The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination ed. by Alexandra Lewis (review)

The recent bicentenaries of the four Brontë siblings, Charlotte's in 2016, Branwell's in 2017, Emily's in 2018, and Anne's in 2020, have stimulated interesting reflections on their legacies. Alexandra Lewis's edited volume The Brontës and the Idea of the Human: Science, Ethics, and the Victorian Imagination, a collection of thirteen original and thought-provoking essays, is a welcome addition to this growing body of new work in Brontë studies. The volume sets out to "reimagine the Brontës for twenty-first-century scholarship," to quote the subtitle of Lewis's introduction. Lewis has done an excellent job of bringing together a diverse range of essays exploring the Brontës' fascination with "what lies at the core—and limits—of the human" (1). This question is addressed from the perspectives of science, psychology, education, ethics, theology, human rights, animal rights, and creativity. While Charlotte, as the longest-lived sibling and most prolific writer, perhaps understandably, dominates the volume, Emily and Anne are also given their due as major writers addressing some of the key debates of the early Victorian period. The only drawback to this collection is that Branwell, whose writing and art often challenge "the idea of the human," is barely mentioned.

Most of the essays in this volume contextualize the Brontë sisters' writings by drawing on a broad range of nineteenth-century debates and theories relating to concepts of the human. Theories of the mind and perception inform Helen Groth's chapter, "Charlotte Brontë and the Listening Reader," which focuses on the role of sound in Charlotte's work. Groth highlights the intensity of the "imaginative exploration of the senses" (122) in Jane Eyre (1847), in which Brontë invites her readers to "listen" (117). Janis McLarren Caldwell's chapter on the "Science of the Imagination" also engages with Victorian theories of the mind. She argues that Charlotte's experience of being interrupted by one of her pupils, famously recorded in her Roe Head Journal as a painful, even sickening, "reentry" (74) or "jerk" (79) into reality from imagination, powers her narration of "untranslatable human difference" (80). The sisters' dislike of teaching as an interruption to their own learning underpins Dinah Birch's chapter "Learning to Imagine," in which she convincingly demonstrates that the sisters' most effective and stimulating learning experiences emerged from "the inward education of the self," rather than their formal schooling (64). Villette (1853), that classic representation of school life, is the focus of Lewis's fine chapter on Charlotte's representation of traumatic memory.

It was a surprise to find in this volume a chapter focusing on teaching the Brontës, and many academics will undoubtedly be inspired by Isobel Armstrong's "Jane Eyre, A Teaching Experiment," an account of how creativity can be deployed to deepen engagements with the novel. Based on her experience of teaching Jane Eyre to MA students, Armstrong concedes that this constituted "one of the most exhilarating teaching experiments of [her] life" (226), helping her to reflect on Jane Eyre's "critique of the conditions where some subjects can be defined as deficit beings, not fully human" (235). The students spent six weeks studying Jane Eyre with the aim of interpreting the novel through the creation of artworks, which included cartes de visite photographs based on tableaux inspired by the novel, collage, and textile art. Fascinated by the students' fascination with Bertha, Armstrong is led to meditate on how both Jane (when destitute on the moor) and Bertha (secretly imprisoned in Thornfield Hall) are represented in the novel as "deficit beings" (235). Rather than showing the reader how to teach Jane Eyre, Armstrong presents a compelling account of the often intangible and sometimes frustrating relationship between teaching and research. She shows how discussions in the classroom stimulated her to learn more about Jane Eyre...