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Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology, by Sally Shuttleworth; pp. xiv + 289. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 35.00, $54.95.
Sally Shuttleworth's project in this book is to position Charlotte Bronte's work "firmly within the context of Victorian psychological discourse" (2). Current scholarship, Shuttleworth argues, has wrongly viewed Bronte as socially and intellectually isolated. When they have contextualized her work at all, critics have incorrectly viewed Bronte through the lens of an emergent psychoanalysis, imagining her "an intuitive genius who seems to belong more to the Freudian than to the Victorian era" (1). The pre-Freudian psychology within which Shuttleworth situates Bronte's fiction, on the contrary, includes both popular and medical discourses, a range of materials from psychiatric texts to the periodicals and local press publications that Bronte would likely have read.
While her methodology owes a debt to the discourse theory of Michel Foucault, Shuttleworth says, she nevertheless chooses to operate largely within disciplinary boundaries to produce a "picture of reading patterns" in the parsonage and in the community, a "precise, localized picture of how contemporary theories percolated through to the people of Haworth" (4-5). Shuttleworth thus seeks to replace a "hierarchical model" of scientific textual dissemination with a "dynamic, interactive model" that "takes into account the social and economic conditions underlying the diverse formulations and specific appropriations of psychological concepts" (5). Where medicine, economics, social theory, and literature met in a textual economy, cultural meanings were "negotiated" and "anxieties expressed and explored" (16, 12). Throughout this book, then, Shuttleworth insists that the medical, economic, and social discourses she examines belonged to a "shared rhetorical field in which metaphors and vocabulary circulated, causing a...