The Brontes have been 'queered'

[biddyboo]

For Pride month, the Bronte Parsonage museum has posted a number of Facebook posts exploring the Brontes and 'gender identity'

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/eGENRmGQPkz7omY5/

The posts talk about the Brontes using 'androgynous' pseudonyms, rather than the male pseudonyms they were necessitated to use due to the sexism of the times they lived in 😕

It hasn't gone down well. Comments were disabled, and the museum posted about commitment to equality and diversity and not tolerating bullying and hatred (I haven't seen evidence of this, just a lot of people outraged about history being rewritten to suit a narrative).

The conflation of breaking sexist stereotypes and "gender fluidity" may well explain why we are currently in the mess we are. Women didn't break the stereotypes to become men, they did it to be women who could do what they chose to do.

As an interesting (to me anyway) aside I noticed recently that Lizzie Borden's middle name was Andrew (after her father) and her own mother's middle name was Anthony. Does anyone know whether this was a common occurrence in 19th Century USA? Was this done in families with no male children to carry on the family surname? Nothing to do with gender though.

There are no trans characters in Shakespeare.

In the geographical area the Bronté sisters lived, it was exceptionally commonplace for men to have surnames as Christian names. It was much less so for women to. To confuse the issue a little more, it was not uncommon to refer to female relatives by their surname, for example "Aunt Bronté" Grandmother Bronté, cousin Bronté.

I rarely agree with you @Blossomtoesbut Shakespeare is definitely the king of gender fluidity.

Hmm I'd say he's more the king of male and female disguises, and storylines that absolutely depend on us knowing the actual sex of the disguised character to make any sense. (With an added layer of jokery based on the fact that the actor may not have been the same sex as the character, still dependent on us understanding people's sexes and the sex binary)

Viola in 12th night, Rosalind in As you like it are classic examples. They are in disguise. They TALK about the fact that they are in disguise and their reality as a female person under the disguise. They do not change sex or even "gender" nor are they questioning their "gender identity". The only fluidity involved is in their costumes, and the resulting perceptions of them by others. At the end, all is revealed and each female, formerly disguised character is still female and furthermore follows a fully straight, and feminine-gendered, path, getting married to an alpha male. No one is confused about their own sex or "gender identity".

Shirley Keeldar, the heroine of Shirley has, by 19th century standards, a masculine name - because her parents gave it to her. They wanted an heir and got an heiress. That doesn't make Shirley 'queer'; it means, as an heiress and a landowner, she has some freedoms of action not usually accorded to young women at that time. I wish organisations would just stop with this revisionist crap.

Yes, the Brontës weren’t concealing their ‘gender’, they were concealing their sex, and Charlotte says somewhere, maybe in her introduction to the reissued Wuthering Heights, that they deliberately choose names that seemed vaguely masculine but weren’t incontrovertibly male like Charles, Algernon and Edward would have been. And scholarly work done on the reception and reviews of Wuthering Heights when it was thought to be by a man versus when it was known to be by a woman shows striking differences.

I will look up the article by Shim on queerness in Villette, but worth pointing out the author is still a doctoral student; many of us would look back at stuff we published then and think ‘Okayyy…’

Probably unfair without reading the essay, but Lucy retains her female dress, just adding a hat, jacket and combing back her front hair to make her readable as ‘meant to be playing a man in a girls’ school play’, because she’s worried about the proprieties, as a friendless foreign teacher not long promoted from nursery governess, not out of some kind of relish in playing with boundaries.

And she finds she enjoys acting, but because the role allows her temporary access to a freedom she otherwise hadn’t got access to, even as a first person narrator (she’s famously reticent, and conceals key facts from the reader, like why she’s alone in the world, who Dr John is, what happens to Paul Emanuel) — it’s like Jane Eyre’s drawings.

This.

The film "Shakespeare in Love" took this one step further, with Gwyneth Paltrow binding her breasts to disguise herself as a boy so she could play Romeo, whilst an actual boy played Juliet.

Of course this would not have been necessary if women had been allowed to act on stage, or if women had been allowed to identify as men to be able to act on stage and then play female characters.

Having a man on stage playing a female character always adds a comedic element whether you want it to or not. That's fine when you have a man playing a character such as the Nurse or Mistress Quickly or even one of the three witches, but must have been a bit of a shame for Shakespeare to have written something beautiful and then be forced to have a male actor playing 14 year old Juliet, or Miranda, or Lady Macbeth.

In the plays where female characters dress as male characters, the plot absolutely relies on everyone understanding what sex the character really is, even if the actor playing that character at the time the play was written had to be male.

Gender is basically about stupid, misogynist & old fashioned sex role stereotypes, however you look at it. That’s that the Brontes were having to deal with and also George Eliot, Dr James Barry & plenty of others.

The idea that being a woman or a man is down to social stereotypes, personality, presentation or anything except biological sex is ridiculous in a civilised society.

