The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds
2016; Penn State University Press; Volume: 53; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.53.4.0801
ISSN1528-4212
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Scientific Studies
ResumoThe contemporary relevance of nineteenth-century literary works such as those of the Brontë sisters lies not only in literary criticism and commentaries but also in their transformations in what is now a translingual, transnational, and transcultural setting. In other words, one form of restoring the value of the Brontë sisters in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is through translations, namely, their “afterlives” in Walter Benjamin's terms. The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds, a remarkable collection of essays edited by Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett, brings to its readers different perspectives on the translations of the Brontë sisters particularly in the context of postcolonialism.As a study of the Brontë sisters, the chapters in this anthology are distinctive in at least two senses. First, the editors and authors free the Brontë sisters from the more familiar Euro-American context which conventionally concentrates on the critical realist fictions of the Victorian age per se. Instead, by turning the focus toward translations beyond Euro-America, these articles present the Brontë sisters as “examples of heteroglossia, hybridity, and postcolonial reworking” (1) in both other words and other worlds. Second, translations of the Brontë sisters are defined in this book in a much broader sense than that which is traditionally understood as translingual practice. In other words, the translations investigated here are not only interlingual but also, to use Roman Jakobson's term, intersemiotic. On the one hand, the Brontë sisters find themselves reassessed in languages other than English as well as in non-textual artistic forms including cinematic, theatric, and operatic adaptations. On the other, these various languages, cultures, and art forms also demonstrate self-renewed and sometimes self-reflective vitality via the process of incorporating, transfiguring, and re-presenting a mid-nineteenth-century work in their postmodern and postcolonial contemporariness.Chapters 1–3 are analyses of textual migrations of the Brontë sisters. Shouhua Qi's “No Simple Love: The Literary Fortunes of the Brontë Sisters in Post-Mao, Market-Driven China,” offers a reception study of the Brontë sisters in China. By comparing the translations of Jane Eyre at different stages of history, Qi delineates the way in which changes in intellectual thoughts, sociopolitical ideologies and economic conditions have been reflected in these works. Whereas the female nobility and naïveté of Jane Eyre and other women characters were foregrounded in the early modern Chinese translations, Charlotte Brontë's works were disparaged in the era of socialist realism for their lack of class consciousness and petty bourgeois indulgences. Nevertheless, since the Cultural Revolution the Brontë enthusiasm has been revitalized, which vigorously involves the rewriting of the Chinese scholarship on world literature. Moreover, by means of trans-media publications in tourism, geography, environmental science, and televised production, such enthusiasm has consolidated the relevance of the Brontë sisters in the post-Mao China against the backdrop of globalized commercialization.Suzanne Roszak's “Rhys's Haunted Minds: Race, Slavery, the Gothic, and Rewriting Jane Eyre in the Caribbean” discusses how Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea addresses issues of racial prejudice and black slavery in Jamaican history particularly through the subversion of gothic conventions from within the modernist formal paradigm. Rhys demystifies the secretive Gothic world by, for instance, replacing the Brontëan fearful ghostly depictions of landscape with anti-supernatural revelations of the brutal realities of slavery, white privilege, and inequality among human beings. Moreover, her exploration of the female protagonist's gothic anxiety with blackness exposes the latter to be complicit with racism and slave abuse.In “On the Migration of Texts: Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, Maryse Condé's La Migration des coeurs, and Richard Philcox's Translation of Condé's Windward Heights,” Jacqueline Padgett locates Brontë's work in a translational intertextuality with its transference into French by Condé whose work is then translated into English by Philcox. Condé's translation or rather rewriting of the Wuthering Heights manifests her Caribbean diasporic nonconformity to Anglophone-centric canonization, since she rigorously transforms the original form of narrative and style