Dr. Maribel W. Molyneaux
Honors Seminar
The Brontës: "With Courage to Endure" 

Taking as our premise that the nineteenth-century British novel is the literary child of the Industrial Revolution, the seminar examines the collected works of the Brontë sisters both as historical documents and aesthetic texts. As novel writers who were also middle-class women who worked for pay as governesses, the Brontës were deeply entangled in the conjunction of aesthetics with material reality that marked Victorian life and art. Because of the open, multiple-voiced, and exploratory nature of the novel as genre, the Brontës were able to self-consciously use the ability of the novel to continually change itself to evaluate, question, and perhaps transform the imaginative and material contexts of their own lives. The result is a group of exceptional texts that seem to reinvent the novel; the texts engage in relations not only with other novels but, in a critical way, they break down the boundaries between the sociopolitical and aesthetic realms the Brontës both inhabit and represent.  

The seminar has at its center the seven novels that comprise the Brontës literary canon: Anne's Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte's The Professor, Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette. Though we briefly explore the Angrian and Gondolian empires the sisters created in childhood along with their brother Branwell, our focus is on nineteenth-century socio-economic and aesthetic realities as they are represented in the novels. White the novels are discussed in relation to themes, images, and narrative strategies that bind them together, each novel is also viewed as an independent product. For instance, while Agnes Grey, The Professor, Jane Eyre, and Villette are all variations on the making of middle-class, wage-earning governesses into novel heroines, we argue on another level that Agnes Grey functions as a conduct book for the employers of governesses or that The Professor describes the discrepancy in wages, status, and job opportunities between male and female teachers. To establish a context in which to study the Brontë novels, course material includes biographical materials, historical specifics, and selected literary criticism. Secondary readings include excerpts from Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Fanny Ratchford's The Brontë's Web of Childhood, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic, M. Jeanne Peterson's "The Victorian Governess," Wanda Fraiken Neff's Victorian Working Women, Dominic La Capra's History and Criticism, and Julia Swindell's Victorian Writing and Working Women. 

The class meets for 3 hours a week in two sessions, one for 2 hours and one for 1 hour. Requirements: one in-class oral presentation, two exams (midterm and final), 15 pp. term paper.