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Monday, July 10, 2006

From Some Missing Posts

I confess that a last week I wrote two or three posts which I mistakenly deleted when I meant to clear some drafts I had written! The following items were included in the posts:

I found this very amusing: A quotation out of context is a fortune cookie's content. "Miss Brontë, Miss Brontë," chanted the Career Girls of Mike Leigh's 1997 film, each blindfolded and flipping a worn copy of Wuthering Heights before pointing to her destiny. This ritual produced a satisfying outcome for one ("Must come!"), but their interpretation of that phrase was far different from what Brontë must have intended.

Do you remember the Askmen romance novel test? Open a romantic book carefully balanced on its spine and just watch as your girlfiend's secret fantasies reveal themselves to your unbelieving eyes! The book will open to the pages she has read most often, and you are told to be sure to imitate whatever it is the man in these scenes is doing. I don't believe that I ever posted properly about this... But I tried this with Jane Eyre and the result was very silly (the Hay Lane scene). I shall now try it with Wuthering Heights. Ahem. Silence, please...

Apparently I have either a deep seated desire to tote hot cinders or to teach grown men to read.
Another interesting Bronte reference comes from a political blog:

Until the 1960s, most people brought up within Western culture believed that its literature, its art and its music were among the glories of its civilization. Today, much of the academic debate about the Western literary heritage claims that it is politically contaminated. Some of these charges are well known because they offended against the ideological triumvirate of gender, race and class: Othello is ethnocentric, Paradise Lost is a feminist tragedy, Jane Eyre is both racist and sexist.

Is Jane Eyre a victim of anti-Westernism?

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