Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T09:36:41.726Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Neither Monsters nor Temptresses nor Terrors”:Representing Desire in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Julia Gardner
Julia Gardner
Affiliation:
University of California, Riverside
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Although romance QUA romance is often seen as leading to the grim finality of the Victorian marriage plot, Charlotte Brontë's second novel, Shirley (1849), thwarts readerly expectations. Brontë cautions the reader that “if you think, from this prelude, that anything like a romance is preparing for you, reader, you never were more mistaken,” but also teases that “it is not positively affirmed that you shall not have a taste of the exciting” (39; ch. 1). This disavowal, coupled with contradicting hints of romance, appears in the second paragraph of Shirley and establishes the vexed dynamic surrounding the marriage plot present throughout the novel.

Type
Editors' Topic: Charlotte Bronté
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , fall 1998 , pp. 409 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Bodenheimer, Rosemarie. The Politics of Story in Victorian Social Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988.Google Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. Shirley. New York: Penguin, 1974.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Castle, Terry. “Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction.” Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing. Ed. Bristow, Joseph. New York: Routledge, 1992. 128–47.Google Scholar
D'Emilio, John. “Capitalism and Gay Identity.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Abelove, Henry, Barale, Michele Aina, Halpern, David M.. New York: Routledge, 1993. 467–76.Google Scholar
Donoghue, Emma. Passions Between Women. New York: HarperCollins, 1995.Google Scholar
Faderman, Lillian. Chloe Plus Olivia. New York: Viking, 1994.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Trans. Hurley, Robert. The History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage, 1980.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan, Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Hunt, Linda C. “Sustenance and Balm: The Question of Female Friendship in Shirley and Villette.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 1.1 (Spring 1982): 55–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Keen, Suzanne. “Narrative Annexes in Charlotte Brontë's Shirley.” Journal of Narrative Technique 20.2 (Spring 1990): 107–19.Google Scholar
Moore, Lisa. “ ‘Something More Tender Still Than Friendship’: Romantic Friendship in Early-Nineteenth-Century England.” Feminist Studies 18.3 (Fall 1992): 499–520.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roof, Judith. A Lure of Knowledge. New York: Columbia UP, 1991.Google Scholar
Straub, Kristina. Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vanskike, Elliott. “Consistent Inconsistencies: The Transvestite Actress Madame Vestris and Charlotte Brontë's Shirley.” Nineteenth Century Literature. 50.4 (03 1996): 464–88.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vidler, Anthony. “Spatial Violence.” Assemblage 20 04 1993: 83–84.Google Scholar
Zlotnick, Susan. “Luddism, Medievalism and Women's History in Shirley: Charlotte Brontë's Revisionist Tactics.” Novel 24.3 (Spring 1991): 282–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar