"We Are Three Sisters": Self and family in the writing of the Brontës by Drew LamonicaCall Number: Offsite PR4169 .L36 2003 & ebook
ISBN: 0826214363
Publication Date: 2003-02-01
Both print and ebook. In "We Are Three Sisters," Drew Lamonica focuses on the role of families in the Brontës' fictions of personal development, exploring the ways in which their writings recognize the family as a defining community for selfhood. Drawing on extensive primary sources, including works by Sarah Ellis, Sarah Lewis, Ann Richelieu Lamb, Harriet Martineau, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Lamonica examines the dialogic relationship between the Brontës' novels and a mid-Victorian domestic ideology that held the family to be the principal nurturer of subjectivity. Using a sociohistorical framework, "We Are Three Sisters" shows that the Brontës' novels display a heightened awareness of contemporary female experience and the complex problems of securing a valued sense of selfhood not wholly dependent on family ties. The opening chapters discuss the mid-Victorian "culture of the family," in which the Brontës emerged as voices exploring the adequacy of the family as the site for personal, and particularly female, development. These chapters also introduce the Bronës' early collaborative writings, showing that the sisters' shared interest in the family's formative role arose from their own experience as a family of authors. Lamonica explores in detail the various constructions of family in the sisters' novels, concluding that the Brontës were attuned to complexities; they were not polemical writers with fixed feminist agendas. The Brontës disputed the promotion of the family as the exclusive site for female development, morality, and fulfillment, without ever explicitly denying the possibility of domestic contentment. In doing so, the Brontës continue to challenge our readings and our understanding of them as mid-Victorian women.