to the presentation and reception of Brontë’s art, life, and legacy. Focusing on the interdisciplinary conversations that comprise the volume, the editors discuss how book history, cultural heritage, the history of dress, literary criticism, and museum curation prove vital to understanding the ways in which readers have responded to Brontë’s work from its original publication to the present day.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
Michael Frank, “The Four Brontës: Myth vs. Reality.”
- 2.
Elizabeth Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, 124.
- 3.
Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, 124.
- 4.
Lucasta Miller, The Brontë Myth, 57. For more on the mythologizing power of Gaskell’s work, see Tom Winnifrith, The Brontës and Their Background and Frank, “The Brontë Biographies: Romance, Reality, and Revision.”
- 5.
Elaine Freedgood, Idea in Things, 2. Subsequent citations are referenced by page number in the text.
- 6.
Freedgood, Idea in Things, 2.
- 7.
Freedgood, Idea in Things, 11.
- 8.
Peter Miller, “Introduction,” in Cultural Histories, 6.
- 9.
Cleanth Brooks, “New Criticism,” 598.
- 10.
Miller, Brontë Myth, 57. For an exemplary discussion of Romantic influence and “passion” in Brontë’s work see David Lodge, “Fire and Eyre.”
- 11.
Frank Trentmann, “Materiality in the Future of History,” 283–4.
- 12.
Trentmann, “Materiality in the Future of History,” 284. Here Trentmann draws heavily on Bill Brown, “Thing Theory” and Sense of Things.
- 13.
Rens Bod, Julia Kursell, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn, “Practical and Material Histories,” 1–2.
- 14.
Brown, “Thing Theory,” 7.
- 15.
Asa Briggs, Victorian Things, 4.
- 16.
Briggs, Victorian Things, 53. On the connection between cultural studies, critical interest in the Great Exhibition, and the material turn see Lyn Pykett, The Material Turn. Representative studies of material and exhibition culture include: Tony Bennett, Birth of the Museum; Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England; Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851.
- 17.
Trentmann, Empire of Things, 193. See also Porter, Oxford History of British Empire, 1–3.
- 18.
Andrew Miller, Novels Behind Glass, 6. Subsequent citations are referenced by page number in the text.
- 19.
Eva Badowska, “Choseville,” 1510. See also Charlotte Brontë to Revd. Patrick Brontë [31] May 1851, in Margaret Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 625.
- 20.
Heather Glen, Imagination in History, 234.
- 21.
Terry Eagleton, Myths of Power, 3. See also Lucasta Miller, ix for an explanation of Eagleton’s influence on her work.
- 22.
Miller, The Brontë Myth, 2.
- 23.
Miller, The Brontë Myth, 104.
- 24.
Miller, The Brontë Myth, 105.
- 25.
Charlotte Brontë to Revd. Patrick Brontë, 9 June 1849, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 219. See note on “Text.”
- 26.
Lucasta Miller, 1994.
- 27.
Eagleton, Myths of Power, xxix.
- 28.
See also Christine Nelson, The Brontës: A Family Writes with images from the extensive manuscript collection at the Morgan Library & Museum, New York and published to coincide with the 2016 exhibition Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will.
- 29.
Karen Harvey, “Introduction—Practical Matters,” 3.
- 30.
Juliet McMaster, “Art of the Brontës,” 205–6.
- 31.
Brontë to William Smith Williams, 16 August 1849, in Smith, Letters, vol. 2, 235.
- 32.
William A. Cohen, Embodied, 27. Subsequent citations are referenced by page number in the text.
- 33.
Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology, 33. Subsequent citations are referenced by page number in the text.
- 34.
“The First Shilling Day at the Exhibition,” Illustrated London News, 501. See also Richards, 37 and Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye, 56–7.
- 35.
Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 9.
- 36.
Lauren Goodlad and Andrew Sartori, “The Ends of History: Introduction,” 592. Subsequent citations are referenced by page number in the text.
- 37.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York’s exhibition, Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will, curated by Christine Nelson, ran from 30 September 2016 to 2 January 2017. The National Portrait Gallery, London’s exhibition, Celebrating Charlotte Brontë: 1816–1855, curated by Rosie Broadley and assisted by Lucy Wood, ran from 22 February to 14 August 2016. The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth’s exhibition, Charlotte Great and Small, curated by Tracy Chevalier, was on view from 1 February until 31 December 2016.
- 38.
Brontë, Jane Eyre, 338.
- 39.
Brontë to Ellen Nussey, 20 November 1840, in Smith, Letters, vol. 1, 233–4.
- 40.
Brontë, Shirley, 439.
References
Alexander, Christine and Sara L. Pearson. Celebrating Charlotte Brontë: Transforming Life into Literature in Jane Eyre. Haworth: The Brontë Society and Brontë Parsonage Museum, 2016.
Alexander, Christine and Jane Sellars. The Art of the Brontës. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Alexander, Christine and Margaret Smith. Oxford Companion to the Brontës. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Auerbach, Jeffrey. The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999.
Badowska, Eva. “Choseville: Brontë’s ‘Villette’ and the Art of Bourgeois Interiority.” PMLA 120, no. 5 (2005): 1509–23. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25486265?seq=1.
