Serving two masters. Or the dialectics of romantic victorian literature

Auteurs

  • Sandra Sirangelo Maggio Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
  • Valter Henrique Fritsch Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Mots-clés :

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, Victorianism, Victorian Literature, Evangelicalism,

Résumé

The aim of this work is to investigate the strategies used by Charlotte Brontë, in the novel Jane Eyre, so as to solve the protagonist’s dilemma of choosing between what she considers to be morally right, or to follow her intuition and her heart. This impasse is referred to, here, as the “Victorian Predicament,” the clash between two conflicting aspects of Victorianism. On the one hand, there is the rigid code of morality, represented by the Evangelical Movement, proposing an ideal of respectability suitable for the new emerging middle classes. On the other hand, we have the influence of the Romantic Movement, which poses a new ethics and a new aesthetics. The idea suggested is that the use of symbolic imagery solves this difficulty of coping with the simultaneous commitments to morality and passion, and forges the style characterized by the use of poetic prose that is the mark of Brontë’s writing.

Bibliographies de l'auteur

Sandra Sirangelo Maggio, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Professora de literaturas de língua inglesa dos cursos de graduação e pós-graduação do Instituto de Letras da UFRGS, lotada no Departamento de Língua Modernas.

Valter Henrique Fritsch, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

Doutorando do Programa de Pós-graduação em Letras, Área de Estudos de Literatura, Especialidade Literaturas Estrangeiras Modernas, Ênfase Literaturas de Língua Inglesa.

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Publiée

16/04/2014

Numéro

Rubrique

Literaturas de expressão inglesa