Hunger and repression inShirleyandVillette

Abstract

Although they wrote as contemporaries, Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens never met, nor did they hold high opinions of each other's work. Bronte enjoyed David Copperfield, but she criticized those portions of Bleak House narrated by Esther as “too often weak and twaddling.” Even her compliments of Dickens are noticeably strained. When commenting on David Copperfield, she only commends Dickens for his “varied knowledge of men and things,” tepid praise when juxtaposed with her summation of Goethe, in the same paragraph, as “Great, powerful, giant-souled” ( Correspondence III: 20). Dickens was even less enthusiastic about Bronte, reportedly announcing in 1860 that “he had not read Jane Eyre and … never would as he disapproved of the whole school.” Probably, like so many other Victorian readers, Dickens would have found the character of Jane coarse and vulgar and would have distinguished his own more rarefied and conventional heroines from those of Bronte's “school.” Despite the many differences between Dickens's and Bronte's novels, however, the two authors share a proclivity for slender female heroines that runs throughout both of their works: Jane Eyre, Frances Henri, Caroline Helston, and Lucy Snowe have the same slim, contourless bodies as do Agnes Copperfield, Rose Maylie, Mary Graham, and Amy Dorritt, to name only a few. Dickens typically employs the slender female body as a marker of his heroines' selflessness and lack of sensuality, going so far as to sentimentalize hunger and starvation.