| This project examines Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" (1847), and Anne Bronte's "The Tenant of Wildfell Hall" (1848), specifically attending to portions containing Helen Huntingdons's and Jane Eyre's personal art portfolios. Applying an art historical analysis to two literary works, the project considers how the Victorian woman's art portfolio constructs a self-representational space, a unique arena where meaning exists in a mutual rapport between subject and object---extending, yet also enacting a personal space of contemplation. The portfolio will be interpreted as a highly contested space which produces and reveals tensions between the artist's selfhood and the outside world. Through this analysis I will reconstruct and recognize the artist's conditions of expression and existence as a maker of art, narrative, and the self within the produced and assembled art portfolio, and the precarious relation of this portfolio to the self and to the "outside" world. |
