Culture
‘To Walk Invisible: the Brontë Sisters’ To Broadcast On WOUB-TV Sunday
By: Emily Votaw
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Emily, Charlotte, and Anne Brontë grew up the daughters of a priest in a parsonage nestled on the windy moors near the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire over 150 years ago.
Emily’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s The Tenant of WildfellHall (among some of their other works) would eventually be lauded as English literary classics; but there was a time when the sisters were just wildly imaginative children sequestered alongside their equally brilliant brother (Patrick Branwell) in a dilapidated parsonage, dreaming up stories to fill the days after the death of their mother and their two sisters, Maria and Elizabeth.
This Sunday at 9 p.m., WOUB-TV will broadcast PBS Masterpiece’s To Walk Invisible: the Brontë Sisters, a two-hour dramatization of the three-year period in which the sisters rocketed from absolute obscurity to literary fame.
“(The Brontës’) work resonates incredibly well today,” said Joseph McLaughlin, an associate professor of English at Ohio University who specializes in Victorian-era literature. “I teach Jane Eyre frequently, and students love Jane. Students tend to identify with her more than any other Victorian character. They imagine themselves as her.”
Jane Eyre is one of the first novels to exemplify the use of a first-person narrator. The narrative develops through the lens of Eyre’s experience of her love affair with the mysterious Mr. Rochester and the numerous personal and spiritual hurdles that she thrusts herself over throughout the novel.
“At the introductory level of the curriculum, (the Brontës’ works) are great examples to use to think about literary form and narration,” said McLaughlin. “Jane Eyre is wonderful novel to teach to get students thinking about what it means to have a first-person narrator – what it means to look into a world in which everything is being filtered through Jane and her values and her emotions.”
McLaughlin said that Wuthering Heights stands as a clear-cut example of another distinctive and now prolific narration style.
“(Wuthering Heights) is an example of a novel where you have multiple points of view going on, where you have different narrators and you don’t have overarching third person narrator and you’re trying to piece together a story from multiple viewpoints,” McLaughlin said.
McLaughlin noted that a Google image search for cover artwork for Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre churn up all types of liberties in interpretation. One might find a vaguely Edward Gorey inspired illustration for a newer edition of Withering Heights, intended to emphasize the novel’s romantic, gothic qualities. Jane Eyre might be depicted a bit like a grocery store romance book, it’s cover depicting a steamy scene between the novel’s brainy protagonist and the mysterious Mr. Rochester in strokes of heavy paint.
“The Brontës’ work plays in a couple different registers,” said Nicole Reynolds, an associate professor in both Ohio University’s English and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments. “On one level, Jane Eyre is the story of an orphaned girl who falls in love with a brooding man with a dark past; it’s a romance. You can also read it in a more explicitly feminist vein and examine the fact that Jane initially rejects the love story for some time – she asserts herself and acts as an autonomous agent when it was explicitly difficult for her to do so.”
Reynolds said that when feminist literary criticism gained prominence in the ‘70s and ‘80s, academics began looking for a lineage of women in literature, a search that included examination of the Brontë’s work.
“When I first read Jane Eyre, I read it as a love story, skimming over the parts about Jane making her way in the world,” said Reynolds. “Now, as an older woman, I’m terribly impatient with Rochester – I see right through him, and I’m more interested in when Jane has to go out into the world.”
“When I first read Jane Eyre, I read it as a love story, skimming over the parts about Jane making her way in the world. Now, as an older woman, I’m terribly impatient with Rochester – I see right through him, and I’m more interested in when Jane has to go out into the world.” – Nicole Reynolds
Jane Eyre is a fiercely independent heroine with a strong inner life, defying the expectations and wishes of a patriarchal society. When the book was first published, Charlotte did so under a masculine pseudonym, Currer Bell, a custom for female writers at the time. Upon Jane Eyre’s critical reception, it was thought to have been surely written by a man because of the intensity of the main character.
“On one hand, (the Brontës) seem incredibly conventional and sheltered,” said McLaughlin. “But on the other, I think that they give us a window into the way in which children and young adults who were brought up in a seemingly conventional setting had access to incredible imaginative lives through literature – lives that were anything but conventional, boring or mundane.”