Charlotte Brontë and defensive conduct

In both her life and her art, Charlotte Bronte was alive to the difficulty of responding to attacks that are denied or under-acknowledged, so that any defense risks seeming defensive in our modern sense of the word: too quick to take offense or covertly aggressive. For some, Bronte's novels are deformed by hunger, rebellion, and rage; for others, they are deformed by the repression of these feelings. Both views ignore hunger, rebellion, and rage as powerful resources for Bronte's art rather than as personal difficulties to be surmounted or even deplored. Janet Gezari reassesses Charlotte Bronte's achievement by showing the ways in which an embodied defensiveness is central to both the novels and their author's life. She argues that Bronte's novels explore the complex relations between accommodation and resistance in the lives of those who find themselves - largely for reasons of class and gender - on the defensive. Gezari rehabilitates the concept of defensiveness by suggesting that there are circumstances in which defensive conduct is both appropriate and creditable. The emphasis on a different kind of bodily experience in each novel identifies Bronte's specific social concerns in