THE “LURE OF THE FABULOUS”: GIFT-BOOK BEAUTIES AND CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S EARLY HEROINES

Abstract

Charlotte Brontë indulged her early fascination with “high life” by reading and imitating silver-fork literature and iconography in her juvenilia. Although critics have contended that Brontë's rejection of silver-fork subject matter was necessary for her artistic growth, the legacy of “the fabulous” persists in her mature fiction, particularly in the development of her female characters. Her literary representations of aristocratic beauties, as they were rendered in gift annuals and silver-fork fiction, signal her attempt to negotiate female desire as it is represented through fashionable dress. With her “copies” in the late juvenilia, Brontë both closely reproduces and satirizes the feminine consumption of material excess in order to discover a more original means of depicting feminine subjectivity. The period between 1838 and 1839, during which Brontë wrote the novelettes Stancliffe's Hotel, Captain Henry Hastings, and Caroline Vernon, marks such a crossroads; while all three contain superficial elements of the annuals and silver-fork fiction, they also exhibit Brontë's emergent concern with interiority. Her eventual shift to a plainly dressed yet actively desiring female heroine in her late juvenilia represents a new visual template for representing female subjectivity which becomes the prototype for heroines in her mature work.