L’étrangeté d’une langue étrangère : (dé)familiariser l’expérience belge d’Emily Brontë

• Main Author: Augustin Trapenard
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2008-12-01
• Series: Cahiers Victoriens et Edouardiens
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/cve/7956

The story of Charlotte and Emily Brontë’s 1842 sojourn in Brussels is a topos of the « Brontë myth », and from 1850 onwards, in every biographical or critical study, the « Belgian experience » has been used as a privileged tool to read their lives and works. Yet nothing remains of this foreign venture but a few devoirs, the homework that they wrote in French in response to their master’s instructions. These incomplete manuscripts, so foreign to the Brontës’ English works and often scored with monsieur Héger’s corrections, retain an inescapable identity as themes written by two students learning French—but more and more critics seem to analyse them as evidence and signals of transition in the Brontë writings. Emily’s nine devoirs, however, keep asserting her resistance to foreign cultures, strangers or intrusive readers—and, in her writing, themes and reflections the mere process of familiarization appears as a trauma. In studying Emily Brontë’s devoirs as acts of resistance, this paper attempts to shed a new light on the Belgian experience and show how it gradually became a topos in the official story that made Emily Brontë an author.