Jane Eyre, Anna Leonowens, and the White Woman’s Burden: Governesses, Missionaries, and Maternal Imperialists in Mid-Victorian Britain

Zlotnick, Susan

doi:10.5325/victinstj.24.1.0027

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“What Do the Women Do?”

Zlotnick¹

2014

A Companion to British Literature

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In the opening moments of The Brontës of Haworth, a 1973 BBC miniseries based on Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë, the viewer watches the little Brontës arrive in Haworth and toddle up the steps of the parsonage for the first time, as the narrator tragically intones that "the family was keeping an appointment with destiny. In thirty-five years time, all those six children would be dead." I begin my undergraduate seminar on the Brontë sisters with a short clip from The Brontës of Haworth, with its sad accounting of "the delicate Brontë sisters" who find "death and immortality" in a "remote" Yorkshire village; however, by way of a contrast, I follow it with a You Tube video, the "Brontë Sister Power Dolls" (1998), which stars fashion doll versions of Anne, Emily, and Charlotte. When an "evil publisher," voiced by a ten-year-old boy, taunts the sisters with "girls can't write books," they bombard him with their novels, transform (Transformer-style) into a Brontësaurus, and proceed to destroy an all-male literary club with their "barrier-breaking feminist vision." Both clips get a laugh, but they also serve a larger purpose. They offer a rudimentary introduction to the interpretative challenges presented by the Brontës: are they, in Terry Eagleton's memorable phrasing, "three weird sisters deposited on the Yorkshire moors, from some metaphysical outer space" (Eagleton 1975: 3) whose uneventful lives and early deaths stand in stark contrast to the high romance of their novels, or are they the feminist heroines of the English canon, whose novels of female empowerment continue to inspire readers?The story of the Brontës as the ill-fated protagonists of their own lives originates in two early biographical exercises: Charlotte's "Biographical Notice," which prefaced 3

show abstract