Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Sibling Rivalry: The Boring Brontës

If you ever find yourself stranded amid misty moors, brooding heroes and foreboding working-class people speaking in an almost incoherent dialect, be seriously concerned. Chances are you’ve stumbled into a Brontë novel.

The most acclaimed works written by Charlotte and Emily Brontë are Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, respectively. There was indeed a third sister, named Anne, but she’s the bonus Jonas of literature. Maybe if she wrote about syphilis-infected wives and madness instead of governesses she would have been a tad more memorable. Back to our main sisters, the dynamic duo of Victorian literature.

Let us begin with Jane Eyre, a standard Victorian novel about the development of the title character. This unfortunately can become stale to the modern audience. We want to read about one person’s constant failings about as much as we want to see incessant Facebook status updates. Jane would be riveting to read about if she had the attitude of, say … Kanye West.  However, Charlotte Brontë writes with a severe inferiority complex and a tendency to preach.  At one point Jane leaves her job on a whim. Understandably, she had some misgivings about her employer but she just ends up acting outlandish, in the aggravating way, not the Kanye way. She wanders in the moors for a while, refuses to ask for help despite her lack of food and ends up getting taken in by three strangers in the middle of nowhere. Are we taking a tally of the poor life choices being made here?

Some critics champion Jane as a figure of female empowerment. Maybe I missed something, but she seemed to base her happiness around her relationship with a very disturbing dude named Mr. Rochester. He has a dark secret, which I will save for you to discover on your own time. At one point, he dresses as a gypsy woman in order to trick Jane into admitting her feelings for him. Seriously, guy? Also, major points deducted from Jane for being stupid enough not to realize he was putting on a falsetto. I’m sure he was about as convincing at switching genders as Amanda Bynes circa She’s The Man.

Wuthering Heights on the other hand can best be described as proto-soap opera, making it even less plausible. Besides the general Brontë trend of characters with no ability to live without their significant others, the abundance of cousin-loving also troubled me. This was pre-Mendel, mind you. Cousin-loving was widely accepted and sometimes even preferred to keep the bloodlines pure. By pure I mean riddled with chromosomal imperfections, insanity and bad teeth. Also, the repetitive naming got old fast. Ms. Emily, we understand that you’re trying to tell us something by having Catherine name her daughter Catherine, but it just isn’t very practical.

These novels are fairly readable and relatively shorter than their contemporaries. If you are an English major you must read them, even if you start having uncontrollable urges to violently throw them on the ground like I did. Or maybe you’ll be swept up in the melodramatic camp like so many others. If you are just causally interested in the Victorians (if that’s even possible) try George Eliot’s Silas Marner. It’s short and smart.  If you’re very ambitious, try Middlemarch, an epic of provincial proportions.

What can we take away from these novels? Nothing is as it seems; if a man really loves you he’ll dress as a woman to prove it and don’t marry someone until you check their attic to make sure there are no skeletons up there, or live people for that matter.

 

Elizabeth Garbitelli is a junior in the College and is currently studying abroad in Oxford, England. She can be reached at [email protected]. Literary Snarknotes appears every other Friday in the guide.

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