An Agential-Realist Re/configuring of Helen Huntingdon as a Victorian Painter-Heroine
Keywords:
Anne Bronte; Victorian feminist imaginaries; Post humanitiesAbstract
Through mattering discourse, this work attempts to re/configure Helen Huntingdon, the heroine of Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). A diffractive reading is provided through the aegis of Karen Barad’s agential realism by relying on Victorian feminist imaginaries. Helen, the mother and Helen, the romantic partner, stands “together-apart” (Barad, 2014, p. 168) with matter (painting). There are no “absolute separations” now or (n)ever. All future renderings may (not) matter the same. This diffractive re/worlding focuses on the inseparability of Helen, the human, from the non-human thereby emerging a more than-human phenomenon.
References
Arianne, C. (2019). The Right to Rule and the Rights of Women Queen Victoria and the Women's Movement. CUP.
Barad, K. (2014). “Diffracting diffraction: cutting together-apart”. Parallax, 20:3, 168-187, Doi: 10.1080/13534645.2014.927623
Barad, K. (2010). “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/continuities, Space- Time Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today, 3.2, 240–268 Doi:10.3366/E1754850010000813
Barad, K. (2003). “Posthumanist performativity: towards an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” Signs, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2003, pp. 801-831
Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the Universe Halfway. Duke University Press.
Barad, K. (1996). “Getting real: technologies of embodiment and materiality”, keynote address, Gender, Technology, Place Conference, Rutgers University, March 30, 1996.
Barton, A. (2011). “A woman’s place: uncovering maternalistic forms of governance in the 19th c reformatory.” Family & Community History, Vol. 14 (2), pp 89-104
Bleeker, M. (2023). Doing Dramaturgy Thinking through Practice. Springer.
Boardman, K. (2000). “The ideology of domesticity: the regulation of the household economy in Victorian women's magazines.” Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, 150-164
Boghian, I. (2014). “Middle women, tea-drinking and Victorian cultural paradigms: domesticity, stability and respectability.” Speech and Context: International Journal of Linguistics, Semiotics and Literary Science 88-99
Bronte, A. (1848). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Edited by Herbert Rosengarten, 1992. Introduction by Margaret Smith, ix- xxiv. OUP.
Bronte, A. (1848). The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Edited by Lee A. Talley, 2009. Broadview Press.
Delap, L., B. Griffin and A. Wills. (2009). “Authority, dependence and power in accounts of twentieth-century domestic service. In Judy Giles (Editor), The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800, 204-220. Palgrave Macmillan.
Denisoff, D. (1999). “Lady in green with novel: the gendered economics of the visual arts and mid-Victorian women’s writing”. In Editor Nicola Diane Thompson, Women Writers and the Woman Question, 151-169: CUP.
Eagleton, T. (2005). Myths of Power: A Marxist Study of the Brontës. Palgrave Macmillan.
Murris, K. & Bozalek, V. (2022). “Dis/identification”. In Editor Karin Murris, A Glossary for Doing Post-qualitative, New Materialist and Critical Post-humanist Research Across Disciplines. Routledge.
Kleinman, A. (2012). “Intra-actions” (Interview of Karen Barad by Adam Kleinman). Mousse 34, 76–81.
Leviathan, A. (2018). “Challenging or Conforming to the Norms of Victorian Society: Queen Victoria’s Stance on Women’s Social Status Emilie”. Interdisciplinary Journal in English No. 3, 18-29.
Losano, A. (2003). “The professionalization of the woman artist in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 58, No. 1, 1-4.
Lutz, D. The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects. W W Norton.
Nsaidzedze, I. (2017). “An Overview of Feminism in the Victorian Period [1832-1901]”. American Research Journal of English and Literature, vol 3, no. 1, 1-20.
Shand, E. (2019). “Enfolded Narrative in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Refusing ‘a perfect work of art”. Brontë Studies, 44:3, 292-305, doi: 10.1080/14748932.2019.1606440
Shand, E. (2016). “Romanticism versus Realism in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: The Failings of a Singular Perspectives.” British Women Writers Conference. June 2-5, 2016.
Sutherland, J. (1989). The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press.
Thormählen, M. (2019). “ ‘Horror and disgust’: Reading The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.” Brontë Studies, 44:1, 5-19, DOI: 10.1080/14748932.2019.1525872
Tosh, J. (1999). A Man’s Place Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. Yale University Press.
Ulrich, Renee, M. (2005). “Victoria’s Feminist Legacy: How Nineteenth-Century Women Imagined the Queen”. Unpublished PhD dissertation. University of Texas, Austin.
Wahrman, D. (1993). “Middle-class domesticity goes public: gender, class, and politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria”. The Journal of British Studies, 32, 396-432 doi:10.1086/386041
Ward, Yvonne, M. (2006). “The Womanly Garb of Queen Victoria’s Early Motherhood, 1840-42”. Women’s History Review 8, no. 2: 277-294. doi:10.1080/09612029900200211
Whipps, B. (2023). “Unwavering courage and hope: the life of Anne Brontë.” In.
Editor, Tim Whittome. Walking with Anne Brontë Insights and Reflections. Xlibris Publishing.
Zakreski, P. (2002). “Refining Work: Representations of Female Artistic Labour in Victorian Literature, 1848-1888”. Thesis submitted for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield Department of English Literature.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Shehr Bano Zaidi (Author)
![Creative Commons License](http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/4.0/88x31.png)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
You are free to:
- Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format for any purpose, even commercially.
- Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
- The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.