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Visual Culture and Scopic Custom in Jane Eyre and Villette

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Jane Kromm
Jane Kromm
Affiliation:
Purchase College
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Extract

Art making and art viewing activities steeped in assumptions about gender recur throughout Jane Eyre and Villette. This paper will argue that Charlotte Bronte developed these fine arts devices as part of a carefully crafted feminist critique of spectatorship and representation. Bronte pursued this end by demonstrating that incidents relating to the production and reception of visual culture were relevant for visual experience more broadly understood by linking these events in the narrative to “scopic custom”; that is, the art experiences of Bronte's characters are presented as occurring in relation to the customary, gendered patterns of looking and being looked at which dominated Victorian society. This strategic interweaving of visual culture with scopic custom allows Bronte to accentuate their interdependence as a socio-cultural dynamic of critical significance, and to illuminate their share in the cultural and social constraints affecting women as producers and objects of representation.

Type
Editors' Topic: Charlotte Bronté
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , fall 1998 , pp. 369 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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