Book Description
In "We Are Three Sisters," Drew Lamonica focuses on the role of families in the Brontës' fiction of personal development, exploring the ways in which it recognizes the family as a defining community for selfhood. Drawing on extensive primary sources, including works by Sarah Ellis, Sarah Lewis, Ann Richelieu Lamb, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Lamonica examines the dialogic relationship between the Brontës' novels and a mid-Victorian domestic ideology disseminated in conduct books and home guides that held the family to be the original nurturer of subjectivity. Arguing that the sisters share a common interest in the familial influences on self-development and self-understanding, Lamonica draws connections among their works to prove this argument.
About the Author
Drew Lamonica is Professional in Residence at Louisiana State University Honors College in Baton Rouge and a Rhodes Scholar.
We Are Three Sisters: Self and Family in the Writing of the Brontes FROM THE PUBLISHER
During the nineteenth century, as millions of British citizens left for the New World, hearth and home were physically moved from the heart of the empire to its very outskirts. In Domesticity, Imperialism, and Emigration in the Victorian Novel, Diana Archibald explores how such demographic shifts affected the ways in which Victorians both promoted and undermined the ideal of the domestic woman. Drawing upon works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Samuel Butler, Charles Dickens, Charles Reade, and William Makepeace Thackeray, the author shows how the ideals of womanhood and home promoted by domestic ideology in many ways conflicted with the argument in favor of immigration to imperial destinations. While biographers have widely acknowledged the importance of family relationships to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte and to their writing processes, literary critics have yet to give extensive consideration to the family as a subject of the writing itself. In "We Are Three Sisters," Drew Lamonica focuses on the role of families in the Brontes' fictions of personal development, exploring the ways in which their writings recognize the family as a defining community for selfhood.
Drawing on extensive primary sources, including works by Sarah Ellis, Sarah Lewis, Ann Richelieu Lamb, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Lamonica examines the dialogic relationship between the Brontes' novels and a mid-Victorian domestic ideology that held the family to be the principal nurturer of subjectivity. Using a sociohistorical framework, "We Are Three Sisters" shows that the Brontes' novels display a heightened awareness of contemporary female experience and the complex problems of securing a valued sense of selfhood not wholly dependent on family ties. The opening chapters discuss the mid-Victorian "culture of the family," in which the Brontes emerged as voices exploring the adequacy of the family as the site for personal, and particularly female, development. These chapters also introduce the Brontes' early collaborative writings, showing that the sisters' shared interest in the family's formative role arose from their own experience as a family of authors. Lamonica also examines the seldomrecognized influences of Patrick and Branwell Bronte on the development of the sisters' writing.
Of the numerous studies on the Brontes, comparatively few consider all seven novels, and no previous study has undertaken to examine the Brontes' writing in the context of mid-Victorian ideas regarding the family -- its relationships, roles, and responsibilities. Lamonica explores in detail the various constructions of family in the sisters' novels, concluding that the Brontes were attuned to complexities; they were not polemical writers with fixed feminist agendas. The Brontes disputed the promotion of the family as the exclusive site for female development, morality, and fulfillment, without ever explicitly denying the possibility of domestic contentment. In doing so, the Brontes continue to challenge our readings and our understanding of them as mid-Victorian women. "We Are Three Sisters" is an important addition to the study of these fascinating women and their novels.
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