Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and the Tropes of Mastery

“Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and the Tropes of Mastery” explores the way in which these writers cross from the intensely personal, intimate space of the (love) letter into the explosive spaces of fiction and poetry. In the first part of the essay, I explore Charlotte Brontë’s interrogation of the relationship between domination and submission in her four extant letters to her “literature master,” M. Héger, and in Jane Eyre, a fictional “Master Narrative” illuminating the conflicting economies of vocation, authority, gender, and desire. In the second part of the essay, I explore the ways in which Emily Dickinson’s “reading” of Brontë’s Jane Eyre leads to a re-writing and a re-visioning of that text in new forms and “unforeseen sequences.” By focusing on the dialectics of binding (in Dickinson’s “Master Letters”) and unbinding (in Dickinson’s letters and poems), I propose that Dickinson conceives of writing as a form of radical–antinomian–inquiry. Ultimately, the essay seeks to reveal the links between gender, exile, and the writing of endlessness.