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Atmospheric exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s weather wisdom

Atmospheric exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s weather wisdom
Atmospheric exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s weather wisdom
As her family name suggests, Jane Eyre is exceptionally responsive to changes in the weather. In her eponymous “autobiography,” Jane’s ability to predict future events and assume an embodied—yet occasionally omniscient—insight alerts us to the ways in which Charlotte Brontë’s fiction leverages the rise of climate science as a basis for successful female authorship. In opposition to the prevailing belief of the Victorian medical establishment that storms prompted hysteria and exacerbated symptoms of women’s biological “periodicity,” Brontë’s first published novel draws the sensitive body and insightful mind of its female protagonist into close alliance. Far from reflecting a nervous pathology, Jane’s empowered responses to the air demonstrate the ways in which meteorological concepts such as weather wisdom and lunarism prove vital to nineteenth-century fiction. (JP)
0030-8129
84-100
Pizzo, Justine
361ed39e-7af3-446d-b290-78e5aa9acdcf
Pizzo, Justine
361ed39e-7af3-446d-b290-78e5aa9acdcf

Pizzo, Justine (2016) Atmospheric exceptionalism in Jane Eyre: Charlotte Brontë’s weather wisdom. PMLA, 131 (1), 84-100. (doi:10.1632/pmla.2016.131.1.84).

Record type: Article

Abstract

As her family name suggests, Jane Eyre is exceptionally responsive to changes in the weather. In her eponymous “autobiography,” Jane’s ability to predict future events and assume an embodied—yet occasionally omniscient—insight alerts us to the ways in which Charlotte Brontë’s fiction leverages the rise of climate science as a basis for successful female authorship. In opposition to the prevailing belief of the Victorian medical establishment that storms prompted hysteria and exacerbated symptoms of women’s biological “periodicity,” Brontë’s first published novel draws the sensitive body and insightful mind of its female protagonist into close alliance. Far from reflecting a nervous pathology, Jane’s empowered responses to the air demonstrate the ways in which meteorological concepts such as weather wisdom and lunarism prove vital to nineteenth-century fiction. (JP)

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Published date: January 2016
Organisations: English

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 393138
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/393138
ISSN: 0030-8129
PURE UUID: a09cbf10-6dcb-47d2-8043-1cf0e72f58dc
ORCID for Justine Pizzo: ORCID iD orcid.org/0009-0002-4012-4967

Catalogue record

Date deposited: 21 Apr 2016 12:43
Last modified: 17 Oct 2024 01:46

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