of rhetoric. However, such “afterlife” effect leaves her translator Philcox in a double bind. On the one hand, he has to maintain fidelity to Condé's story, which is essentially a reading or foreignization of Wuthering Heights. On the other, the predisposition of restoring Brontë's original inspiration on Condé makes his English translation somehow deviate from Condé's work. As a result, Philcox produces his own, in several instances unfaithful, rewriting of La Migration des coeurs just as Condé has done to Wuthering Heights. For example, he occasionally retains or deletes the Créole terms from Condé's original work, which, according to Padgett, creates a twofold problem. To put it simply, from Brontë to Condé and then to Philcox, the translational warp has become an “afterlife” of the “afterlife.” What these afterlives demonstrate is a cultural pluralism that enables texts to migrate and to open new spaces in literature for new readerships.Chapters 4–6 are intriguing as they turn our attention to the intercultural reworking of the Brontë sisters in cinematic and other trans-media forms. Kevin Jack Hagopian's essay investigates Luis Buñuel's filmic transplantation of Wuthering Heights into the postcolonial Mexican context. He argues that Buñuel's 1954 Abismos de pasión revitalizes the subversive melodramatic power of Brontë's novel by resituating the story in the progressive history of gender and class politics. The film is a deviation from the art cinema as well as the mainstream Hollywood film making. “Buñuel saw in Brontë's novel not Wyler's airless ‘classic’ but a modern work of eruptive passions, of romantic delirium, and of overdetermined emotional logic” (141). The director highlights these melodramatic elements to create a space for critiques of gender, sexuality, race, and class. Hagopian goes further to suggest that, whereas the novel is normally understood as a romance between Catherine and Heathcliff, the film is more a postcolonial story of the intense social, psychic, and economic contests among various characters living in the hacienda system.In Chapter 5, Saviour Catania offers a profound analysis of Yoshishige Yoshida's integration of Brontë and Bataille in his Japanese film version of Wuthering Heights, Arashi-ga-Oka. The author starts with a discussion of how the Bataillean projection dynamically interplays with the Brontëan plots in the film. During a mirror-light game, for instance, Kinu (Catherine's counterpart) recognizes her transcending self in Onimaru (Heathcliff's counterpart). Despite Bataille's strong influence on Yoshida's visual and audio presentations of the Wuthering Heights, especially on his use of cinematic light, Catania suggests in the end that Yoshida recognizes the partial truth of Bataille's claim about Brontë and shows more agreement with Brontë's belief in the continuity of love into death than with the Bataillean view of deathly finality or dissolution.The last chapter, Jean-Philippe Heberlé's “Michael Berkeley and David Malouf's Rewriting of Jane Eyre” compares Brontë's work with its operatic adaption. Malouf and Berkeley's work is particularly interesting in that they incorporate several references to texts other than Jane Eyre, such as the Mad Scene of Lucia di Lammermoor. The gap between the original text and its operatic adaptation notwithstanding, the latter's intertextuality allows much space for its spectators' interpretation. Furthermore, as Heberlé suggests, “Berkeley and Malouf's opera is as much a metacomment on the novel as a metacomment on how an operatic genre functions and what it consists in” (201). By retaining some operatic conventions while debunking others, their adaptation also reconfigures opera as an art form in the postmodern setting.Overall, the essays in the book provide readers with multiple perspectives and insightful readings of the Brontë sisters rewritten in non-English cultures and non-textual media. They have broadened the range of conversations in the Brontëan scholarships. They also show the possibility and potentiality for mid-nineteenth-century Victorian novels to gain new vitality in the contemporary translingual and transnational contexts. Moreover, all of the essays take the approach of comparison in a remarkable way. In fact, it is precisely through the gaps, deviations, and alterations based on comparison that we discover the renewed power of the Brontës. However, the collection mainly concentrates on the reworking of Charlotte Brontës's Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, with their other works and the other Brontë sister barely discussed. This may be understood by some readers as a topical limitation of the book, whereas I would rather refer to it as an open gesture toward more scholarly investigations of its kind in the future.
Referência(s)