The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds ed. by Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett (review)

The contemporary relevance of nineteenth-century literary works such as those of the Brontë sisters lies not only in literary criticism and commentaries but also in their transformations in what is now a translingual, transnational, and transcultural setting. In other words, one form of restoring the value of the Brontë sisters in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is through translations, namely, their “afterlives” in Walter Benjamin’s terms. The Brontë Sisters in Other Wor(l)ds, a remarkable collection of essays edited by Shouhua Qi and Jacqueline Padgett, brings to its readers different perspectives on the translations of the Brontë sisters particularly in the context of postcolonialism.

As a study of the Brontë sisters, the chapters in this anthology are distinctive in at least two senses. First, the editors and authors free the Brontë sisters from the more familiar Euro-American context which conventionally concentrates on the critical realist fictions of the Victorian age per se. Instead, by turning the focus toward translations beyond Euro-America, these articles present the Brontë sisters as “examples of heteroglossia, hybridity, and postcolonial reworking” (1) in both other words and other worlds. Second, translations of the Brontë sisters are defined in this book in a much broader sense than that which is traditionally understood as translingual practice. In other words, the translations investigated here are not only interlingual but also, to use Roman Jakobson’s term, intersemiotic. On the one hand, the Brontë sisters find themselves reassessed in languages other than English as well as in non-textual artistic forms including cinematic, theatric, and operatic adaptations. On the other, these various languages, cultures, and art forms also demonstrate self-renewed and sometimes self-reflective vitality via the process of incorporating, transfiguring, and re-presenting a mid-nineteenth-century work in their postmodern and postcolonial contemporariness.

Chapters 1–3 are analyses of textual migrations of the Brontë sisters. Shouhua Qi’s “No Simple Love: The Literary Fortunes of the Brontë Sisters in Post-Mao, Market-Driven China,” offers a reception study of the Brontë sisters in China. By comparing the translations of Jane Eyre at different stages of history, Qi delineates the way in which changes in intellectual thoughts, sociopolitical ideologies and economic conditions have been reflected in these works. Whereas the female nobility and naïveté of Jane Eyre and other women characters were foregrounded in the early modern Chinese translations, Charlotte Brontë’s works were disparaged in the era of socialist realism for their lack of class consciousness and petty bourgeois indulgences. Nevertheless, since the Cultural Revolution the Brontë enthusiasm has been revitalized, which vigorously involves the rewriting of the Chinese scholarship on world literature. Moreover, by means of trans-media publications in tourism, geography, environmental science, and televised production, such enthusiasm has consolidated the relevance of the Brontë sisters in the post-Mao China against the backdrop of globalized commercialization.

Suzanne Roszak’s “Rhys’s Haunted Minds: Race, Slavery, the Gothic, and Rewriting Jane Eyre in the Caribbean” discusses how Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea addresses issues of racial prejudice and black slavery in Jamaican history particularly through the subversion of gothic conventions from within the modernist formal paradigm. Rhys demystifies the secretive Gothic world by, for instance, replacing the Brontëan fearful ghostly depictions of landscape with anti-supernatural revelations of the brutal realities of slavery, white privilege, and inequality among human beings. Moreover, her exploration of the female protagonist’s gothic anxiety with blackness exposes the latter to be complicit with racism and slave abuse.

In “On the Migration of Texts: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Maryse Condé’s La Migration des coeurs, and Richard Philcox’s Translation of Condé’s Windward Heights,” Jacqueline Padgett locates Brontë’s work in a translational intertextuality with its transference into French by Condé whose work is then translated into English by Philcox. Condé’s translation or rather rewriting...