From Absent Mothers to Wicked Stepmothers: The Brontës, Motherhood and Neo-Victorianism

The present article will try to cover the main considerations regarding the depiction of motherhood in the most culturally reproduced Brontëan novels, namely Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and—to a lesser extent—Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853). Special attention will be given to Wuthering Heights and its cultural reproductions due to its potential to delve into generational traumas and physically absent matrilineal bonds as well as due to its influence in popular memory through adaptation—be it faithful or “classic” adaptations of the novel or those imaginings that use a characteristically Brontëan language to deal with some of the issues present in the aforementioned narrative. Thus, the main aim of this discussion is to trace the affective potential of the mother-daughter bond in the Brontës narratives so as to provide a framework of reference from which to explore how neo-Victorian fiction—in this case, Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Michael Stewart’s Ill Will: The Untold Story of Heathcliff (2018), William Oldroyd’s Lady Macbeth (2016) and Kristoffer Nyholm and Anders Engström’s television series Taboo (2017—)—has re-imagined these relationships and their affective legacy in cultural memory.