Charlotte Brontë’s mythic figures: Prometheus and Medusa in ‘The Death of Napoleon,’ The Professor and Jane Eyre

Plasa, Carl ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3819-4694 2024. Charlotte Brontë’s mythic figures: Prometheus and Medusa in ‘The Death of Napoleon,’ The Professor and Jane Eyre. Wynne, Deborah and Regis, Amber, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to the Brontës and the Arts, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 207-220. (10.3366/edinburgh/9781474487610.003.0014)

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on the figures of Prometheus and Medusa as they appear in three of Charlotte Brontë’s texts: ‘The Death of Napoleon’ (1843), The Professor 1845–46 and Jane Eyre (1847). In common with the multitude of other mythic presences who populate Brontë’s corpus from first to last, neither of these figures functions simply as a type of literary decoration or means by which Brontë can advertise her erudition. Rather both are vital aspects of her imaginative signature, providing a sophisticated language with which she is able to dramatise and comment upon some of the issues at the heart of her work and nineteenth-century literature and culture more widely. In the case of Prometheus these range from war and empire to gender and authorship, while, where Medusa is concerned, they involve sexual and national difference, on the one hand and the legacy of slavery, on the other.

Item Type:	Book Section
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:	9781474487610
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	6 March 2023
Last Modified:	21 Jan 2026 15:28
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/157522

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