“Mortal hostility”: Masculinity and fatherly conflict in the Glass Town and Angrian sagas

Sanders, Valerie; Butcher, Emma

Abstract

Opening paragraph:
The above extract from the second part of Charlotte Brontë’s story “The Enfant,” which first appeared in Blackwood’s Young Men’s Magazine for June 1829, is a rare example in the juvenilia of the raw instinctive emotions of fatherhood at their most ecstatic. Almost everything about this fable is strange and atypical of what was to follow in the later juvenilia and early writings of both Branwell and Charlotte Brontë, in relation to their handling of what might be called family “structures of feeling” (Williams 132-33) – whether between fathers and children, or sibling pairs. For a start, this demonstration of paternal joy emanates from a minor Glass Town character with the unpromising name of Moses Hanghimself, in a brief, self-contained story without apparent links to the major dramas of Zamorna, Northangerland, and their families. The context is that Hanghimself’s nameless child (usually referred to as “it”) has been captured by the cruel child-snatcher, Pigtail, who is forcing the Enfant to sweep chimneys. Subsequently rescued by a party of gendarmes, the child is brought before Napoleon and restored to his father, who recognizes an adder bite on his arm, whereupon “the two leaped about as if they were half frantic” (EEW I: 36). All ends happily when Hanghimself buys a beautiful Languedoc estate with a generous donation from the Emperor, “where he now lives with his Enfant, two of the happiest and most contented people in all France” (EEW I: 36).

Citation

Sanders, V., & Butcher, E. (2017). “Mortal hostility”: Masculinity and fatherly conflict in the Glass Town and Angrian sagas. In J. E. Pike, & L. Morrison (Eds.), Charlotte Brontë from the Beginnings: New Essays from the Juvenilia to the Major Works (59-71). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315571393

• Publication Date: 2017
• Deposit Date: Jan 15, 2025
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Pages: 59-71
• Book Title: Charlotte Brontë from the Beginnings: New Essays from the Juvenilia to the Major Works
• Chapter Number: 4
• ISBN: 9781317168164; 9781472453686
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315571393
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/4421594