Cultural Imperialism
|
"...doctor's who were so keen to label and objectify women."
The quote above is as good an example of what is wrong with this book as I can find. The ideas of "labelling" and "objectifying" would have been meaningless to a Victorian, they are modern concepts, pray then how could the "doctors" have been so keen to apply them. Mistaking a current view of the past for how people actually saw themselves then permeates the whole book. The belief that people, who had the misfortune to live in an era before literary theory and feminism saved us from ignorance, have to be saved by the retrospective application of said ideas is one of the great (unacknowledged) cultural imperialisms of our time.
This book tells us little we didn't know before. Of course the Bronte's have become mythical, but then so have Shakespeare, Dickens and Richard Burton.
Ms Miller also makes much of how Charlotte manipulated her image, particularly in her relationship with Elizabeth Gaskell, to paint herself as sympathetically as possible. It is of interest that in the introduction to her book Ms. Miller manages to mention a debillitating illness she suffered for four years, the death of her father and the birth of her son. Perhaps she hoped like Charlotte to deflect criticism by this strategy? Not from me!
|
|
Sisters are doin' it for themselves
|
|
This book is for those who have been seduced by Gaskell's image of a miserable Charlotte Bronte shuffling along the cobbled streets in her clogs, and have found it difficult to reconcile this idea with the sensuality of her novels. Lucasta Miller strips away nearly 150 years of myth and downright nonsense and describes with wit and lucidity how the sisters' reputations have fallen victim to the attitudes and interpretations of successive generations. More than just another book about the Brontes, this work examines the art of biography and the changing trends in this genre. As with many other writers, the sisters have become public property and, as such, there is a tendency for us to become focussed on the authors rather than their literary canon. Lucasta Miller urges us to return to the novels in order to learn about these enigmatic women, and that is exactly what I intend to do.
|
|
|
An excellent, unusual examination of the Bronte myth
|
|
The previous review is too good to improve on, but I would like to say that this is one of the best biographies I've read since Adam Sisman's Boswell's Presumptuous Task. The biography of biographies might seem arid and over-scholarly to the general reader but this is witty, shrewd, unsnobbish and full of insight. Hugely impressive and enjoyable.
|
|
|
The Brontes: Fact or Fiction?
|
|
Our expectation of books about the Brontes is that they will be biographies, literary studies or contributions to the Haworth heritage industry. The Bronte Myth is none of these, but offers a subtle and challenging exploration of the territory that lies between. As soon as the sisters first published (under their Bell pseudonyms), the speculation began about who they were, initially a simple matter of identity and gender, but very soon creating myths about their nature and significance. Emily and Anne being almost instantly removed from the scene, the first creators of the Bronte Myth were Charlotte herself and, after her death, her biographer Mrs. Gaskell. A century and a half later, the sisters have been re-created to suit successive generations and philosophies and the myth renews itself in film, popular song, coach trips, tea rooms and country biscuits. This powerful and changing myth is explored with scholarship and wit by Lucasta Miller whose range of reference is indicated by 40 pages of notes (to 250 pages of text), largely source acknowledgements. Countless biographies (from the astute to the absurd) are examined with forbearance and/or irony and popular culture is not neglected. It's refreshing to find a scholarly account giving mentions to Lip Service's disingenuous Bronte parody, Withering Looks, and the Bronte Society's canine look-alike competition (post-modernist irony, surely?). Inferences and connections are unfailingly revealing, with a shrewd examination of Stella Gibbons' comic masterpiece, Cold Comfort Farm, as a reaction to 1920s passionate nature myths of Emily Bronte, and the bold decision to finish the book with the effect of the Bronte myth on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, 'in the public mind...the Cathy and Heathcliff of their generation'. I missed a comment on James Kirkups witty and apposite poem, A Visit to Bronteland', but otherwise the range of cultural reference is overwhelming. Not that 'overwhelming' is a word that can be readily applied to a book that makes the academic accessible to the general reder. For a study that depends largely on a fascinatng deconstruction of Gaskell's 1857 biography, it is also impressively up-to-date, incorporating Shared Experience's 1997/99 theatre version of Jane Eyre (though I cannot share Miller's enthusiasm for the production) and even a passing reference to Michael Berkeley's 2000 opera which similarly finds some identification between Jane and the first Mrs. Rochester. A pity that the still-underrrated Anne Bronte gets so little of Lucasta Miller's attention, but the book is about the Bronte Myth and in that myth Anne is always the sister in the kitchen making the tea.
|
|
|
United States | 
United Kingdom | 
Canada