Sandra Hagan and Juliette Wells, eds. The Brontës in the World of Arts. Hamphire, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008. ISBN: 978075465752-1. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

Multivalent and delightfully inspiring, this interdisciplinary collection of essays on the novels of the Brontës ranges from such diverse approaches as opera adaptations of Wuthering Heights (1847) to fashion studies of Villette (1853). Beginning with the visual arts, Christine Alexander, in “Educating ‘The Artist’s Eye’: Charlotte Brontë and the Pictorial Image,” reads Jane Eyre (1847) as a fictional autobiography and establishes the impact of Thomas Benwick’s History of British Birds, especially the vignettes at the end of each section, on the composition of the novel. This chapter is also devoted to the development of Charlotte Brontë as an artist and, by extension, to the women of the period who were taught to copy rather than create original works of art. Richard Dunn also reads Jane Eyre as a fictional autobiography focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s writing as subject to the male influence and criticism in the world around her, in particular to her brother Branwell Brontë who encouraged Charlotte to devote her attention to realistic rather than exotic topics. Juliette Wells treats Jane’s transition from fantasist to realist and juxtaposes events in Charlotte Brontë’s life to those of Jane Eyre. In “Jane Eyre’s Other: The Emergence of Bertha,” Patsy Stoneman explores the representations of the madwoman in different media—fiction, theater and film. Jean Rhys’s sympathetic representation of Bertha in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) has had an enormous impact on film adaptations of the novel: “The immense revision that Jean Rhys’s novel makes to Jane Eyre is first to give a voice to Bertha…and then to show exactly why this voice cannot be heard” (201). Stonemann discusses several film and stage adaptations of the novel which bring Bertha’s victimization to the foreground. “No Brontë novel,” Sandra Hagan points out, “evinces more interest in the politics of the visual realm than Charlotte Brontë’s Villette…Thus it presents rich possibilities for the study of the interplay between author and illustrator” (170). Here Hagan examines some of the problems involved in commingling the visual arts and the visual politics in Edmund Dulac’s illustrations of Villette, including the disparity between the narrator’s representation of Lucy as a single autonomous woman versus the illustrator’s stereotypical representation of her as a spinster, a “valueless shadow” within the “scopic economy” which Lucy criticizes: Discussing the major illustrations in the novel, Hagan argues that Dulac’s misinterpretations of the text attempt to nullify Brontë’s challenges to gender ideology (173). Unlike most of the novels of the period devoted to women artists, Antonia Losano claims, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) represents art as “a lucrative occupation rather than a hobby.” By making her heroine a working artist, Anne Brontë articulates her “rigorous theory of mimesis,” expressing a “strong warning against art as self-expression” (46). Helen’s development from an amateur imagist to a professional realist artist “allows her to shed a self-expressive, Romantic model of esthetic production that can render women intensely vulnerable to male scrutiny and analysis” (66). Helen’s mature style, characterized “by freshness of colouring and freedom of handling,” aligns her painting with “the landscape styles of Constable or the drawing masters like Giplin or the early Ruskin” (60). As Losano demonstrates, professionalism allows Helen “to begin short-circuiting the traditional erotic structure of the aesthetic experience: the woman-as-object can now become the woman-as-subject” (66). Ann Jackson discusses Charlotte Brontë’s ambivalent attitude towards the theater, arguing that despite mixed feelings,the forms and conventions of theater shape and transform characters in the novels, especially in Villette and Jane Eyre. Theater in Villette “brings compression, selectivity, intensity, and decisive movement; the surrounding text provides background, ramification, and perspective” (129). …