Educating the romantic child in the novels and poetry of Anne Brontë

This PhD project is centred on Anne Brontë’s engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century philosophical and aesthetic discourses relating to pedagogy and childhood in her novels and poetry. It comprises a written thesis alongside the production of a digital scholarly edition and accompanying website. Through a focus on Brontë’s interventions into discourses surrounding the Romantic child and their ideal education, this thesis illuminates Brontë’s vision of reshaping society through transforming approaches to the raising of children. I argue that this approach unites various key themes in her work, moving from questioning established modes of Romanticism in her poetry, to her critiques of pedagogical theories without parental support in Agnes Grey (1847), to her firm articulation for a new approach to education for both genders in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848). This approach centres Brontë’s interrogation of key philosophical and political theorists and illuminates unexpected common ground between arrestingly realist fiction, lyric poetry and the affective potentiality of the figure of the Romantic child. In Chapter One, this thesis explores Brontë’s often-neglected poetry. I contend that an increasingly complex and critical approach to childhood emerges in her later poems which is tinged with a bittersweet longing for the comfort provided by the nostalgic Romantic aesthetics of innocence invoked in her earlier work. Throughout Chapter Two, the thesis positions Agnes Grey as performing a sustained critique of Enlightenment and Romantic models and their influences, including the work of Bentham, Locke and Rousseau. In Chapter Three, I investigate Brontë’s deployment of Romantic aesthetics relating to childhood amid the otherwise faithfully realist tone as a vehicle for legitimising the radical critique of marriage law in Tenant. However, I argue that both novels still retain a particular and notable preference for deploying Romantic imagery when it comes to childhood, innocence and the mother-child relationship, complicating Brontë’s critiques surrounding the practical and gendered limitations of Rousseau’s approach in Agnes Grey and Tenant. A substantive element of this PhD project is the production of a digital scholarly edition of a selection of her poems that relate to childhood. Through a manuscript-centred focus on Brontë’s work the edition reveals additional facets of Brontë’s intellectual positioning within her poetry, illuminating crucial vexed internal dynamics surrounding themes of motherhood, nostalgia and Romanticism, informing and enhancing the thesis work.

Funder

Moore Institute, University of Galway

Publisher

University of Galway

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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Collections

University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)