Gender identity didn't exist and didn't need to exist at the time of the Brontes because men could oppress women more openly.

It's offensive to talk about GI and not sexism, it's erasing the 'lived reality / experience' of the Bronte sisters.

Shakespeare played with gender in many of his plays. You know this and are just being disingenuous. Virginia Woolf wrote about a trans character in Orlando in the 1920s. It’s pointless you pretending this issue didn’t appear in literature in the past when it patently did. It’s a concept that has been explored for centuries.

Shakespeare wrote characters who disguised themselves as the opposite sex. When he used this plot device he had to be very obvious about it. Lots of asides along the lines of, "I'm really a woman but I'm dressed as a man, hope I don't get found out!!!" to remind the audience that the man on stage was playing a woman who was pretending to be a man, because they were not allowed to have an actual woman playing the female character.

That has nothing to do with people in the 21st century identifying as trans or non binary or gender fluid or what have you. These concepts did not exist in Shakespeare's time.

Virginia Woolf is a completely different author who was writing more than 300 years after Shakespeare.

Virginia Woolf is a completely different author who was writing more than 300 years after Shakespeare.

No shit. 😂

So...irrelevant then?

'They're not queering the Brontes'
Also
'Shakespeake was gender fluiding all over theatres back in the day'.

Gender Derangement Syndrome. Don't do it kids.

Picking up on your last point, some groups are imposing disabilities on the past. I'm thinking of some recent neurodivereity training at church. Lots of useful practical tips but also asked us to identify autistic characters from the Bible, my brain was boggled. Autism especially is being read into a lot of older books and individuals from the past.

Shakespeare did not "play with gender".

Characters disguising themselves in various ways was an important facet of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.

In Henry IV Part 2 Prince Hal and his companion Poins disguise themselves to observe Falstaff, for instance.

Female characters disguising themselves as males is part of that aspect.

And again, no-one believed that the young male actors were women, any more than they believed that all the characters in Hamlet were actually dead at the end of the play.

Entirely relevant to the assertion that gender fluidity and the trans issue have emerged only during the 21st century.

Not the Brontes, but have the trans activist narcissistic historians done Elizabeth 1 yet?

I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too,

According to the gingerbread recipe she must have had a Blue Brain in a Pink Body. How ever did she manage without T, Top Surgery, and Bottom Surgery?

I'm not seeing how what is essentially a science fiction book from 100 years ago is relevant to the Brontes, or to your revisionist interpretation of Shakespeare.

I hope you don't teach literature.

By being the very last of the Tudor line.

Not much. I seem to remember that Ursula le Guin, first published only using her initials. And there is James Tiptree Jnr - who all Sci-Fi pundits happily accepted was a man (because women do not write Sc-Fi) until she turned up at a convention.
The eighteenth century allowed publication by 'a lady' quite often, but members of the Bluestocking Group tended to publish anonymously, which they had no problems with most of them being either independently well-off or married to well-off men - none of which detracts from their bravery and spirit in publishing on 'male' topics at all, misogyny was big business in the 1700s!

The irritating thing is that those who support this have probably never even read the Brontes. You see it all the time - woke lunatics demanding that libraries be ‘de-colonised’, or that Kipling novels be removed, or that parts of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf be edited, etc, when they actually have no interest in serious literature at all. In truth, they’re motivated by a mixture of spite and attention-seeking. They also love the sense of power. (Though obviously they hide all that behind a mask of self-righteousness.)

I hate that ugly phrase ‘gender identity’. Ugghh, it’s so typical of the way academics think and talk. The Brontes were artists. Their books are beautiful and profound works of art, not sociology essays. I’m sick of people using great works of art to back up their particular grievance. You see this especially in literature departments. The canon is now treated as raw material for psychoanalysts, Marxists, feminists, post-colonialists, race theorists, post-structuralists, gay rights activists, Jungians, and so on. So Hamlet, for example, is reduced to an Oedipal crisis. Or Dickens’ Hard Times becomes a ‘Marxist study of Labour relations’. No one seems interested in how beautiful the works are, or how deep and original and profound.

I wish those with an axe to grind would f- off and leave the arts alone. I wouldn’t mind so much if they genuinely loved great and beautiful art, but they often don’t. Anthony Burgess once said that there are two kinds of good - ethical good and aesthetic good. I doubt the people who built the Taj Mahal were ethically good. They probably beat their wives and owned slaves. But the Taj Mahal itself is still a beautiful work of art. If you want to theorise about ‘gender identity’ write a flippin book on gender identity. And if you’re interested in gender identity in the 19th-century, read contemporary diaries and newspapers and autobiographies. Don’t project your ideas onto classic works of art.

I told you what it’s relevant to. I hope you don’t either.

Was “A Room of Own’s Own” all about a special pad for a transman, or about how women of that time were socially held back because of their sex?