Barker, Juliet. Sixty Treasures of the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Haworth: The Brontë Society, 1988.
Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1994.
Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 1995.
Bod, Rens, Julia Kursell, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn. “Practical and Material Histories of the Humanities.” History of Humanities 2, no. 1 (Spring 2017): 1–2.
Bolt, Barbara. “Introduction: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts.” In Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts, edited by Barbara Bolt and Estelle Barrett. London: I.B. Tauris, 2012.
Briggs, Asa. Victorian Things. Sparkford: Sutton Publishing, 2003.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Edited by Stevie Davies. London: Penguin, 2006.
Brontë, Charlotte. The Letters of Charlotte Brontë: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends. 3 vols. Edited by Margaret Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995–2004.
Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley. Edited by Herbert Rosengarten and Margaret Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979b.
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. Edited by Mark Lilly. London: Penguin, 1979a.
Brooks, Cleanth. “The New Criticism.” The Sewanee Review 87, no. 4 (Fall 1979): 592–607. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27543619.
Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001): 1–22.
Cohen, William A. Embodied: Victorian Literature and the Senses. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.
Dinsdale, Ann, Sarah Laycock, and Julie Akhurst. Brontë Relics: A Collection History. Haworth: The Brontë Society, 2012.
Eagleton, Terry. Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.
Frank, Katherine. “The Brontë Biographies: Romance, Reality, and Revision.” Biography 2, 2 (Spring 1979): 141–56.
Frank, Michael. “The Four Brontës: Myth vs. Reality.” New York Times, 8 March 1996. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/08/books/the-four-brontes-myth-vs-reality.html.
Freedgood, Elaine. The Idea in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.
Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. 2 vols. London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1857.
Glassie, Henry. Material Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Glen, Heather. Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002a.
Glen, Heather. Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the Brontës. Edited by Heather Glen, 1–12. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002b.
Goodlad, Lauren M.E. and Andrew Sartori, eds. “The Ends of History.” Special issue, Victorian Studies 55 no. 4 (Summer 2013). https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/victorianstudies.55.4.591.
Hagan, Sandra, and Juliette Wells, eds. The Brontës in the World of the Arts. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008.
Harvey, Karen. “Introduction—Practical Matters.” In History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, edited by Karen Harvey, 1–23. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009.
Heritage, Barbara. “Authors and Bookmakers: Jane Eyre in the Marketplace.” The Papers of the Bibliographic Society of America 106, no. 4 (2012): 449–85.
Illustrated London News. “The First Shilling Day at the Exhibition.” British Newspaper Archive. 31 May 1851. https://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0001578/18510531/116/0031.
Lodge, David. “Fire and Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s War of Earthly Elements.” Chap. 2 in Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1966.
Lutz, Deborah. The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. London: Norton, 2016.
van Manen, Max. Researching Lived Experience, Second Edition: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016.
McMaster, Juliet. Review of The Art of the Brontës by Christine Alexander and Jane Sellars. Victorian Review 22, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 204–7.
Miller, Andrew. Novels Behind Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Miller, Lucasta. The Brontë Myth. London: Jonathan Cape, 2001.
Miller, Lucasta. Review of The Brontës by Juliet Barker. The Independent, 17 December 1994. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/no-windswept-moors-please-lucasta-miller-analyses-a-monumental-new-biography-of-literatures-most-1389886.html.
Miller, Peter. Introduction to Cultural Histories of the Material World. Edited by Peter Miller, 1–32. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2013.
Nelson, Christine. The Brontës: A Family Writes. New York: The Morgan Library & Museum, New York in Conjunction with Scala Arts & Heritage Publishers Ltd., 2016.
Otter, Chris. The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain 1800–1910. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Porter, Andrew. The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century. 3 vols, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Pykett, Lyn. “The Material Turn in Victorian Studies.” Literature Compass 6, no. 20 (2003): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2004.00020.x.
Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914. London: Verso, 1991.
Shuttleworth, Sally. Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Stack, George J. “Materialism”. In: Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy. Taylor and Francis, 1998. https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/materialism/v-1. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780415249126-DC098-1.
Stout, Janis P. “Introduction: For Use, for Pleasure, for Status: The Object World of Willa Cather.” In Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World, edited by Janis P. Stout, 1–15. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005.
Tilley, Chris, Webb Keane, Susanne Küchler, Mike Rowlands, and Patricia Spyer, eds. Handbook of Material Culture. London: SAGE Publications, 2006.
Trentmann, Frank. Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-first. London: Penguin Random House UK, 2017.
Trentmann, Frank. “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics.” Special issue, Journal of British Studies 48, no. 2 (April 2009): 283–307. https://doi.org/10.1086/596106.
Winnifrith, Tom. The Brontës and Their Background: Romance and Reality. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973.
Wynne, Deborah. “Charlotte Brontë’s Frocks and Shirley’s Queer Textiles.” In Literary Bric-À-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities, edited by Jonathon Shears and Jen Harrison, 147–62. London: Routledge, 2013.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding authors
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pizzo, J., Houghton, E. (2020). Introduction. In: Pizzo, J., Houghton, E. (eds) Charlotte Brontë, Embodiment and the Material World. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34855-7_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34855-7_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34854-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34855-7
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)