'Bursting the fetters and breaking the bars' : a Lacanian approach to Emily Brontë's poems

Abstract

In an attempt to conduct a critical swerve away from the archetypal and often one-dimensional criticism of Emily Brontë's poems, and towards an astute articulation of the distinctiveness of the experience her poems offer, the present dissertation appropriates a constellation of conceptualisations formulated by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The introductory chapter delineates the very particular framework underlying the origin of Brontë's cryptic verses in tandem with outlining the Lacanian notions of the barred subject and the other, the signifier and the signified, the Mirror Stage in relation to the maternal image, the Master/Slave dialectic and the psychic triptych of structures known as the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The second chapter explores the simultaneously detrimental and regenerative qualities of memory, as well as providing a penetrating insight into Brontë's quasi-obsession with death and mourning. Brontë's compulsive revisiting of death does not portray an acceptance of the logic of loss and mourning but, conversely, signals her vehement refutation of mourning and its restorative effect. In an unorthodox move, the Brontëan subject strives to dismantle the Symbolic and regress to a pre-oedipal (yet deceptive) unification with the (m)other within the Imaginary. The duelling dichotomies and contradictions which pervade Brontë's poems are analysed in Chapter 3, a chapter which also exposes a degree of jouissance which transforms her sense of isolation into one of 'ice-elation.' The final chapter brings together all the distinctive qualities which render Brontë's poetic corpus so compelling, unique and powerful.