Tracing the Wutherthe Brontëan outsider from Victorian to neo-Victorian fiction

Abstract

This thesis offers an analysis of the affective potentiality—that is, the potential to affectively speak back to the discourses that hold up structures of power—of a selection of Brontëan narratives from Victorian to neo-Victorian fiction. In so doing, one of the main aims of this work is to take some ‘first steps’ towards arriving at a definition of the Brontëan and, for that matter, the (neo-)Brontëan, through the figure of the Brontëan outsider. In this study, I have conceptualized and analysed this character, who proves to be ubiquitous in the popular imaginary and cultural memory of the English-speaking world since its conception, at least, in the West. Apart from the various motifs associated to the Brontës’ novels, their setting and their historical context, this work proves that there are other characteristics that make up the Brontëan and the Brontëan outsider. It appears that what seems to be characteristically Brontëan has a marked affective quality due to the ‘unruliness’ that the Brontëan outsiders’ status as liminal figures bestow them. In particular, the pain of this outsiderness and the desire to sustain the self in their position at the threshold are considered ‘unruly’ affects by those narratives that attempt to control their alleged ‘unstable’ bodies. Chapters one and two provide an overview of this figure in Victorian fiction—namely in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Villette (1853). Chapter one proposes a Wuthering Heights model of outsiderness that can somehow be followed as a pattern in other Brontëan novels, though expanded and complicated by the dialogues established among Jane Eyre and Villette, which occupies chapter two. In a similar way to how outsiders in Wuthering Heights respond to and shape their outsiderness, Charlotte Brontë’s protagonists—Jane Eyre and Lucy Snowe—seem to reject or re-appropriate their metaphorical cages in pursuit of their painful desires to sustain their non-normative selves. Chapters three and four show how the Brontëan outsider has been rewritten and (re-)imagined in neo-Victorian fiction. In this respect, chapter three offers a brief overview of neo-Victorianism before delving deeper into the analysis of Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Michael Stewart’s Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff (2018), and Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). In fact, Wide Sargasso Sea, Ill Will and Rebecca share, from the perspective of their outsiders, the reasons behind the process of becoming outsiders. Lastly, chapter four analyses three onscreen works that have appeared in the 2010s and that could be considered imaginings—a term that I coin to refer to this type of seemingly unintended or more displaced appropriations—William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016), the television series Taboo (2017—), and Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015). These works also fall under the neo-Victorian umbrella for many reasons; however, that does not mean that they are unproblematic revisitations of Brontëan tropes and narratives. In any case, the process of comparing and contrasting these stories to the Brontëan hypotexts productively defamiliarises each text, creating a position from which we can revisit and interrogate the Brontëan novel, our contemporary assumptions of it, and our own cultural landscape. The ensuing (neo-)Brontëan cinematic language connects Brontëan and neo-Brontëan fiction, further attesting to the constructive dialogues that can be established thanks to the interconnectedness of outsiders in the popular imaginary.