Browsing by Author "Crain, Samantha"

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    Judicious Improbable as Critique: The Brontës’ Possible Fictions and Their Reception
    (2022-01) Crain, Samantha
    This dissertation examines how the Brontës augment natural fiction with Gothic and sometimes folklore in their novels and how these augmentations serve their critiques and affect the novels’ reception, through the formation of a judicious probable. Charlotte Brontë attempted to eschew other genres in favor of natural fiction in The Professor, using an ethos of fiction learned from Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine but the book failed to secure a publisher. The first chapter explores the complexities of Brontë’s first-written novel and its reception as an unsatisfying precursor to her later works. Charlotte had learned her lesson with Jane Eyre, incorporating Gothic and folklore to craft the autobiography of a young governess consistently misread by authority figures as a changeling in a novel that asserts Jane’s right to depict her own experiences without external corroboration. The second chapter juxtaposes Charlotte’s evolving ethos with reviewers’ objections to its improbability and controversial subject matter. Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights differently combines natural fiction with Gothic and folklore, centering the text on the unreliable accounts of two primary narrators whose loyalty to middle-class rationality cannot hold up in the regional world of the text. They demonstrate the necessity of an expanded view of the possible in their ideologically motivated readings of Cathy, Heathcliff, and Linton Heathcliff as changelings. The fragmentation of the text’s Gothic prevents the text from overstepping the possible and allows the novel’s primary characters to dramatize a proto-polyamorous love ethic and the author’s own mysticism. The third chapter posits links between the novel’s ethos and its vexed critical reception. Anne Brontë eschews folklore but employs a domestic Gothic alongside her natural fiction by enclosing her heroine’s diary account within the first-person narrative of the novel’s hero. Gilbert Markham initially demonstrates his incompleteness and then experiences Helen’s domestic Gothic alongside the reader and is emotionally educated thereby. Anne’s novel asserts not only Helen’s right to depict her own experiences but to use those experiences didactically to instruct others—both men and women. The final chapter marks how Anne’s decision to stay firmly within the mundane possible made her immediate reception if anything more caustic than those of her sisters’ preceding novels. In each of these novels, the Brontës judiciously employ the improbable in order to expand natural fiction, refusing to be relegated or dismissed. Their efforts were popular but often disputed by reviewers who found the improbability and coarseness of their novels undermined their claims to seriousness. This dissertation shows how the Brontës depiction of uncommon experiences by combining genres suggests how exclusionary probable fiction is and explores the implications of that exclusion by refusing to replicate it.