Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T09:06:30.110Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Visual Culture and Scopic Custom in Jane Eyre and Villette

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Jane Kromm
Jane Kromm
Affiliation:
Purchase College
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Art making and art viewing activities steeped in assumptions about gender recur throughout Jane Eyre and Villette. This paper will argue that Charlotte Bronte developed these fine arts devices as part of a carefully crafted feminist critique of spectatorship and representation. Bronte pursued this end by demonstrating that incidents relating to the production and reception of visual culture were relevant for visual experience more broadly understood by linking these events in the narrative to “scopic custom”; that is, the art experiences of Bronte's characters are presented as occurring in relation to the customary, gendered patterns of looking and being looked at which dominated Victorian society. This strategic interweaving of visual culture with scopic custom allows Bronte to accentuate their interdependence as a socio-cultural dynamic of critical significance, and to illuminate their share in the cultural and social constraints affecting women as producers and objects of representation.

Type
Editors' Topic: Charlotte Bronté
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , fall 1998 , pp. 369 - 394
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

Alexander, Christine and Sellars, Jane. The Art of the Brontës. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Bacon, Alan. “Jane Eyre's Paintings and Milton's Paradise Lost.” Notes and Queries 31 (1984): 64–65.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barker, Juliet. The Brontes. New York: St. Martin's, 1995.Google Scholar
Bellis, Peter. “In the Window Seat: Vision and Power in Jane Eyre.” English Literary History 54 (1987): 639–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bermingham, Ann. Landscape and Ideology. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.Google Scholar
Bermingham, Ann. “The Origin of Painting and the Ends of Art: Wright of Derby's Corinthian Maid.” In Barrell, John, ed. Painting and the Politics of Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1992: 135–164.Google Scholar
Boase, T. R. S.English Art, 1800–1870. Oxford: Clarendon, 1959.Google Scholar
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. New York: Norton, 1971.Google Scholar
Brontë, CharlotteVillette. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1984.Google Scholar
Charlier, Gustave. “Brussels Life in ‘Villette.’” The Brontë Society Transactions 12.5 (1955): 386–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crosbie, Christina. “Charlotte Brontë's Haunted Text.” Studies in English Literature 24 (1984): 701–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Crosbie, Christina. “Villette and the Ends of History.” The Ends of History: Victorians and the Woman Question. New York: Routledge, 1990.Google Scholar
Fraser, Rebecca. The Brontës. Charlotte Brontë and Her Family. New York: Crown, 1988.Google Scholar
Friedman, Joan. “Every Lady Her Own Drawing Master.” Apollo 105 (04 1977): 262–67.Google Scholar
Gaskell, Elizabeth. The Life of Charlotte Brontë. London: Dent, 1971.Google Scholar
Gates, Barbara. “ ‘Visionary Woe’ and its Revision: Another Look at Jane Eyre's Pictures.” Ariel 7 (1976): 36–49.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Sandra and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.Google Scholar
Jacobus, Mary. “The Buried Letter: Feminism and Romanticism in Villette.” Women Writing and Writing about Women. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1977. 42–60.Google Scholar
Johnson, Patricia E. “ ‘This Heretic Narrative’: The Strategy of the Split Narrative in Charlotte Bronte's Villette” Studies in English Literature 30 (1990): 617–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Johnstone, Christopher. John Martin. New York: St. Martin's, 1974.Google Scholar
Kelly, L. Duin. “Jane Eyre's Paintings and Bewick's History of British Birds. Notes and Queries. 29 (1982): 230–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Klingender, Francis. Art and the Industrial Revolution. Frogmore: Paladin, 1972.Google Scholar
Kromm, Jane. “The Feminization of Madness in Visual Representation.” Feminist Studies 20.3 (Fall 1994): 507–35.Google Scholar
Matus, Jill L. “Looking at Cleopatra: The Expression and Exhibition of Female Desire in Villette.” Victorian Literature and Culture 21: 345–67.Google Scholar
McLaughlin, M. B. “Past and Future Landscapes: Pictures in Jane Eyre.” The Victorian Newsletter 41 (1972): 22–24.Google Scholar
Millett, Kate. Sexual Politics. Garden City: Doubleday, 1970.Google Scholar
Millgate, Jane. “Narrative Distance in Jane Eyre: The Relevance of the Pictures.” Modern Language Review 63.2 (04 1968): 315–19.Google Scholar
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by Duel in the Sun.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989:14–26; 29–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newman, Beth. “The Situation of the Looker-on: Gender, Narration, and Gaze in Wuthering Heights.” PMLA 105 (1990): 1029–41.Google Scholar
Newton, Judith. “Villette.” Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778–1860. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1981: 86–124.Google Scholar
Nunn, Pamela, ed. Canvassing. Recollections of Six Victorian Women Artists. London: Camden, 1986.Google Scholar
Parker, Roszika and Pollock, Griselda. Old Mistresses. London: Routledge, 1981.Google Scholar
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984.Google Scholar
Ruskin, John. Modern Painters. 5 vols. London: Allen, 1900.Google Scholar
Spark, Muriel. The Bronte Letters. London: Peter Nevill, 1954.Google Scholar
van Hasselt, Andre. Histoire de Peter Paul Rubens. Bruxelles: Societe des Beaux-Arts, 1840.Google Scholar
Waagen, G. F.Peter Paul Rubens. His Life and Genius. Ed. Jameson, Anna. Tr. Noel, Robert. London: Saunders, 1840.Google Scholar