Charlotte Bronte: Forever A Woman Writer?--A Comparative Study Of Two Ages' Criticism On CB

Both the late 19th century and the late 20th century witnessed a great concern about female authorship. This thesis tends to argue, through a comparative study of the criticism about Charlotte Bronte between these two ages, that strikingly different as they are in either focus or methods of study, they nevertheless share one common feature, that is: both saw Charlotte Bronte first as a woman, then an author.This thesis consists of four parts. The introduction part tries to demonstrate, through a sketchy outline of the history of the criticism upon her, that Charlotte Bronte, who belongs to the very first generation of professional women writers, has provided us a perfect case to investigate the critical attitudes toward the issue of female authorship. Chapter one traces the different critical images of Charlotte Bronte in the late 19th century, explores the Victorian historical and cultural background, and finally argues that it is the Victorian sexual ideology, with its severe prescriptions over the proper female spheres, that has determined that the critics would inescapably value femininity over literary achievements. Chapter two focuses the study on the feminist criticism (which has risen since the 1970s on) on Charlotte Bronte, which is in turn categorized into three directions: 1) textual and contextual interpretation; 2) intertexual interpretation; 3) tracing the history of women's literature, and argues that, in an age predominated by the consciousness of power struggles of every kind, that of between the two sexes particularly keenly felt, the feminist critics, in their well-intentioned expectations of doing full justice to those women like Charlotte who were once misjudged by the patriarchal history, are nonetheless doing another injustice to them, that is, to overvalue theirgender identity again when interpretating their works.In the end, the paper concludes that just as the late 19th century criticism on female writers is essentially pragmatic in the sense of trying to maintain the hierarchical gender structure, the late 20th century criticism also runs the risk of being pragmatic: to regard women's literature as a social and historical text which records as well as reflects some particular human experience. In both concerns, gender inevitably serves as an essential element, and, more often than not, actually precedes literary talents in interpreting a text. In a word, female writers often come, in both the late 19th century and late 20th century critics' eyes, first as women, then as authors.