{"id":575,"date":"2013-01-17T23:22:51","date_gmt":"2013-01-17T21:22:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=575"},"modified":"2013-01-17T23:22:51","modified_gmt":"2013-01-17T21:22:51","slug":"mary-brunton-anne-bronte-and-green-skinned-jane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2013\/01\/17\/mary-brunton-anne-bronte-and-green-skinned-jane\/","title":{"rendered":"MARY BRUNTON, ANNE BRONT\u00cb (AND GREEN-SKINNED JANE) <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

My colleague Andrew Monnickendam gave a plenary lecture at the last AEDEAN conference on Scottish writer Mary Brunton (1778-1818), one of the authors he deals with in his new book The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations (Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone)<\/em>. His presentation of Brunton\u2019s Self-Control<\/em> (1811) did call my attention, as the heroine Laura paints when in dire poverty to support her father, and her would-be-seducer bears the name of Hargrave. This seemed quite close to Anne Bront\u00eb\u2019s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall<\/em>, as the heroine Helen Graham, a runaway wife, paints to keep herself and her little son, and is the object of the sexual passion of a man called Hargreave. I did ask Andrew whether there was evidence that Bront\u00eb had read Brunton, and it seems she might have. We do know that Austen read Self-Control<\/em> and called it an \u201cexcellently-meant, elegantly-written work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have just finished reading Brunton\u2019s novel and I\u2019m now convinced that Anne Bront\u00eb had read. It might even be the case that she decided to experiment with the romantic triangle and fancy the heroine already married to the libertine, meeting only too late the right gentleman. I\u2019ll call this \u2018echotextuality\u2019 rather than \u2018intertextuality\u2019 as I really have no way to prove my thesis and, anyway, it does not really matter except for my pleasure in finding literary echoes. I agree and disagree with Austen\u2019s sneer, as I have found Brunton more brisk than elegant and her plot, although at points the stuff of silly melodrama, also too close for comfort to the patterns of real misogynistic abuse (Anne\u2019s Tenant<\/em> is, of course, an early masterpiece in this, with her portrait of domestic horrors). <\/p>\n

Brunton\u2019s Scottish directness can be seen in the opening chapters, in which she has young Laura fence off a very direct attempt at seduction by Hargrave. The poor thing spends the following four years defending herself from the same man, no easy task as he is aided by Laura\u2019s own aunt, Lady Pelham, who tortures her mercilessly to see her married to this dashing, handsome heir (what a difference with Helen\u2019s own aunt!). Funnily enough, I was reading one evening in front of the TV and during a pause I chanced upon a Mexican soap opera with practically the same characters, situation and dialogue!<\/p>\n

In 19th century novels the line separating seduction from downright rape is quite thin, and Laura is subjected to a second desperate attempt from which only a miracle saves her. My complain, I think, is that she is saved only because she\u2019s the heroine while another poor girl is less lucky \u2013I don\u2019t know if this is what Austen found improbable. One of my male students asked me quite perplexed whether the minute analysis of his feelings that Anne\u2019s hero Gilbert Markham engages in is realistic. I answered yes as I believe this is a post-Romantic novel about individuals who do care, above all, about feeling. Brunton\u2019s novel, however, also touches the improbable when it comes to the many turns and twists given to the feelings that Laura has for Hargrave (for she wants him but is morally repelled by his unruly sexuality), Hargrave for her (a classic case of craving for what he can\u2019t have) and the third member of the triangle, the manly but gentle De Courcy. Brunton\u2019s insistence on reporting rather than using dialogue and the histrionic quality of that dialogue when it materialises have filled me with impatience and hilarity in turns \u2013but I confess I haven\u2019t been able to let go of the book until seeing Laura make the safer choice and the villains get their come-uppance.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m writing about Brunton and Bront\u00eb at the end of a very busy day that I have spent mainly organising an article on John Scalzi\u2019s Old Man\u2019s War<\/em> SF saga. This is, believe me, quite a good love story about John and Jane, a couple who first meet when he, aged 75, is recycled into a 25-year-old post-human supersoldier. She, a soldier of an even less human, superior breed, has been born fully adult from his dead wife\u2019s DNA. Both are green-skinned as their chlorophyll-rich skin uses sunshine as an alternative source of energy. Inevitably they fall in love and, once they are given new human-looking bodies they start an alternative pacifist life, somewhat complicated by the discovery that Jane still remains super-human.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s really crazy to see how women in fiction have changed and, well, I\u2019m sorry to say that despite my sympathies for the suffering Laura and Helen, my heart is with green-skinned Jane. As a working woman with her own independent income I am developing an increasing resistance to 19th century lady heroines rewarded with money and sweet men (and who abandon painting as quickly as they can). Jane, in contrast, is awesome and I mean it in the sense that her tremendous efficiency at work generates awe \u2013both as a ruthless killer and later as a ruthless hero. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny to think that Jane comes from the same time and place as Laura as, after all, what is Jane if not another version of Frankenstein\u2019s she-monster? In the end, then, I choose Mary Shelley. Sorry Mary, sorry Anne (and sorry Jane… Austen). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My colleague Andrew Monnickendam gave a plenary lecture at the last AEDEAN conference on Scottish writer Mary Brunton (1778-1818), one of the authors he deals with in his new book The Novels of Walter Scott and his Literary Relations (Mary Brunton, Susan Ferrier and Christian Johnstone). His presentation of Brunton\u2019s Self-Control (1811) did call my […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,46,37],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-575","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","category-the-tenant-of-wildfell-hall","category-victorian-literature","tag-gender-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=575"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/575\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=575"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=575"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=575"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}